Placing the frontier : law, custom, and knowledge in British North-East India / Reeju Ray.

"This book is about the entanglements between colonial law, space, and place in regions defined as frontiers in British India. This book shows that colonial law was central to the spatial transformation of the Himalayan borderland region into a frontier space. The frontier was not a geographical site at the periphery of colonial territory. The frontier was produced as a particular type of political-legal space and was integral to the imperial project. The book will follow law's movement- it's ebb and flow- into such spaces through practices of border making, jurisdiction, and colonial knowledge. Over the course of the nineteenth century colonial law manifested in the frontier as simultaneously ambiguous or absent, paternalistic or utilitarian, and pervasively violent. The book carefully unravels the mechanisms of colonial law in geographical ordering of the frontier and the concomitant identification of inhabitants as "tribal". Law assumed the task of defining both people and the region use tropes of primitivism. The two broad legal definitions, that of British and non-British territory, incorporated other legal categories such as frontier, tribal, settlers, agricultural land, waste land, cultivator subject among others. These categories emerged in legal discourse to serve colonial commercial and defensive concerns in the frontier. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects while they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The book examines the nature of this legal limbo that in turn placed both the hills and its inhabitants as interruptions to the imperial project. The book shows the uncanny simultaneity of violence, plural legal orders, and liberal principles of law. Arguing against the established notion that a legal plural order allowed autonomy and coexistence between local rulers and colonial administrators, this book shows how plurality in fact entrenched colonial power and enabled severe forms of legally sanctioned violence. Colonial governance through law was enabled by regulatory frameworks customs already in place in the colony. The plural legal order on the imperial frontier depended on formulations of customs and customary authority. The book shows that custom was not the 'other' of law and instead helped to entrench colonial legal order. The book is also concerned with changes in lived experiences of inhabitants of the frontier space and uses place as a conceptual category for the same. Place making by inhabitants of the colonial frontier demonstrate the heterogenous narratives of self, and belonging found in sites of orality, and kinship, that shape the hills in the present day. The book intervenes in the field of South Asian legal history in a number of ways. First, it focuses on an understudied region that nevertheless reveals intricacies of colonial law crucial for analysis of forms of governance of marginalized communities throughout India. It departs from the premise of postcolonial legal history that universal law based on a rule of difference did not live up to its stated principles in the colony. This book argues that both the absence and the excess of law in the frontier were embedded in and reproduced the universal character of law. Second, it demonstrates how imprecise jurisdictional boundaries and the ambiguities of legal policies - insteadpolicies-instead of being impediments to - wereto-were in fact strategically useful for colonial rule. Further, legally sanctioned violence produced by such ambiguities in law and jurisdiction was central to both contingent and strategic approaches to governance. Thus, the book presents a critique of existing understandings of autonomy and coexistence as characteristic of legally plural ordering in colonies. Third, the breadth of literary and non-literary sources used in the book allows for a juxtaposition of local reproductions of the past and histories of belonging that defy notions of history and memory, myth and reality, physical and imaginative space. The book concludes with a discussion of colonial and indigenous forms of knowledge, which naturalise the association between law, literacy, and civilization"--