Playing with Nature

History and Politics of Environment in North-East India

Sajal Nag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138280632
• eBook ISBN: 9781351986403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

North East India is called nature's gift to India. It is mountainous, thickly forested, nourished by massive rainfall, has massive rivers, has a diverse wildlife, inhabited a number of forest dwellers called tribes who cherished environmentalist ethos. The region has been experiencing environmental depletion which was a result of colonial policies, exploitation of its ecological and mineral resources, large scale trans-border immigration and settlement of people, establishment of the plantation industry through deforestation and the dependence of the dairy industry on grazing and other factors. This books depicts the precariousness of the environmental situation and traces the history and politics of such degeneration with a view to raise the consciousness of the people of the region towards their environment and save it from further aggravation.

CHAPTER 1

India’s North-East: An Enigmatic Absence in History and Cartography

RILA MUKHERJEE

THE NEGLECT OF THE UPLANDS

Anyone working on the north-east knows that this region is little studied, because it falls outside conventional area classification. This neglect is echoed in cartography. Van Schendel writes that ‘anyone interested in finding fairly detailed modern maps showing the region covering Burma, north-east India, Bangladesh, and neighbouring parts of China knows that these do not exist. This is a region that is always a victim of cartographic surgery’.¹

How is this surgery evident? Van Schendel writes:

Over the past half-century, the scramble for the area has influenced mapmakers as much as the rest of us, and atlases commonly have maps with the captions ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South Asia’. These apparently objective visualisations present regional heartlands as well as peripheries of parts of the world that always drop off the map, disappear into the folds of two-page spreads, or end up as insets. In this way, cartographic convenience reinforces a hierarchical spatial awareness, highlighting certain areas of the globe and pushing others into the shadows.²

All of us who have studied maps of this region know how true this is. Van Schendel notes that although in terms of physical space criterion this area shares language affinities (for example, Tibeto-Burman languages), religious commonalities (for example, community religions and, among the universalistic religions, Buddhism and Christianity), cultural traits (for example, kinship systems, ethnic scatter zones), ancient trade networks, and ecological conditions (for example, mountain agriculture),³ it is now relegated to the margins of ten valley-dominated states with which it has antagonistic relationships, e.g. China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal.⁴ We have always neglected the uplands and this has been the fate of India’s north-east in history, in academia and in cartography.

UPLANDS AS ZOMIA

A new approach to the study of this marginal area can be through the notion of Zomia, derived from the term ‘zomi’, used in Chin-Mizo-Kuki languages to denote uplanders.

This notion was initially formulated by Van Schendel in 2002 as

a neglected – an invisible – transnational area, which overlapped segments of all four sub-regions (Central, South, Southeast and East Asia) without truly belonging to any of them. It is an area marked by a sparse population, historical isolation, political domination by powerful surrounding states, marginality of all kinds, and huge linguistic and religious diversity.⁵

William G. Clarence-Smith noted in his editorial note to the special issue on Zomia in the Journal of Global History:

following Fernand Braudel’s seminal writings on the Mediterranean, much research has teased out historical links between lands bordering great bodies of water. Similar zones of interaction around major ‘wastelands’ (such as mountains, forests, tundra, and deserts) have yet to attract the same degree of attention. Zomia is not only situated in one of the most stupendously elevated mountainous zones of the planet but it also crosses well-entrenched boundaries that Area Studies have created since the Second World War, between Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central (Inner) Asia, and South Asia.⁶

This new kind of spatial conception, overturning the geographic conception of area studies, helps tease out the history of this marginal space. Geographies of the state label these areas as wastelands, often, but not always, transforming into borderlands, where human agency and older ideologies prevail over statist policies.⁷

States did not emerge in these borderlands because, Fiskesjo says,

the violence of state-making is easier to perpetrate on lowland farmers, and highlands offer an escape. But the dynamics of state–margin relations may be even more crucial. Insisting on the global context as directly consequential in the internal dynamic of these upland Southeast Asian polities, Friedman points to how pre-existing states may block the appropriation of resources and expansion that otherwise could fuel local aggrandization. Environmental degradation, likewise inseparable from the regional context, also may preclude the mobilization of surpluses driving competitive spirals. Secondary states may emerge anyway, built on the control of trade routes or other resources, and evolve into large-scale ‘predatory’ states based on conquest and subjugation just like primary states, albeit often reliant on trade rather than on agriculture.⁸

The Shan states of upper Burma and the north-eastern states are prime examples of such secondary state forms.

Zomia as conceptual theme and geographic category is sometimes unstable,⁹ nevertheless it is necessary to recover this space because

global processes cut across traditional spatial categories, causing many to question inherited geographical scales, including the post-war inspired division of eastern Eurasia into the regions and disciplines of Asian studies. The institutionalization of these regions has produced scholarship capable of investigating certain preconceived geographical scales, including civilizations (East or South Asia), nations or empires (China, India), or regions (mainland Southeast Asia). But if geographical scales – the spatial configurations of power, culture, and economy – are not fixed, and are instead produced through historical processes, then the inherited scholarly traditions and institutions are ‘ill suited to deal with human activities spilling over’ the boundaries of civilization, state, and region.¹⁰

COLONIALISM, AREA STUDIES AND ZOMIA

I suggest that the sad fate of zomia is linked not only to the scramble for area studies after the Second World War but from the onset of colonialism itself. As zomia was thinly populated, the European notion of empty spaces/wastelands was applied to the area in the course of the nineteenth century. Large parts of zomia were non-state spaces and this factor, too, added to the disdain of the colonists. We shall see further on how this disqualified zomia from being mapped, historically and geographically.

It is clear by now that this paper is looking at India’s north-east region as zomia. If manpower, and not mere territorial aggrandizement, was the logic of the pre-modern Southeast Asian paddy state, as Scott argues, then clearly zomia lost out in the hierarchy of states in this part of the world.¹¹ Although partly colonized, the north-east was left out of the ambit of the grand developmental projects of the colonial state. Missionaries and not merchants held sway here. The region was held as frontier, and not as an integral part of the colonial governance. It was never integrated to mainstream India, nor to its economic heartland.

THE NORTH-EAST AS ZOMIA

But this approach, the conventional one, looks at the north-east as part of India. If I look at the north-east as an integral part of Zomia there is a perceptible shift in my viewfinder. My lens size increases and now my vision of Zomia is somewhat different. This is a greater Zomia linking parts of south-west China, northern Burma and the north-east with the sea, more specifically, the northern Bay of Bengal, thereby connecting Zomia with the littoral. This is a region with its own economic dynamism.

Van Schendel’s Zomia concerns itself with links within the region stretching from the uplands of Southeast Asia into South Asia, but here I propose linking the space of Zomia and its silk roads and wool routes with the littoral, more specifically, the south-eastern Bengal delta, today centred on Dhaka in Bangladesh, without privileging either space. This is not a spatial exaggeration. The south-eastern delta contained many land routes combining a mix of land and river crossings and the existence of some of the earliest travel in this region is attested to from the first century of the Christian era.¹²

One example of Zomia connecting with the lowlands would be that of Yunnan through, one, its supplies of silver and gold which the Bengal deltas accessed, two, its need for cauris which the Bengal deltas supplied from the Maldives, and three, its strategic position on the Silk Route between China and Persia,¹³ a route that connected it with the south-eastern delta. Yet other examples would be medieval Tibet and Kuch Behar that supplied Bengal with horses and silver. A third would be some ancient divisions of Central Asia – such as Parthia – which had considerable economic and political connections with the deltas. A fourth would be certain parts of the north-east that granted Bengal access to the silver regions of northern Burma-Mizoram for example.

The autonomy of the north-east is not imagined; it is also recorded in its history, as evidenced in the medieval state chronicles of the Tripuris, Manipuris and Ahoms.¹⁴ But this history is seen as a ‘little’ history and falls outside the grand narratives that make up the history of the nation. But Zomia has always been important to Bengal and Burma as social entity, economic being and political unit.

A GREATER ZOMIA: FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE SEAS

For my part, I envision this greater Zomia by documenting routes and networks of discovery, travel, trade and conquest. This visioning is two-pronged, one, I will look at sources from the east regarding this region and two, I will study sources from the West regarding the area. I hope to show, thereby, that this was not such a neglected world in the pre-colonial period. Moreover, I will show that although we tend to privilege Western sources, these are quite unsatisfactory as regards the north-east.

THE EASTERN END

The section of Zomia that concerns us here is the borderlands that Giersch writes about: the present transnational area between China (Yunnan, southern Sichuan, Guizhou and western Guangxi), north Burma and Siam and India’s states of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland,¹⁵ the last three an area without recorded history.

There are many references to Zomia in the ancient world. Chinese annals noted the lucrative trade India conducted with Ta-ts’in (Roman Orient or Syria, with the chief port at Petra¹⁶) and An-hsi (Parthia or Persia) but noted that An-hsi blocked a direct Syria-China trade.¹⁷ Thus did An-hsi seek to keep its locational advantage, and this was successful until 166 CE when the Ta-ts’in sent an embassy to China through Annam.¹⁸ Thereafter the Chinese trade to the Red Sea went via Annam to Sri Lanka or the Malabar ports.¹⁹

From the second century BC once China discovered Bactria, the Chinese attempted to open trade with western India (Sindh) and ambassadorial expeditions were sent from China overland through the north-east and Central Asia.²⁰ This suggests that the sea route from China to India was unknown at the time. The Chinese gradually knew the sea only from the first century CE. The account of Wei-lio (written before 429 CE) suggests that the Chinese first encountered the Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf.²¹

The Chinese expansion into Yunnan and Bengal, soon after, shattered An-hsi’s position as intermediary in the trade of the east and west. By the th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. India’s North-East: An Enigmatic Absence in History and Cartography
• 2. Marsh, Rice and Faith: Aspects of Environmental and Religious Changes in the Early Medieval Surma-Barak Valley
• 3. Man, Nature and State in Pre-Colonial Kachar
• 4. Environment and War: Small Wars in North-East India, 1845-1913
• 5. The Coming of British Forestry in Assam in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Initiatives and Problems
• 6. The Ecological and Social Watershed: Colonial Intervention and Forest Use in Assam
• 7. Forests, Fields and Pasture: Environmental and Revenue Debates of Land Usage in Colonial Assam in 1910-1920
• 8. Colonialism and Deforestation in Naga Hills
• 9. State-Science, Hegemony and Shifting the Cultivator: Contesting the ‘Anti-modernity’ Discourse on Shifting Cultivation in South Asia
• 10. Land Use/Land Cover Change and its Impact on Climate in the Barak Valley, Assam
• 11. Rain, Rain, Come Again: History of Rainfall, Deforestation and Water Scarcity in Cherrapunji, the Rainiest Spot in the Globe
• 12. Challenging Times, Challenged Body: Decolonization, Displacement and Disease among East Pakistani Refugees in South Assam, 1947-1954
• 13. The Empire as a World of Sport: Aspects of Hunting in Colonial Assam, c. 1850-1900.
• 14. Colonizing the Wild: British Policies towards Wildlife in Assam, 1874-1947
• 15. Encountering Floods: Colonial State and the Flood of 1916 in the Surma-Barak Valley of Assam
• 16. Environmental Impact of the Great Earthquakes of 1897 and 1950 on North-East India
• 17. Mythology as a Protest Narrative: A Lepcha Tale
• List of Contributors
• Index