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Title Pages
An Endangered History: Indigeneity, Religion,

and Politics on the Borders of India, Burma, and
Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala
Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
Title Pages
Angma Dey Jhala
(p.i) An Endangered History (p.ii)
(p.iii) An Endangered History
(p.iv) Copyright page
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication

Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Angma Dey Jhala
For my mother,
and her dreams of home (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Figures, Tables, and Maps

Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
(p.ix) Figures, Tables, and Maps

Angma Dey Jhala
Figures
2.1 ‘My House on Sirthay Tlang above Demagree on the Kurnapoolee
River, Chittagong Hill Tracts.’ 46
2.2 ‘My Bungalow on the Hill at Chandraguna, Chittagong Hill Tracts.’ 63
2.3 ‘T.H. Lewin with the Seven Lushai Chiefs Who Accompanied Him to
Calcutta (1873).’ 84
4.1 ‘Rangamati Lake.’ 168
4.2 ‘Family Portrait (Bohmong’s Son and Wife).’ 183
4.3 ‘Three Women with a Child.’ 194
4.4 ‘Woman Pounding Rice.’ 195
4.5 ‘Portrait of a Man (A Boy, Basanta Pankhu Kuki).’ 195
Tables
3.1 ‘Return of Nationalities, Races, Tribes and Castes, in Each Division of
the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ 126
3.2 Censuses in the CHT, 1872–1901 140
Maps
I James Rennell, Map of Colonial Bengal and Arracan Border.
II ‘The Chittagong Division Comprising the Districts of Noakhali and
Chittagong with the Hill Tracts under the Jurisdiction of the Lieutenant
Governor of Bengal.’
III Chittagong Hill Tracts, 1890. (p.x)
Page 1 of 1
Acknowledgements

Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
(p.xi) Acknowledgements
Angma Dey Jhala
I first considered writing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts as a newly arrived

doctoral student at Oxford in 2001. At the time, much of the scholarship (and
news coverage) on the region focussed on insurgency movements and human
rights violations, and less on the history, particularly the colonial history, of the
east Bengal and Burma border. While intrigued, I would go on to focus on
another research topic, which would preoccupy me fruitfully for the next 15
years, but I remained haunted by the untold story of the Hill Tracts. The
intervening period has witnessed the opening up of archives on northeast India
and east Bengal as well as the publication of dynamic new histories on the larger
borderland region. This work contributes to this emerging discourse on an oft
forgotten area and its peoples.
Several people, institutions, and funding agencies have been invaluable in their
support of the research that went into this book, as well as my earlier work.
David Washbrook was a supportive and generous doctoral supervisor, and he
remains a kind mentor until today. Shun-ling Chen, Ayesha Jalal, Norbert
Peabody, Jayeeta Sharma, and Willem van Schendel have expressed interest in
this project at different stages.
I wrote this book as a faculty member in the History Department at Bentley

University, and it is with deep gratitude that I thank my institution. Bridie
Andrews and Marc Stern, my department chairs during this time, as well as my
dean, Dan Everett, were encouraging, supportive, and thoughtful mentors
throughout this endeavour. Conversations with my colleagues Chris Beneke,
Sung Choi, Samir Dayal, Ranjoo Herr, Cliff Putney, Kristin Sorensen, Leonid
Trofimov, (p.xii) and Cyrus Veeser have provided much insight and pleasure
Page 1 of 4
Acknowledgements
over the years, and I thank them for creating a warmly collegial and engaging
environment to teach and work.
A number of institutions and funding agencies have generously assisted in the

writing of this book. Faculty summer grants and a faculty affairs grant from
Bentley enabled me to examine university and government archives and cover
permission costs for my book. Student research assistants from Bentley’s
Valente Center, Mihir Saxena, Rijul Hora, and Ei Shwe, in 2012 and 2014–15,
were vital aids, transcribing and annotating often nearly incomprehensible hand
written archival manuscripts, with sunny dispositions. In particular, a sabbatical
in 2015–16 provided me the intellectual freedom and time to write a full draft of
the book. Much of that year was spent as a visiting scholar at the Studies on
Women, Gender, and Sexuality department at Harvard University, where I was
kindly welcomed by Afsaneh Najmabadi. The resources at Harvard, particularly
access to libraries, university archives, and the fellowship of likeminded
scholars, aided enormously in the writing of this book.
A book that dwells in the archives, as this does, is indebted to the painstaking
work of librarians, who preserve repositories not only over decades but
generations, despite the vicissitudes of time. I benefitted exponentially from the
thoughtful help of archivists who assisted in copying and scanning delicate
materials, answering bibliographic questions, tracking down ever-elusive
documents, images, and maps, and giving permissions to reproduce images. I
thank the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; the
Senate House Library, London; the SOAS Archives and Special Collections,
London; the Centre of South Asian Studies Library, Cambridge; the Pitt Rivers
Museum Collection, Oxford; Harvard Map Collection, Cambridge, MA; Harvard
Widener Library, Cambridge, MA; and Bentley Library, Waltham, MA. I especially
thank Geraldine Hobson for graciously permitting me to reproduce images from
the J.P. Mills Collection at the SOAS archives.
This book also deeply benefitted from the writings and memoir of the late
Chakma raja, Raja Tridiv Roy. While I was unable to seek his counsel on certain
points, his written recollections on the Hill Tracts were invaluable and broad
sweeping in nature. I also thank Rajkumari Moitri Roy Hume of the Chakma raj
for sharing with me her vivid, (p.xiii) detailed memories of the Chittagong Hill
Tracts during a dramatic era of transition.
The arguments within this book were presented at conferences and symposia,
and benefitted from the critique and encouragement of various audiences. I
thank the audiences at the Historical Justice and Memory: Questions of Rights
and Accountability in Contemporary Society Conference, hosted by the Alliance
for Historical Dialogue and Accountability programme at Columbia Law School
(December 2013); the New England Association for Asian Studies Conference,
Page 2 of 4
Acknowledgements
hosted by Boston College (January 2017); and the Bentley History Department
Seminar, Of Beheaded Statues and Other Colonial Legacies (October 2017).
I also wish to acknowledge the editors at Oxford University Press, who

expressed keen interest in this book at the earliest stage. I thank them and the
several anonymous reviewers for championing this book.
Many friends and family have cheered me on during the writing of this book, and
I am grateful for their steadfast interest throughout this process.
My dearest Mapu Chacha, while he did not have a chance to see this book, knew
of its progress and sustained my heart and spirit throughout its writing. I miss
him daily with a tender ache and always shall, and his love for beauty and search
for sublimity in all forms remains a guide of how to live a life well. My esteemed
and beloved Dadabava likewise did not have a chance to read this book, but our
conversations on anthropology and ethnography, and more generally, ideas of
knowledge in the past have influenced this book nonetheless. I hope he might
have found this a useful attempt.
Richard Cash and Maria Hibbs Brosio are always interested and kindly
supportive of what I do, and over the years, I have regaled them with accounts
of this book, as well as others, which they have listened to with indulgence. I
thank them for their continued love over these many decades.
My parents and Liluye have listened to many discussions about this book and
witnessed its evolution from an idea to a final manuscript. My father patiently
read through the complete draft of the book, giving suggestions for
improvement. Liluye provided insight on various visual and technical issues.
She, along with Mithun, Kesariya, Suryavir, (p.xiv) and Ayushi, has filled my
days with drama, adventure, and joy, and in between writing spells, the delights
of a boisterous family.
In particular, it is to my niece Kesariya that I give special thanks. She was my

constant companion during much of the writing of this book, composed as it was
in the darkness of pre-dawn hours and late winter nights during my sabbatical.
Between school drop off and pick up, she taught me how to write on schedule
with still time for laughter, love, and the always unexpected. In some magical
way, she showed me books can be birthed and children reared, happily side by
side.
I dedicate this book to my mother. Years ago, my mother taught me with

painstaking patience how to read. Suffice it to say, I was a slow, plodding reader
at first. For a book focussed on how we read and interpret knowledge, I would
be much remiss to not acknowledge my first teacher. In teaching me to read, she
brought the world into living, vibrant colour. Without her, I could not have
Page 3 of 4
Acknowledgements
written this or indeed any earlier work, and I thank her for this gift that never
ceases giving.
And finally this book is for the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and all those
interested in unearthing lost histories of indigenous peoples.
Angma Dey Jhala
February 2019
Bentley University, Waltham, USA
Page 4 of 4
Maps

Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
Maps
Angma Dey Jhala
Map I James Rennell, Map of Colonial

Bengal and Aracan Border.
Source: Based on the map, ‘To the
Honorable Warren Hastings, Esquire,
Governor General of the British
possessions in Asia this Map of Bengal
and Bahar’, 1779. MAP-LC G7652.G3
Page 1 of 3
Maps
1779. R4. Housed in the Map Collection,

Pusey Library, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA.
Note: This map is not to scale and
does not represent authentic
international boundaries.
Map II ‘The Chittagong Division

Comprising the Districts of Noakhali and
Chittagong with the Hill Tracts under the
Jurisdiction of the Lieutenant Governor of
Bengal.’
Source: Based on the map published in
W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of
Bengal, Volume VI: Chittagong Hill
Tracts, Chittagong, Noakhali, Tipperah,
Hill Tipperah. London: Trübner & Co.,
1876. © The British Library Board. IOR/
V/27/62/6. Official Publications, India
Office Records, British Library, London,
UK.
Page 2 of 3
Maps

Map III Chittagong Hill Tracts, 1890.

Source: Based on the map © The British
Library Board. Cartographic Items Maps
I.S.70. Calcutta: Survey of India Offices,
1890. Reproduced by permission of the
British Library, London, UK.
Page 3 of 3
Introduction

Bangladesh
Angma Dey Jhala

Print ISBN-13: 9780199493081
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199493081.001.0001
(p.xv) Introduction
Border Histories and Border Crossings in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal
Angma Dey Jhala
In the winter of 1771, an English gentleman farmer, on a brief jaunt away from
his family, found a bedraggled orphan boy on the streets of Liverpool and
brought him home to the dark, howling moors of Yorkshire. The boy appeared to
have no discernible race; he was described at various points as a gypsy, an
Indian lascar, son of a Chinese emperor, an African slave, and an American/
Spanish castaway.1 It is possible that he was abandoned on the Liverpool docks,
after arriving on an East Indiaman from India, China, Malaya, or Dutch Batavia,
or a slave ship from Africa or the Americas, as the port city, along with London
and Bristol, was part of the teeming British slave trade.2 In his adopted home,
the boy found solace in the strange and ungovernable beauty of the moors,
delighting in their open spaces, running wild and undisciplined under the wide
skies. His close connection to the land, coupled with his indefinable race,
ethnicity and ‘gibberish’ language, rendered him uncivilized, irrational, and
inhuman to the English country folk he met. He was a ‘universal “other”’ of no
known origin, dangerous and violent.3 Between liminal worlds—occident and
orient, metropole and colony, white and black, civilized and savage—the young
man represented the foreignness of groups on the margins of colonial society
and the porous, liminal frontiers of the Empire. This young man was Heathcliff,
the protagonist of Emily Bronte’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 to mixed reviews,4 but it would go on

to become a significant work of nineteenth-century (p.xvi) British literature,
and one that tellingly examined ideas of Victorian sexuality, identity, and class.
But it is also a work that expressed British views not just of non-European others
in general, but specifically those groups that could not easily be categorized
Page 1 of 52
Introduction
through language, race, religion, or geography. Heathcliff falls between various

regional/ethnic identities: Eastern European or Irish (gypsy), South Asian
(India), East Asian (China), American (North or South), and African. Many of the
adjectives used to describe the young Heathcliff were not just applied to non-
Europeans as a whole, but often specifically to indigenous groups on liminal
border frontiers of the Empire—areas which could not be easily contained by
territorial, geographic, or political boundaries, or, for that matter, by a narrow
sets of physical characteristics, social customs, or religious practices. The
descriptions of Heathcliff’s naive primitivity and childlike, unwavering devotion,
his cunning and cruel harshness, and his love for the untamed heath were often
used to describe autochthone groups—whether Native Americans, Australian
aborigines, or South Asian hill tribes—in larger narratives of imperial encounter
and (mis)adventure around the colonized world.
An Endangered History is an account of one such liminal border area, the little-
studied region of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of British-governed Bengal, from the
late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The CHT lie on the crossroads of
India, east Bengal (now Bangladesh), and Burma (contemporary Myanmar). It is
in an area of lush rivers and fertile valleys, which has historically been
celebrated for its haunting natural beauty and cultural heterodoxy—from the
chronicles of Mughal governors to the ethnohistories of colonial British
administrators. The region is composed of several indigenous or ‘tribal’
communities, including the Bawm, Sak (or Chak), Chakma, Khumi, Khyang,
Marma, Mru (or Mro), Lushai, Uchay (also called Mrung, Brong, Hill Tripura),
Pankho, Tanchangya, and Tripura (Tipra).5 They practise Buddhism, Hinduism,
animism, and Christianity; are close in appearance to their Southeast Asian
neighbours in Burma, Vietnam, and Cambodia; speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects
intermixed with Persian and Sanskritic, Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or
swidden—slash-and-burn agriculture.6 Their transcultural histories, like that of
Bronte’s fictional hero, defied colonial, and later, postcolonial taxonomies of
identity and difference. Indeed, both British (p.xvii) administrators and South
Asian nationalists would misunderstand and falsely classify the region through
the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race, and, most perniciously, nation
in part due to its unique, and at times perilous, location on the invisible fault
lines between South and Southeast Asia.
This book aims to re-establish the vital place of this much marginalized (and oft
maligned) border region within the larger study of colonial South Asia and
Indian nationalism. In the process, I argue that the region is a fertile space to
analyse transregional histories, which cross the boundaries, technologies, and
teleologies of state formation, colonial or postcolonial. The peoples of the region
have long been engaged in transcultural relationships with neighbouring states
and communities throughout Southeast and South Asia, whether for the
purposes of trade, pilgrimage, or marriage, in the process defying the bounded
spaces of imperial–political geo-bodies, Mughal or British, as well as later post-
Page 2 of 52
Introduction
independent nation state boundaries. I suggest that studying this fluid border
area reveals a number of important developments in how colonial states created
and imagined porous frontier zones, and the consequences of such colonial
policies on later nation state formation.
In particular, I focus on how British administrators used European knowledge

systems to define this region as distinctly different, from the moment of the
English East India Company’s expansion into Bengal in the mid-eighteenth
century to the partition of British India and Independence in 1947. Much of this
colonial archive, based upon the writings of regional district administrators,
applied European-derived intellectual paradigms, whether from botany, natural
history, demography, geography, or ethnography, to construct the autochthone
groups of the CHT and their landscapes. In the process, such readings of the
culture, religion, languages, and geography of the indigenous ‘tribes’ reveal the
problems of imperial knowledge production. While there are manifold accounts
by colonial administrators, serving in both British India and the princely states,7
there are few histories of political agents that have focussed on the ‘political and
personal dimensions’ of colonialism, particularly in frontier areas, such as the
larger northeast India border,8 in which the CHT was situated. This is one of the
major contributions of this book.
These colonial interpretations were varied and diverse, far from uniform in
nature, and rich with ambiguity and paradox, revealing (p.xviii) the lively
debate among colonial administrators and policy makers on how best to govern
and police tribal ‘others’. Complex and often puzzling, their works are filled with
ambivalence, self-contradiction, and subversion—in several cases critiquing
colonial rule while upholding it and praising and protecting indigenous custom
while advocating Western ‘civilization’ and reform. As a result, I suggest these
accounts are as much about European administrator-scholars as the groups they
were trying to define in the CHT.
For this reason, the colonial archive serves not only to exhume a long-forgotten
regional past, but also to illuminate a dynamic interconnected global history. In
the process of describing and defining unfamiliar autochthone groups, British
administrators grafted European and colonial landscapes and cultures from
around the world upon the CHT, including the Scottish highlands, English
countryside, German riverine valleys, wooded American frontiers, island
Jamaican plantations, upland Indonesia, and Ashanti villages, among others.
Nearly every account I examine included a geographic or cultural comparison
with other parts of the Empire as well as other parts of the Indian subcontinent.
In response, tribal peoples from the CHT both resisted and adopted aspects of
colonial culture and governance, and their chiefs increasingly saw themselves as
global cosmopolitans by the early twentieth century, crossing both constructed
geopolitical borders as well as imperial subjectivities in the way they constituted
and reconstituted identity. Their life histories reveal that indigenous voices, long
Page 3 of 52
Introduction
assumed to be marginal and peripheral to colonial power, were engaging or

attempting to engage with power systems at the imperial centre.
Such ideas of transregionalism, both within and outside the subcontinent, would
become increasingly contentious in the twentieth century with the rise of the
Indian nationalist movement. The politically charged language of nationalism left
a troubling legacy on this multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multicultural border
area. The indigenous peoples, who were primarily Buddhist (as well as Hindu
and animist), were sidelined during the nationalist movement, which emphasized
majority Hindu and Muslim constituencies. While the leaders of the CHT
petitioned to join either India or Burma during the 1930s and 1940s—nations
with whom they shared historic and contemporaneous cultural and religious ties
—the region was placed in Muslim-majority (p.xix) East Pakistan in 1947
(subsequently Bangladesh after the Bengali war of liberation in 1971). In the
following period, the indigenous peoples suffered widespread state-
manufactured violence and human rights violations, including ethnocide,
genocide, forced conversion to Islam, destruction of Buddhist and Hindu places
of worship, inundation of thousands of miles of arable land with the building of
dams, rape, massacre, and forced migration in the second half of the twentieth
century, mostly because they were seen as non-native others—more Southeast
Asian than Indian (or later Bengali)—in ancestry and culture. Examining the
decades leading up to Partition is one way to re-remember these groups who
have often been excluded and forgotten as ‘stateless’ silents9 in the violent
tectonic shifts of Partition and nation state building. Largely overlooked in
mainstream histories of Indian nationalism, I suggest that a study of the CHT
would further broaden our understanding of Partition, particularly in Bengal. In
addition, recovering its colonial past would shed light on the postcolonial history
of a Buddhist minority in a contemporary Muslim-majority nation state, of which
there are few similar studies.10 Before delving further, I will briefly address here
the CHT’s transregional past.
Historical Overview
Pre-colonial Border Crossings, Burmese, Mughal, European: Through Mountain Passes
and across Ocean Routes
Originally a remote hinterland of the colonial province of Bengal, the CHT was a
fertile meeting ground for Indo-Persian tradition, indigenous tribal cultures, and
European influence, belonging to a larger geography that stretched across
Assam, Tibet, Kashmir, Nepal, Burma, and western and southern China.11 For
centuries, foreign merchants—whether Armenian, Afghan, Shan, or European—
traded with Bengalis, Khasis, Cacharis, and Manipuris in this larger border
region with Burma.12 Goods and people moved between hill and lowland
societies throughout northeast India, as merchants, pilgrims, and migrants
travelled between western Assam, northern Bengal, Bhutan, Tibet, Cooch Behar,
Rangpur in Goalpara, and the foothills of the Himalayas in a porous and flexible
environment of ever shifting political frontiers.13 During the colonial period, the
Page 4 of 52
Introduction
overland trade route with China appealed to both private investors and
corporations connecting, as it (p.xx) did, east Bengal to Yunnan province in
China, Burma, Manipur, and Cachar.14 European merchants were eager to find
markets for their own goods as well as gain gold, elephant tusks, pepper,
lacquer, hardwoods, cotton, and highly prized wool shawls, which were valued at
up to a thousand rupees in Mughal India, Tartary, Persia, and Arabia.15
This transcultural engagement reflected a dynamic intermingling of religious

practices, including Hinduism, Sufi Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism,
from the early medieval era up through the twentieth century. Medieval
accounts describe relationships between Afghan soldiers, Mughal-Rajput
commanders, Tibetan-speaking Buddhist Tantric kings, and Portuguese sailors in
the area as well as the role of northwestern Indian merchants and bankers in
spreading Hindu and Buddhist doctrines and Ismaili forms of Islam. Records of
the Surma-Barak river systems chronicle communities practising conjoined
forms of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and tantric Buddhism living peacefully side by
side, while narratives of the religious and cultural traditions of the Chakmas
from the CHT note the incorporation of Hindu worship and ritual into their
Buddhist practices.16
The port city of Chittagong in many ways reflected this cosmopolitanism,

connecting the region to Mughal India and the larger Indian Ocean economy. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, metropolitan Chittagong and its
surroundings served as a ‘frontier’ between Mughal India and the monarchic
state of Arakan in Burma.17 The port attracted foreign capital and empire
builders, in addition to the Arakanese and Mughals, including the Portuguese,
Afghans, Pathans, and eventually the British.18 Christian slaves and fugitives
from Goa, Ceylon, Cochin, and Malacca settled in Chittagong and were gifted
land grants by the king of Arakan. These Portuguese merchants engaged in
piracy and plunder of coastal villages19 via river pathways into inland Bengal
and Burma,20 undermining Mughal control in the process. Bengali, Tamil,
Telugu, Malay, Arab, Persian, and Dutch merchants also traded in its harbours
and on its streets.21 Chittagong thus saw a rich intermingling of diverse
cultures, reflected in the cosmopolitanism of medieval mainland Burma as well.
The Arakan or Rakhine state, which controlled Chittagong, was, as Rishad

Choudhury argues, ‘a paragon of the early modern cross-cultural polity’.
Consolidated in 1430, it was nominally a Theravada Buddhist kingdom, and its
capital, Mrauk-U (Myohaung), was located (p.xxi) on the eastern littoral of the
Bay of Bengal. The Mrauk-U dynasty incorporated various aspects of the
material culture and ceremonial of Indo-Islamic courts, including the patronage
of a Persianate Bengali literature and adoption of Persian titles, alongside
Buddhist practices and Burmese honorifics. Such rich cultural fusion was
expressed in the works of the Bengali poet, Alaol (c. 1607–1680), who served at
Page 5 of 52
Introduction
the Arakan court, and evocatively described the region’s multi-jati22 hybridity
and its location in a diverse Burmese coastline.23
The Mughals themselves were unsure exactly where the city and its
surroundings fell. They had trouble particularly in classifying the Arakan polity
in religious terms, for the royal dynasty did not practise the familiar faiths of
either Islam or Hinduism. Emperor Akbar’s court chronicler, Abu’l Faz’l, while
noting that the city and region around it lay in Arakan, at the same time
ambiguously situated it under Akbar’s revenue administration.24
Mughal Intrusions: Imperial Sovereignty and Local Autonomy

It was eventually the Mughal distaste for Arakanese slave raiding that instigated
formal imperial conquest. After two failed invasions of Chittagong in 1617 and
1621, and various threats through the 1630s, when the Mughal governor of
Bengal warned Arakan that the entire region of Chittagong and Rakhang would
come under Mughal suzerainty,25 Chittagong fell in 1660. Shaista Khan annexed
Chittagong that same year.26 It formally became part of provincial Bengal under
Nawab Murshid Quli Khan (r. 1716–1727) in the early eighteenth century.27
This growing Mughal influence would not only affect coastal Chittagong but also
the hill tribes further inland, although more indirectly. While the Mughals gained
influence in Bengal from the sixteenth century onwards, with Akbar’s annexation
of Bengal in 1574, Shah Jahan’s appointment of his son Shah Shuja as governor
of Bengal in 1639, and the later 1660 annexation of Chittagong,28 most British
colonial records noted that there was little direct intervention by the Mughal
state in the CHT until the eighteenth century. Indeed, the powers and territories
of the local tribal rajas or chiefs remained largely autonomous throughout
Mughal rule and the hill tribes were mostly untouched. In part, this may have
been due to the fact that the CHT had a small population who practised jhum
agriculture, which had little (p.xxii) surplus, making it less attractive for
imperial control by the Mughals or neighbouring Chittagong, Arakan, and
Tripura.29
This period reflected not only the gradual spread of Mughal political and
economic systems, but perhaps more importantly, the sustained role and
salience of local dynastic power, manifest through significant alliances between
regional states within the area. Local rajas, such as the rulers of Bijni, Cooch
Behar, the Ahom court in contemporary Assam, Bhutan, and the Dalai Lama of
Tibet,30 as well as the rulers of Tripura, Manipur and the CHT tribal chiefs,31
formed important interregional alliances with each other, as well as with the
imperial centre. Such connections reflected the abiding importance of local
ideas on territoriality and sovereignty. Furthermore, when the rajas of Bijni,
Sidli, and Karaibari in northeast India, for instance, received the elevated rank
of peshkari zamindars from their Mughal overlords, their titles not only
symbolized their traditional status in the eyes of the emperor, but also their
Page 6 of 52
Introduction
substantial military influence, regional autonomy, and judicial authority over

their own peoples32—a policy of indirect rule which would continue under the
English East India Company.
A passage from the Tripura Rajmala, the genealogical poem of the royal Manikya
dynasty of Tripura, recounts some of these ambiguities of sovereignty through
one princely encounter. In this episode, the Mughal prince Shah Shuja took
refuge at the court of a local tribal ruler, the Magh raja (possibly Raja
Candasudhammaraja), at the same time that his neighbour, the Tripura king,
Raja Govinda, was also visiting due to a dynastic conflict at home. Upon Shah
Shuja’s arrival, Raja Govinda stood and invited the Mughal prince to take his
kingly seat (siṃhāsan) (the Sanskrit word for seat serving as a metonym for
royal throne). The Magh raja turned to his fellow ruler, questioning why they
should renounce their royal seats (material and symbolic) to a Muslim foreigner
(a mlechha). Raja Govinda retorted that the Mughal prince was a paramount lord
among their fellowship of kings.33
The incident reveals the influence of Mughal power in the region, but also its
contested nature. By no means did the Magh raja instantly recognize the Mughal
prince as his liege lord; rather he saw him as a foreign interlocutor. Mughal
administrative conventions, whether relating to voluntary trade or Indo-Persian
ceremonial in such settings as Darbars, would be adopted in modified form by
(p.xxiii) local rulers for strategic alliance making, but alongside the continued
observance of tribal authority, and local forms of agricultural production,
religious ritual, customary law, inheritance, and marriage conventions, as well as
a host of other social practices.34 In certain cases, there was more overt
resistance.35 Indeed, there was little Mughal intervention in the CHT until 1713,
when Chakma Raja Zallal Khan petitioned the then Mughal Emperor Farruksiyar
(1713–19) to allow open trade between the jhumiahs (the swidden
agriculturalists who peopled the Hill Tracts) and the lowland beparees (traders)
on payment of a cotton tribute.36
This hybrid regional history has also influenced ideas of tribal identity and
origin. Colonial administrators, scholars, and indigenous genealogists have long
been divided on the historical antecedents and migration patterns of the original
autochthone peoples in this porous border area. In large part, due to the
‘absence of detailed authentic records’, particularly written chronicles, it has
been difficult to verify the premodern history of the region. Most genesis stories
are based on oral histories and the narratives of minstrel-bards, such as the
genkhuli, who recited genealogical histories over generations.37 Some claim the
peoples of the region originated in southern Tibet or southeastern China before
migrating to their current location.38 Others argued that they were from
Malacca, a place of Malay origin.39 Yet other hypotheses suggested they had
moved from Arakan in Burma40 or were the descendants of medieval mixed
Mughal–Arakan marriages.41 Such genesis narratives captured the imagination
Page 7 of 52
Introduction
of later British colonial administrators who from the eighteenth century onwards
attempted to use such mythologies to determine and define tribal identity and
otherness.42 Members of the Chakma tribe, the largest group in the region, have
several origin tales, and believe themselves descendants of both Hindu and
Buddhist royal dynasties. They claim ancestry from the ancient Hindu Kshatriya
kings of Champanagar in Magadha, in what is contemporary Bihar,43 as well as
lineal descent from the Shakyas, the gotra or clan of Gautama Buddha, the
founder of Buddhism.44 Such varying accounts reflect the diverse
interconnecting histories of the CHT peoples, which crossed boundaries of
religious, cultural, and ethnic typology. As the tentacles of colonial military
capitalism grew, particularly under the East India Company, such fluid histories
became increasingly scrutinized and more rigidly bounded.
(p.xxiv) Colonial Capital at the Borders of Empire: The East India Company and the
Burmese State
By the early eighteenth century, the Mughal empire was splintering both at the
centre and at the margins. Its wane saw the rise of European commercial
interest. In the eighteenth century, the English, Dutch, Danish, Ostend, French,
and Portuguese companies were all engaged players in the region.45 The English
East India Company, which had been formed by royal charter under Queen
Elizabeth I in 1600, gained rights to trade in Mughal India under Emperor
Jahangir by 1619.46 It would broaden its reach in Mughal India throughout the
seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century, would adopt a militarily
expansionist role in the subcontinent, in part due to the growing strength of its
navies. With the decisive victory of the British commander, Robert Clive, against
the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, in the Battle of Plassey of 1757, the East
India Company emerged as the dominant European force in Bengal. Seven years
later, following the Battle of Buxar in 1764, it acquired the rights of diwani or
revenue collection in Bengal from the much diminished Mughal emperor.47
In 1760, Nawab Mir Qasim Ali Khan, the Mughal governor of Bengal, ceded the
province to the British. Chittagong soon became strategically significant to the
Company for several reasons: it housed a bustling port, important for a naval
imperial power; it was a significant commercial hub in the Indian Ocean
economy; it served as a frontier district between Bengal and Arakan, which still
controlled much of the nearby territory;48 and it was a shield against the
increasingly muscular ambitions of Burma.49 Burmese ships were trading far
and wide and Burma’s port cities, such as Pegu, were, like Chittagong, a
mélange of Europeans, Persians, Armenians, South Asians, Mons, and Burmese,
among others in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth
century, there was a prosperous and vibrant commercial relationship between
Burma and China. Burma exported cotton to China, while China sent raw silk for
the Burmese weaving industry; gold and silver, which enriched the Burmese
Page 8 of 52
Introduction
aristocratic class; as well as copper, sulphur, zinc, cast-iron pots and pans, paper,
and various exotic goods.50
Thus, the East India Company saw the CHT and the neighbouring hill border as
a strategic gateway to the riches of Burma and China, (p.xxv) and a buffer zone
against both these expansionist, robust Asian states51 as well as the more
recalcitrant and troublesome eastward-dwelling tribes, such as the oft-vilified
Lushais/Kukis.52 In 1785, Burma invaded cosmopolitan Arakan,53 leading to the
displacement of Arakanese refugees into the CHT,54 where they received support
and sanctuary from local Buddhist communities. In response, the Burmese
attempted to disrupt the East India Company’s local trade and revenue systems
in northeast India. Burmese armies invaded Assam three times between 1817
and 1826, and after 1821, were forced to retreat during the Anglo-Burmese War
of 1824–6.55 With their final victory in 1826, the British gained control over
Arakan56 and became fully entrenched in the region.57 Under the Treaty of
Yandabo, the court at Ava relinquished interference in the affairs of Jaintia,
Cachar, and Assam, and ceded their territories of Manipur, Arakan, and the
Tenasserim. It also agreed to pay an indemnity of one million pounds sterling (a
vast sum for the era) and exchange diplomatic representatives between
Amarapura and Calcutta.58
Company Administration: Revenue Collection and Plough Agriculture

From the start, the colonial government was concerned with extracting revenue
collection from the CHT and transitioning the hill tribes from jhum cultivators to
plough agriculturalists.59 These twin issues would remain primary
administrative objectives throughout the colonial period, up until the twentieth
century, but on both fronts the British faced strong indigenous opposition. Until
1772, the East India Company largely maintained pre-existing Mughal policies of
regional non-interference, but in the period following, after Warren Hasting’s
assumption of the office of governor of Fort William, the CHT increasingly came
within the crosshairs of Company ambitions.60
Resisting the Company’s demand for revenue payments, the hill peoples rallied
behind the leadership of the Chakma chief.61 In 1777, the British chief of
Chittagong wrote to Warren Hastings that a deputy of the Chakma chief, one
soldier-statesman, ‘Ramoo Cawn’, or Ramu Khan,62 had violently resisted
Company landholders by recruiting and leading a fighting body of Kuki
warriors.63 The Kukis, later termed the Lushais and after India’s independence,
the Mizos,64 were perceived by (p.xxvi) the British as the most skilled and
bloodthirsty headhunters and raiders among the hill tribes. In November 1777,
the government requested British troops under the command of Captain Edward
Ellesker to move against the Kuki forces.65 In the following year of 1778, the
Chakma Chief Jan Baksh Khan, along with Ramu Khan and their warriors,
captured Bengali talukdars, raiyats (reyotts), or cultivators, and requested the
payment of nazirs (or tributes) following Mughal revenue patterns. They erected
Page 9 of 52
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Fashion Notes.
Slippers should be worn High on Bad little Boys this Winter.
❦
Fashionable Corns are to be Trimmed with Steel-Blue Razors
this Season.
❦
Red Pepper worn on Hot Stoves continues to Create quite a
Sensation in the Best Social Circles.
❦
The Chivalrous Editor.
This is an Editorial Writer. He is Writing a
Thoughtful Piece about the Degeneracy of the
Age. He talks about the good old Times when Men
were Manly and Youthful Breasts were Pregnant
with Chivalry. By and by he Will go Home and Lick
his wife for not Cutting up enough Cord Wood for
the kitchen Fire in the Morning, and he will Spit
tobacco all over his daughter Esther’s new silk
Gown.
❦
Easy Mathematics.
If you are good at addition, put down a column of figures, five
figures in a row, and the sum will represent the age of Clara Louise
Kellogg.
❦
Suppose a man with a bottle of whiskey were to set down the
bottle and carry the whiskey, what would the result be?
❦
If one gallon of coal oil will blow up a kitchen stove, how much
Kansas City gin is required to make a man feel like a barn afire?
❦
If a Pueblo bed-bug can travel seventy rods in one hour, when
there is nothing ahead to encourage him, how many miles will he
travel in ten minutes to meet a fat man from Cheyenne?
❦
A Mean Man.
A Chicago Papa is so Mean he Wont let his
Little Baby have More than One Measle at a
time.
The Office Towel.
Is this a Corner Lot? No it is a Towel. It has been serving an
Apprenticeship in a Printing Office for the past Four Years. The
horses are Dragging it Away. A man will Take an Ax and Break the
Towel into Pieces and Boil it for Soap Grease. Then he will sell the
Towel for Tripe. If you find a Piece of Tripe with a Monogram in one
Corner, you may Know it is the Towel.
❦
Scandal on Foot.
What is that Walking along the Street? That, my
Son, is a State Senator. Will you not Tell About it? No,
my Son, you are too Young to hear Scandal.
❦
The Old T. D.
Is it a Pipe? Yes it is Papa’s Pipe and it Has
not been Cleaned out for Four months. It is full
of Ashes and Spit. It would not Hurt the Pipe if
you were to Take several good long Sucks at it.
The Awful Bugaboo.
There was an awful Bugaboo

Whose Eyes were Red and Hair was Blue;
His Teeth were Long and Sharp and white
And he went Prowling ’round at Night.
❦
A little Girl was Tucked in Bed,
A pretty Night Cap on her Head;
Her Mamma heard her Pleading Say,
“Oh, do not Take the Lamp away!”
❦
But Mamma took away the Lamp
And oh, the Room was Dark and Damp;
The little Girl was Scared to Death—
She did not Dare to Draw her Breath.
❦
And all at Once the Bugaboo
Came Rattling down the Chimney Flue;
He Perched upon the little Bed
And scratched the Girl until she bled.
❦
He drank the Blood and Scratched again—
The little Girl cried out in Vain—
He picked Her up and Off he Flew—
This Naughty, Naughty Bugaboo!
❦
So, children, when in Bed to-night,
Don’t let them Take away the Light,
Or else the Awful Bugaboo
May come and Fly away with You!
❦
The National Debt.
Here we have a Greenbacker. He seems
Troubled about Something. He is Troubled about
the National Debt. He is Grieving because the
Country of his Nativity owes one Billion Dollars.
The other Man around the Corner is a Grocery
Man. He, too, is Troubled, but he is not Worrying
about the National Debt. Oh, no. He is Worrying
about the one Dollar and Forty cents the
Greenbacker owes him.
❦
Johnny’s Alphabet.
A Stands for Apple, so hard and so Green—

B stands for Boy who is going away—
C stands for colic that Soon will be seen—
D stands for Devil that’s shortly to pay.
THANKSGIVING TALES
For the Profit of the Nursery Brigade.
Tale I—Prolog.
This little Boy looks as if he had On his Father’s clothes. Maybe
he Has not had Anything to Eat for a Month. He is Sitting on a Stool.
He is Waiting for Something. His hands are clasped over his
Stomach. Can he be Waiting for his Thanksgiving Dinner? What a
Queer little Boy to Wait so Patiently? If he were to Cry, he would get
his Dinner Sooner, wouldn’t he?
Tale II—Succulent Soup.
In the Tureen there are two Gallons of Soup and Eleven Cove
oysters. Do not Be Afraid. The Soup is Pretty Hot, but it will not Burn
you. If it is too Hot, you can Spit it out on the Carpet. Do you like
Cove oysters? They are Baby oysters Taken out of the Shell before
they are Hatched. Some People dry them and use them for Gun
Wads. They are much more Digestible than sole leather.
Tale III—Tempting Turkey.
What a Big Fat Turkey it is! It must have eaten lots of Worms
and Caterpillars to be so Fat. It is stuffed with nice Stuffing made of
Old Crusts and spoiled Biscuits. The Gravy looks Quite Tempting. It
does not Look like Tobacco Juice, does it? The Innards of the Turkey
have been Chopped up and are in the Gravy. Unless the Cook was
very Careful while Chopping up the Innards, there is a Piece of her
Finger in the Gravy, too. Will you Try some of the Turkey? Take a
Drum Stick, the Pope’s Nose, a Side Bone, the Neck, some of the
Breast and the Wishbone. If that is not Enough, ask Mamma please
Can you have some More.
Tale IV—Various Vegetables.
The vegetables smell good. Two or three of these Onions would
make you Stronger. Suppose you Try some of the Turnip and
Squash. Pickled Beets are also Good to Eat just before going to
Bed. The mashed Potato is healthy when There are no Potato Bugs
in it. They are very Plenty this Year. Will you put Some Jelly on Your
Bread? How Mad it would Make your Big sister Jennie to Tip the
Jelly over in her lap. Suppose you Try it as a Joke.
Tale V—Venerable Venison.
Here we Have Some Venison. It may Taste a trifle Venerable for
it has been hanging Up in the Shed for Several Weeks. But Papa
says it is not Fly Blown, and Everything Goes on Thanksgiving Day.
Once the Venison was a little Deer and lived in the Mountains. A
man Caught it and Hung it up on a Tree and cut its poor little Throat
and let it Bleed to Death. What a Bad Man. Perhaps the Deer’s baby
deers are crying for their Mamma who will Never come.
Tale VI—Peptonic Pudding.
The Hired Girl is bringing on the Pudding and it is a Daisy. We
mean the Pudding. It is full of Plums. Make Mamma give you a Big
Piece of the Pudding with Ever so many Plums in it. If we Were you,
we would Swallow the Plums whole and Then they will stay By You
longer. When you have Eaten the Pudding, pick your little Dish up
and Drink the Sauce.

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An Endangered History: Indigeneity,

Religion, and Politics on the Borders of

Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy,

Hobbes On Politics And Religion Laurens Van Apeldoorn

Land Acquisition and Compensation in India: Mysteries

Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in

Islam and Politics in Bangladesh: The Followers of

An Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy

On Human Nature. Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics,

The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback

An Endangered History: Indigeneity, Religion,

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(p.i) An Endangered History (p.ii)

(p.iii) An Endangered History

(p.iv) Copyright page

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

© Oxford University Press 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

You must not circulate this work in any other form

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-949308-1

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909691-6

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and her dreams of home (p.vi)

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(p.ix) Figures, Tables, and Maps

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I first considered writing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts as a newly arrived

I wrote this book as a faculty member in the History Department at Bentley

A number of institutions and funding agencies have generously assisted in the

I also wish to acknowledge the editors at Oxford University Press, who

In particular, it is to my niece Kesariya that I give special thanks. She was my

I dedicate this book to my mother. Years ago, my mother taught me with

Angma Dey Jhala

Bentley University, Waltham, USA

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Map I James Rennell, Map of Colonial

1779. R4. Housed in the Map Collection,

Map II ‘The Chittagong Division

Note: This map is not to scale and

Map III Chittagong Hill Tracts, 1890.

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Angma Dey Jhala

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 to mixed reviews,4 but it would go on

through language, race, religion, or geography. Heathcliff falls between various

In particular, I focus on how British administrators used European knowledge

assumed to be marginal and peripheral to colonial power, were engaging or

This transcultural engagement reflected a dynamic intermingling of religious

The port city of Chittagong in many ways reflected this cosmopolitanism,

The Arakan or Rakhine state, which controlled Chittagong, was, as Rishad

Mughal Intrusions: Imperial Sovereignty and Local Autonomy

substantial military influence, regional autonomy, and judicial authority over