Indigenous Identity in South Asia

Making Claims in the Colonial Chittagong Hill Tracts

Tamina M. Chowdhury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317202929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

In the immediate aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, an armed struggle ensued in its remote south-eastern corner. The hill people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, more commonly referred to as paharis, demanded official recognition, and autonomy, as the indigenous people of the Tracts. This demand for autonomy was primarily based on the claim that they were ethnically distinct from the majority 'Bengali' population of Bangladesh, and thereby needed to protect their unique identity.

This book challenges the general perception within existing scholarship that indigenous claims coming from the Tracts are a recent and contemporary phenomenon, which emerged with the founding of the Bangladesh state. By analysing the processes of colonisation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the author argues that identities of distinct ethnicity and tradition predate the creation of Bangladesh, and first began to evolve under British patronage. It isasserted that claims to indigeneity must be understood as an outcome of prolonged and complex processes of interaction between hill peoples – largely the Hill Tracts elites – and the Raj.

Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, Indigenous Identity in South Asia sheds new light on how the concepts of 'territory', and of a 'people indigenous to it' came to be forged and politicised. By showing a far deeper historical lineage of claims making in the Tracts, it adds a new dimension to existing studies on Bangladesh's borders and its history. The book will also be a key resource for scholars of South Asian history and politics, colonial history and those studying indigenous identity.

1
Raids, territorialisation, and agricultural penetration

The Chittagong Hill Tracts before and after annexation, 1760–1861

In her history of Bastar, Nandini Sundar observed that ‘[c]olonialism’s distinctive contribution was not in integrating these regions into some wider system, but in changing the terms of this integration’.¹ In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a similar process began in the late eighteenth century when in 1760, the Kapas Mahal, as the region was known, was informally ceded to the East India Company.

The concept of territorialisation is critical for understanding both how the British conceived of the Tracts and the kinds of methods they employed to bring it under their control. In understanding the period of the Company’s informal control of the Tracts, the ground-breaking work by Philip Stern on The Company-State² is crucial, which suggests that territorialisation was the dominant policy. It defined British expansion in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It underlay the Company’s efforts to impose sovereignty over the region and to exert its ‘right’ to collect tax from its inhabitants, and also to keep a strong military presence there to protect its claims. The expansion of agriculture, along with the introduction of the plough, was a key means by which the Raj sought to tighten its grip over the territory and its people, and was part of this wider thrust. Territorialisation in the Tracts manifested as the spatial, economic, agricultural, as well as political expansion of the Company state in the region. Although raids were not the sole reason for British expansion into the Tracts, their frequency did galvanise British officials to resort to extensive and various drives towards territorialisation.

David Ludden’s work on ‘geographical history’ also provides important conceptual insights for understanding territory under Company rule. Ludden argues there are limitations to ‘thinking about geography in the rigidly territorial terms that constitute national systems of spatial order’³ as if ‘Assam is a solid piece of Indian national territory, fixed inside a world of national states’. With its annexation in 1830 by the British colonial state, Ludden argues, Assam obtained its first ‘firm imperial identity as a regional part of South Asian political geography’ and was positioned as the eastern borderland of British imperialism. Ludden contends that geographically based national identities are a political construct and for that reason ‘[h]uman identity everywhere is now attached to national sites, where some people are always native, and others, necessarily foreign’. Despite this, he argues, ‘virtually everything in social life is constantly on the move, and the mobility of things in social space defines a reality that escapes the epistemology of national geography’.

Ludden further argues that the territorialisation of identity is grossly problematic, not only because identity is always shifting with changes in society, and hence is malleable, but because territory itself is also a construct, which has been historically variable and shifting, and did not necessarily embody a particular ‘culture’, ‘people’, or ‘community’. Hence, he writes, ‘[i]t is now impossible to imagine or describe any place, people, culture, or facet of social life without reference to national maps, which lock every place into immobile gridlines of national geography, static and immutable’.⁴ This book will further Ludden’s argument and attempt to illustrate the Chittagong Hill Tracts beyond the understanding as a fixed and bounded space, despite its annexation as a non-regulated area, but as a multi-dimensional space shaped by society, history and politics, which was gradually reconstructed as a bounded territory during the long period of British rule.

British penetration before 1860: the emergence of ‘territory’ as a bone of contention

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the officials of the East India Company had ambitions to bring the eastern frontier areas under their control. In their early encounters with the hill peoples of the Kapas Mahal, however, they struggled in their efforts to categorise its inhabitants. Even after nearly a century of informal rule, the British administrators found that

Many of the inhabitants of the Joom declare they are all of one tribe … being merely one of caste like Hindus. This is evidently incorrect. The tribes are of different origin, or some at least have a large admixture of foreign blood. Many have Hindu or almost European features, while others have the Chinese countenance, and there is every shade of difference between the two extremes. There may possibly be a great difference in the rites and domestic habits of the tribes, but … found no person, who could give me more than a general description, which as such may I believe, be depended on.⁵

Elsewhere in the subcontinent, the British had categorised ‘tribes’ as heterogeneous. This went hand in hand with the construction of various notions of how and where tribes lived.⁶ In the Mahal, however, Company officials had managed to acquire very little knowledge of the sort it felt it needed about its ‘tribal’ cultures. But if the Company was going to establish its rule over the region, it had to understand, at least to some degree, the extent to which these cultures would be receptive to its goals in the frontier areas. As one administrator noted with some trepidation, ‘[i]t seems that to a great or less extent, the practice of human sacrifice and of personal slavery prevails in the Joom mehals’.⁷

The concept of territoriality, as conceived of by the British, played an important role in how they planned their expansion into the Mahal frontier. By mid-1680s, Company policy in general ‘seemed firmly fixated on securing its establishment through plantation and fortification’.⁸ Philip Stern argues that by this time, having encountered other English and European rivals, the Company focused its efforts on its rights to collect revenue from Asian powers, especially Mughal officials in Bengal. It was willing to go to war if this meant opportunity to expand its maritime power and protect its commercial and jurisdictional rights.⁹ In 1680, already engaged in war to establish Siam (modern day Thailand) as its base, the Company saw this as an opportunity to confront the nawab of Bengal. Stern suggests that as fighting went on intermittently in different places, Company officials began to recognise how crucial a maritime establishment was to underscoring the Company’s claims on land. By 1690, the war in Bengal ended with the nawab’s defeat, and by 1698, the Company had gained control of ‘a zamindari, a Mughal office and title of land-holdership and revenue administration, over the towns and had begun to build its Fort William’.¹⁰

In the Mahal, Company officials imagined that territorial expansion could be achieved through the settlement of the forested hills. Although cultivable land was already being ‘settled’ in the neighbouring plains district of Chittagong, based on a survey undertaken in 1764, the Mahal was not surveyed, nor was it brought under British jurisdiction. Nonetheless, it was classified as khas¹¹ land, where the government reserved the right to ‘settle’ people.¹² The Company (and the subsequent Crown government) was careful not to extend the zamindari system and the Permanent Settlement in this region, and instead reserved it ‘as a source of income in the future’.¹³ The Tracts, the British believed, were unlike the ‘productive and rent-paying’ lands that were brought under the Permanent Settlement, and they thought that such arrangements could prove too complicated for forest dwellers to understand, as they were not ‘in an advanced state of civilisation’.¹⁴

Company jurisdiction was soon imagined in territorial terms, not just in the sense of a physical space, but also as a space for revenue collection. Stern’s argument about the nature of ‘Company-State’ is borne out in the Mahal, particularly in this context. Stern contends that revenue was the Company’s ‘lifeblood’ and that extracting revenue was also a claim to its jurisdiction. He writes,

[p]eopling a settlement and cultivating it was a single claim to dominion, far more important in many ways than its particular foundation. Collecting revenue and investing it in the colony represented an ongoing claim to legitimacy as a government over it, its people, and their commerce.¹⁵

Hence, it is not surprising that from the earliest period, the right to extract revenue became a bone of contention between the British and the Mahal’s local elites. The first record of revenue (or tribute) collection in the region by the British is in a letter of 1777, from an unnamed Company official stationed in the Tracts, referred to only as the ‘Chief of Chittagong’. The famous colonial ethnographer, W. W. Hunter, describes how this ‘Chief’ wrote to Warren Hastings, Governor-General, of a mountaineer named Ramu Khan,

who pays the Company a small revenue on their cotton farm, has, since my being here, either through ill usage from the revenue farmer, or from a disposition to revolt, for some months past committed great violence on the Company’s landholders, by exacting various taxes, and imposing several claims on them, with no grounds of authority or legal demand.¹⁶

The ‘Chief’ was clearly disgruntled that Ramu Khan, a general of the Chakma raja Sher Daulat Khan, was encroaching on what he perceived as ‘Company’s landholders’ and extracting revenue from its taxpayers. But more interestingly, he seemed to exhibit only a rudimentary awareness of the fact that Ramu Khan’s actions were probably intended to defy the Company’s imposition of tax on the ‘tribals’, and that they were part of a larger wave of resistance by tribal groups who were against the regular revenue payments that the British had imposed upon them.¹⁷

For Company officials, revenue extraction was not merely a matter of raising resources, although this was an important goal. It was also a means, they believed, by which stability could be achieved in the Mahal. Neeladri Bhattacharya has argued that after the mercantilism of the late eighteenth century, the object of the colonial state was not merely economic exploitation but also to attain political stability of the regime and to establish its legitimation.¹⁸ In the Mahal, however, the drive for ‘economic exploitation’ and ‘political stability’ were not easily disaggregated. Here, political stability, the Company believed, would flow from economic stability: the British did seek to establish legitimacy, but chiefly, it seems, through establishing an economic presence. They perceived ‘the clearest guarantee of “public tranquility” and political subordination’ lay in ‘the easy collection of taxes and excise’.¹⁹ Ramu Khan’s actions were thus not seen as resistance to economic penetration, but as a threat to frontier peace and stability.

In order to achieve peace, the ‘British authorities wished the Indian nobility to “acquire power by submission”,’²⁰ and Ramu Khan had flouted this goal. His ‘misdemeanors’ were noted with alarm. A second letter quickly followed the first, and in it the ‘Chief’ claimed that Ramu Khan had gathered ‘large bodies of K...