In the history of World War II in eastern India the participation of local people is the least attended subject due to the belief that the whole tribal belt was with the Allied forces. This is untrue. Those groups who had directly come into contact with the invading forces were supporting them in various ways. This is especially true to the people of Manipur. This article makes the point that Kukis had contacted the Indo-Japanese forces even before the invasion and later helped them, during the War, not only in terms of materials, labour, intelligence services and campaigns but also in term of men of war. This assistance was, however, located as a separate resistance movement embedded within the larger war. The Kukis joined the War largely to shake off their bondage under the Raj in a desperate ‘way out’. They did it against the constituted colonial authority on their own understanding of the situation in which they found themselves in an unacceptable situation. It was a political action base on a conscious, pre-mediated, and deliberate decision directed towards a specific local objective and having to do with local grievances.
This paper examines the colonial representation of tribal raids in the Northeast frontier of India and argues that, rather than being the ‘lawless and predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’, it was an expression of hill politics. The Kukis raided British territory when they discovered that an extension of the colonial boundary threatened their very existence as an independent state-evading population. It traces how the Kukis re-ethnicized themselves in the hills by evolving a system that is state-repellent, protected by a vast strip of forested jungle around their settlements commonly known as the ‘hunting ground’. It locates the ‘raid’ in the context of the difference in the perception of space and territoriality between the colonial state and indigenous polities. Colonial spatial ideology and its hill-valley binary are seen to play a vital role in animating tension on the frontier. The raid is thus understood as the ultimate weapon of resistance against an established state by an independent ‘not-a-state-subject’ people in defence of their autonomy and essentially represents non-state practices against state appropriations. Instead of being ‘unruly’, the raid is seen as a form of organized and premeditated resistance based on the consciousness of the hillmen's lived world order.
This article examines the colonial representation of Kuki raids in nineteenth century Northeastern India as, at best, ‘lawlessness’ and, at worst, ‘predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’ whose ‘natural love of plunder’ took of it as an ‘amusement’ for procuring human heads or captives for sacrificial purposes. From the hill perspective, it argues that raiding was mainly made to procure human labour forces, and was an expression of hill politics. Essentially, it was a function of newly emerging notions of kingship and authority. Since the early nineteenth century Kuki country witnessed the emergence of some powerful rajahs. The ensuing warfare, death, subjugation and displacement changed the political and demographic landscape of the hills. The new regimes depended mostly on coerced labour power, which now transformed into wealth, not only to construct, enforce and sustain its authority but also to overcome the constraints generated by the non-state practices. The scarcity of labour power in the hills induced them to acquire it from the plains or other hostile tribes through the in-strument of raid.
This article focuses on the little-known Indian Labour Corps (ILC) who hailed from the Northeast frontier of India during the Great War (WW1). It engages with the labour recruitment process, their collective experience during the long march to France, the nature of their work and life at the warzone camps, their heroic homecoming and subsequently, their life back into the heart of the hills. It argues that large numbers of hill people from the region joined the War as coolies with different perceptions, meanings and expectations closely connected to their warrior traditions. They enrolled into the ILC in large numbers for the coveted ‘ornaments’ of the hill ‘warrior’, which the War could offer to them upon their return home. Their war experiences engendered new ideas and practices, significantly reconfiguring their worldviews and their ‘homes’. Their experiences reflect the frontier dimensions of WW1.
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