Law, migration and new subjectivities

Abstract

This article reconstructs the relationship between the colonial state, law, agrarian groups, and non-sedentary communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the border-land area of Goalpara in colonial eastern India, a historically liminal and fluid space defined by the co-existence of sedentary and mobile lifestyles, and by the persistence of fluid notions of sovereignty and territoriality. It looks at the ways in which an entrenched colonial state, through its tropes of colonial modernity (sedenterisation, ‘settlement of wastelands’, and the extension of colonial legality into aspects of everyday life), irrevocably transformed the social and material life of local groups within a brief period of less than half a century. Complex social relationships and networks between communities were frequently reduced to sharp dichotomous ones, despite the persistence of a multiplicity of overlapping identities (and histories). Further, changes in the region's economy, following the migration of thousands of cultivators from eastern Bengal, were accompanied by the introduction of new concepts of space and shifts in local perceptions of law and other colonial institutions. This provides the context for recording resistance to, and circumvention of, these projects of the colonial state (in particular, its cultural legacies) by the colonised. The article underscores Goalpara's regional identity as a distinct ‘borderland identity’, and locates all of these processes within the space of borderland histories and their interrogation of dominant categories and imaginations of both colonial and nationalist agendas.