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Tribal Studies in India pp 67–79Cite as

Historical Reconstruction of the Past of Northeast India: An Assessment of Colonial Writings

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Abstract

The paper makes a critical study of colonial writings on history of Northeast India; identifies inherent bias and prejudices, questions their reliability and validity at the backdrop of political and epistemological crisis that had gone into the creation and argues in favour of interdisciplinary approaches in the process of reconstructing the past history of the Northeast societies; which are predominantly pre-literate and do not have any written tradition. The paper examines the role of colonial ethnographical accounts; discounts projection of tribes as cultural isolates and suggests reconstructing the history in terms of shared past and shared culture; economic dependence; and precisely in the framework of interaction. The paper advocates for historical analysis of the socio-economic life; political and cultural developments on the basis of social science principles and universalism based upon the parameters of causes and effects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The present paper heavily draws on the data and argument presented in Thakur (2007).

  2. 2.

    A National Seminar on ‘The Archaeology of North East India’ was held from 26 to 28 October 1988, in the Department of History, NEHU. The first seminar of its kind, it attempted to ‘take stock of existing knowledge to identify further areas of research and inquiry. It brought together geographers, geologists, ecologists, linguists, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists to explore various facets of the problem. In the process an authoritative corpus of writing was made available in the collection of papers and abstracts, which with additions and editorial work was published 3 years later’ (Singh and Sengupta 1991).

    Surprising enough, Arunachal Pradesh and some other regions have not been properly represented. The aspects of ethnoarchaeology and industrial archaeology to mention a few are problematic sides to be found in Thakur (2004) that has attempted at filling this gap.

  3. 3.

    The Sect. 4.1 of the present paper draws heavily on my Aizawl paper (Thakur 2015).

  4. 4.

    1857 marks the year of the occurrence of the first major revolt against the rule of the English in India. The British Company officials, however, had managed to counter and ultimately arrest the revolt.

  5. 5.

    Pantham’s account is indeed crucial as it provides the theoretical framework through which the present paper has sought to establish a linkage between imperialist expansion and systems of knowledge formation established to consolidate colonial rule.

  6. 6.

    Dirks makes this statement in the context of change in colonial systems of knowledge generation.

  7. 7.

    Without commenting on the accuracy (or the lack of it) of data and its analysis presented in these ethnographic accounts here, I must give the names of some of the major studies. These, among others, include Alexander Mackenzie’s History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal (1884), T. C. Hudson’s The Meitheis (1908), J.H. Hutton’s The Angami Nagas (1921a) and The Sema Nagas (1921b) and L.W. Shakespeare’s History of the Assam Rifles (1929).

    It is important to make a related point here. The specific and significant changes brought by the colonial rule in northeast India warrant a special kind of periodization. It seems to me that the periodization of the hill societies of northeast India including Arunachal Pradesh should be on the terms of the pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence rather than the more conventional (and inappropriate in this context) ancient, medieval and modern. For details, see Thakur (2014).

  8. 8.

    I draw this rather obvious insight about the way in which ill-informed ethnographic studies can be academically reductive from Frank McGlynn (1994).

  9. 9.

    For a critical reading of Haimendorf’s writings, see Furer-Haimendorf 1939a, b and Thakur 2005.

  10. 10.

    The Annales School is a group of historians who follow the style of histography developed by French historians in the twentieth century to stress the use of social scientific methods in the study of history.

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  1. Department of History, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India

    Amrendra Kumar Thakur

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  1. Arunachal Institute of Tribal Studies, Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh, India

    Maguni Charan Behera

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Thakur, A.K. (2020). Historical Reconstruction of the Past of Northeast India: An Assessment of Colonial Writings. In: Behera, M. (eds) Tribal Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9026-6_4

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