This article probes the production of the uplands of Chittagong in the early years of British East India Company (EIC)rule in Bengal and its eastern frontiers. The South Asian debates around the nature of agrarian property relations have largely skipped places like Chittagong uplands, consequently, the uplands appear in academic and popular discussions as an already constituted outside to this agrarian historiography. The history of the uplands then become easily separated and consumed as part of frontier studies. The article seeks to address the constitution of this outside. Narrating a story where the protagonists range from influential Bengali middlemen in EIC retinue, Company officers responsible for Chittagong administration to mobile Arakanese men called ‘Magh zamindars’, brought together in a swirl of forged documents and contending claims to ‘wastelands’, the article glimpses into the complex interlocking between upland and lowland networks of Chittagong. It frames this narrative by unpacking the revenue categories of sair and kapas mahal; the two categories used for Chittagong uplands during this period. Disaggregating them allows one to see how the uplands were created in the image of the commodity cotton: the people who produced it, the way it was exchanged and the violence that marked the process.

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Thomas Simpson, The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 298 pp.

This article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others, these figures were held responsible for a series of raids carried out in the settled British territories of the northeastern frontiers in the 1890s. After a few inconclusive skirmishes with the British expeditionary force, they were apprehended and imprisoned in a jail in Hazaribagh under the preventive detention act of Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which was reserved and designed to arrest political dissidents of the empire. After a few months, two of them, Liengpunga and Khalkam, were found hanging from the windows of their prison latrine. The British administration labelled these deaths as suicides and closed the cases. The article opens them up. In doing so, it narrates an oblique history of the Scheduled District Act of 1874 which removed hill districts from the jurisdictions of regular courts. By focusing on the historical imbrication of Bengal Regulation III of 1818 in the Scheduled District Act, the article highlights the punitive techniques embedded in the seeming protectionist impulse of the colonial state, something that persists in India's administration of the Northeast region. Closer to the concerns of this issue, it reflects on a legal genealogy of tribal subjects in South Asia.