Frontiers of Imagination: Reading over Thomas Lewin’s Shoulders

Abstract

Frontiers evoke images of linear and ethnocentric contact zones. Much of the historical records about the northeastern frontier of British India reinforce this idea of the frontier. This article facilitates an intervention through a reading of two monographs authored by Thomas H. Lewin, who in 1866 was appointed as the Deputy Commissioner and Political Agent of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Frontiers as imaginative spaces open the field of inquiry to the tropes and symbols that organise the contested, fluid and fluctuating relations between the British government and the hill tribes. From this imaginative space, Lewin’s monographs underscore the dynamism of frontier tropes in the construction of individual and collective identities.