Interrupted Sovereignties in the North-East Frontier of British India, 1787–1870

Abstract

AbstractThe Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills in the North East Frontier of British India were subject to shifting and differentiated forms of colonial governance. Defying notions of coexistence with or autonomy from colonial rule, the colonial history of this region was bound up with specific spatio-temporal constructions. By examining the nature of jurisdictional and political encounters in the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills, this article addresses the interruptions to imperial sovereignty in the Frontier. Imperial sovereignty moved in juridical forms, affecting and being affected by classificatory challenges such as hills and plains, hill tribal, and settler. The relationship between jurisdictional boundaries, plural authority, and imperial sovereignty appears in judicial and revenue files of different levels of the English East India Company government and the British government. Recurrent boundary disputes between the spatio-temporal units of hills and plains during the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries point towards contingent strategies of governance. The unfolding of these disputes over the course of the nineteenth century also show that law and jurisdiction as carriers of imperial sovereignty were spatially and temporally uneven. The historical processes highlighted in this article concern the sub-region of Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills and parts of the Sylhet district of British Bengal, which, at present, constitute the Indian state of Meghalaya and parts of northern Bangladesh, respectively.