Changing Frontiers and Spaces

Abstract

This article is an attempt to understand the transition to colonial rule in the region of Goalpara, a historically transitional space between the colonial provinces of Assam and Bengal. It does this through an examination of the confrontation between local and colonial notions of space, power and authority that was initiated by the construction of the region into a politically and economically unified territory. In the mid-nineteenth century Goalpara was a ‘frontier’ on the subcontinental mainstream in terms of social norms, settled production, forests and fields, long-distance trade and communication, centralized political power, law and taxation, as well as already being liminal in regional terms between ‘proto-Bengal’ and ‘proto-Assam’. What makes its transition from a divergent and peripheral economic and political space, which had mobility as a defining feature, to a unit of a modern state with permanent boundaries and an undivided sovereignty, more significantly, was its fairly rapid (and documented) move from fluid to the normative, from jhum (shifting) to settled cultivation, from local to interregional (trade, power and law), and so on. The article, therefore, defends the region as a unit of analysis for studying the extraordinary impact of colonialism, for it uses specific examples from Goalpara to demon-strate larger propositions about colonial rule, including the ways in which colonial knowledge and power worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.