Rebellion and Ethnogenesis in Colonial North-Eastern Bengal: The Garos as Pagul Panthis

Abstract

In the closing decades of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Peasant insurrection was endemic to the north-eastern borders of Bengal, including the submontane region of Gird Garrow, a characteristic shared with the contiguous Garo Hills. Locating these conditions of insurrection within changes in the order of the regional economy under the Company’s rule, the article elucidates the economic rationale of ‘primitive violence’ and reflects on the processes generated by the state itself in the course of subjugation of the Garo peasants in the region.