Ethnography and law: The archive of colonial violence,Garo Hills circa 1830–70

Abstract

In the winter of 1848, a military expedition for the collection of revenue arrears from the village of Ripugiri in the Garo Hills region in northeastern India ended with the burning of all the houses and granaries of the village, emptied and deserted by its inhabitants in the wake of the colonial army’s advance. This article resurrects this otherwise forgotten site of colonial violence by situating it within processes of territorialisation of British sovereignty, the constitution of jurisdictional boundaries and the concomitant erasure of native orders of sovereignty. Its various sections are braided by an analysis of the mutual constitution of sovereignty and law in the early nineteenth-century Garo Hills and eastern India more generally, as well their embedding in a military violence that spooled from the rationale of the colonial political economy. A year after the event, the officer leading the expedition recounted the burning of Ripugiri in an essay published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The tensions between the two registers, between fragments of conversations in the colonial administration in the immediate aftermath of the event and a text assembled at leisure and lent coherence by distance in time offer an opportunity to study anthropology and history, in their moments of explicit melding with imperial conquest.