Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India (original) (raw)
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In the closing decades of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, peasant insurrection was endemic to the northeastern borders of Bengal, including the submontane region of Gird Garrow, a characteristic shared with the contiguous Garo Hills. Locating these conditions of insurrection within changes in the order of the regional economy under the Company's rule, the article elucidates the economic rationale of 'primitive violence' and reflects on the processes generated by the state itself in the course of subjugation of the Garo peasants in the region.
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Midnapore was one among the first three districts ceded to the East India Company in 1760 by Mir Qasim, the other two being Burdwan and Chittagong. Following this, the acquisition of the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765 launched the East India Company into a complex administrative role related to revenue in an alien territory with complex, multi-tiered, customary land rights that were beyond their knowledge. Their attempts at revenue collection and the accompanying imposition of a legal, rational state on a customary framework led to tragedies like the Bengal famine of 1770. It served as the impetus for the initial uprisings against colonial rule, which mainstream accounts on resistances in the early colonial period tend to omit. The study here aims to shed light on the nature of rule transition and complexities regarding land ownership that the Company encountered, the special nature of Midnapore frontier, and phases of the chuar rebellion pre-and post Permanent Settlement. Special attention has been placed on conceptual clarification of chuars, paiks, their status overlaps and subalternity and on analysing the nature of the rebellion in the light of Eric Hobsbawm's concept of banditry and Ranajit Guha's analysis on features of peasant insurgency in colonial India.
The sovereignty of political economy: The Garos in a pre-conquest and early conquest era
The article is an inquiry into the elision of an image-that of the cotton-producing Garo-in the colonial archive. It situates this inquiry within the pre-and early colonial era where it is still possible to uncover elements of the irrefutable sovereign presence of Garos in eastern India as well as of the regional economic and political system through which the Garo social being makes itself historically visible. Parsing together a narrative of the Garo political order in this period, the article will discuss the ways in which the sovereignty of a people was pivoted around the production and trade in cotton. Rescuing the image of the cotton-producing Garo from the colonial archive is also a retracing of the seamless becoming of the Garo peasant, as adept at working with the hoe as with the plough, into a cotton trader who embarked on long journeys on foot and on boats every cotton season to the lowlands. The article will also probe into the germaneness of the concept of the 'hill/forest tribe' with the sedentary plainsman as its oppositional image and the embedding of ethnicity in circumscribed 'natural' habitats in eastern India by the colonial state.
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Exploring the history of a peasant rebellion in late eighteenth-century Bengal, this article shows how such an analysis of ‘subaltern’ consciousness is incapable of adequately explaining one of colonial India’s most famous instances of insurgency. In the Rangpur dhing, peasants were not driven to revolt by their antagonism towards a rigid, oppressive structure of authority. Instead, the social imagination of Rangpur’s eighteenth-century peasantry perceived the world in which they acted as a complex network of fluid and constantly changing authorities. For them, ‘rebellion’ was not full-frontal assault on a political system they were excluded from. It was an attempt to assert their ability to negotiate within a flexible political order in which they believed they were participants.
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