Colonial reformism and the indexing of native and settler in northeast India

Abstract

Two decades after the punitive Lushai Expedition of 1871, the British colonial government’s modified view of the Lushai Hills as a laboratory for training peasants and planting new crops closely complemented missionary aims of tribal moral improvement. Government-appointed demonstrators advised villagers on how to farm and chaperoned Lushai chiefs on tours of the Naga Hills to study terraced cultivation. Nagas had previously provided similar instruction to a party of Garos. Gorkhas—army veterans who the Chin Hills Regulation of 1896 barred from settling in the Lushai Hills, but local chiefs hosted in villages for fear that they might clear surrounding forests for agriculture—trained Lushais in the ways of wet-rice farming. This paper examines how such initiatives helped index different communities by their relevance to the state-led agrarian project. Suturing accounts of how Lushais, Nagas, and Gorkhas were drawn to capitalist expansion in a peripheral part of northeast India, it asks how colonial reformism and agrarian interventions structured historical relationships between them. It suggests that reformism and colonial capitalist expansion did not exclude tribal communities. They elaborated on notions of difference to fashion native and settler as discrete fields of identity. In a context featuring multiple capitalist subjects-to-be, the colonial state claimed for itself the ability to negotiate a transfer of aptitude between such groups.