Inventing a 'Tribal' (non) Subject and Frontier Jurisdictions in British India

In this talk I will elaborate upon the main themes from my book "Placing the Frontier in North East India: Law, Custom, and
Knowledge", OUP 2023. The frontier of the British empire in India examined in this book form part of the Indian state of Meghalaya comprising Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia districts, and Sylhet Division in Bangladesh. During the nineteenth century the words Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo came to denote both hills and tribal inhabitants in the colonial frontier of British Bengal. Colonial governance through law formulated the hills as frontier and its inhabitants as tribal. Law assumed the task of defining both people and land in relation to what was understood as an uncivilized and untamed frontier landscape. The “where of law” as a
critical analytic allows a reconsideration of key legal categories such as frontier, British and non-British territory, non-regulation areas, scheduled districts, hill tribal, settler proprietor, cultivator subject, among others. Through a study of place-making by colonized inhabitants of the frontier the book further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day.