India's Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of “mapping” in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the “geo-body” of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries.
Drawing on the practices of ethno-history and micro-history, this article examines the nature of community-state relation in the borderland between southern Manipur and Upper Burma. Identified by different names, the Zou is a fringe community and a non-state entity that has sustained a fluid identity under changing historical contexts. Within the 'galactic polities' of pre-colonial Chin Hills, the confederate Zou chiefs lost out to their agnatic rivals (the Kamhau-Sukte clan) in the battle for local dominance around the 1870s. Thanks to the annexation of Upper Burma in 1885 by Lord Dufferin, the Zou became British subjects who later took part in the anti-colonial 'Kuki Rising' or Zou Gal (1917-19) in Manipur. From being 'rebellious' subjects of the Raj, the Zou community in independent India managed to get itself recognised as a 'scheduled tribe' in 1956. The post-colonial era saw the surge of modernising forces like the birth of local church movement, ethnic identity formation and political consciousness; but the 'cultural metabolism' of this marginal community allows for both resistance to and acceptance of external challenges.
Gunell Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 272.
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