Peasants, colonialism, and sovereignty: the Garo rebellions in eastern India

This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community,Footnote ¹ marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges itself on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will mark significant departures from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India, a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

The first part of the article sifts through quotidian details of the prosperous trade in hill cotton in the early colonial period in the lowlands around the Garo Hills—taxes, measures, classes of traders, tables of rates—to discover the Garo community, zamindars, and European traders inhabiting a world of contested sovereignties in which they fought each other to control and regulate this trade. The continuation of this world into the early colonial period was decisively interrupted around 1794, with the introduction of the Permanent Settlement of land revenue and the monopolization of the rights to the collection of sair Footnote ² in cotton by the East India Company. The second part of the article tracks the impact of irreversible changes in the regional economic order, including on the relationship between the Garo community and lowland chieftains, and finds in them the historical context for the story of unfolding Garo violence in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Some apparent fissures discerned within the colonial archive will require an examination of the connections between the rationalization of violence and the new juridical regime introduced by the British state in the Garo Hills and in the valleys from about 1816 onwards. The article concludes by capturing a fracture in time and narrative in the figure of David Scott, the official who ‘pacified’ the Garos. Scott's first deputation to the Garo Hills in 1816 will provide a brief excursion into understanding the legitimization of executive power in the hilly parts of the empire which allowed despotic and brutal colonial governors to control the ‘lawlessness’ of colonial subjects.

Traders, hill cotton, markets: the sovereignties of the early colonial period

As the East India Company devised strategies of separation of the hilly parts of northeastern Bengal and western Assam from the valleys that encased them, the long histories of several polities exercising simultaneous political control and claims over hills and valleys begin to appear in its records. The Garos were one such polity and the manifestations of their control over and presence in the river valleys of Bengal and Assam, foothills, and hill passes in the early decades of the nineteenth century must form the very short but necessary prelude with which we will begin this article. Elsewhere I offer a more elaborate exposition of the irrefutable sovereign presence of the Garos in the pre-colonial regional political order of eastern India, as well as its firm location in the production of hill cotton.Footnote ³ This article will study the Garo resistance to the shattering of this pre-colonial order by colonialism, with the violence of the peasant rebellions of the early decades of the nineteenth century setting the scene for the unfolding story of their becoming primitive hill ‘tribes’.

In the multiple and shifting system of alliances that was the essence of pre-colonial sovereignties in eastern India, the production and exchange of cotton from the Garo Hills held a central place throughout the Mughal period. Non-agricultural dues (sair) formed the key source of revenue for the majority of the zamindari estates (or choudhuries) of northeastern Bengal and western Assam, with a substantial part of the peishkash (tributary or honorary payment) paid to the Mughal faujdar (head of the police court) at Rangamatti being in elephants and aloe/agar wood for the maintenance of the Dacca artillery park and petty garrisons.Footnote ⁴ Most of these products were procured from the region of the Garo Hills, outside the political control of the Mughal state, where they were to be found in abundance. The inclusion of cotton as an article of significance within the peishkash cast Garo sovereignty in a determining role within the regional political order. Their military skill was now held up as a measure against which the prowess of the peishkash-paying zamindars was to be measured.Footnote ⁵ In the notes of the earliest British officers, the Garos were ‘the twins of the Marathas in the Deccan’, wielding such sovereign powers as to fundamentally determine the spatial order of these parts of eastern India during the Mughal epoch.Footnote ⁶

Mughal sources and contemporaneous evidence from the colonial archive suggest that the Garo polity, like many other contiguous polities, inscribed its political claims over a large swathe of the hills and plains. Though marked by a domination over land and by the introduction of agrarianization,Footnote ⁷ such claims were characterized more by a ceaseless display of political power than by a uniform control over territory.Footnote ⁸ Approaching the history of the Garos nearly two-and-a-half centuries after they first appear in British records, it might not be out of place to delineate some of the representative elements of the genre of historical work that studies polities conventionally defined as ‘tribal’ in the pre-colonial as well as the colonial period.Footnote ⁹ While interrogating the classificatory regimes of the colonial state that draw upon evolutionist theories of European modernity to produce the category of the ‘tribe’ in colonies, many of these historians, such as Sumit Guha and Ajay Skaria, have also demonstrated the concrete historical processes under colonialism that led to the representation of the ‘primitive’ as outside of ‘civilization’. These processes include the colonial state's attempts to ‘extinguish wildness and to replace it with civilization: by halting raids, forcibly extinguishing mobility, imposing settled agriculture, and refashioning kingship to make it civilized’.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite an acute awareness of the historical constitution of ‘wildness’, as well as of the flows of interdependence between hills and plains, there is a sense in which, in the final analysis, hills and plains remain as essentially impermeable categories in these works, and hill/forest polities are seen as discrete from the agrarian plains.Footnote ¹¹ This may well be a reflection of the specific conditions of the histories of the communities inhabiting these regions of western India or a consequence of an inadequate historical probing of their political economies. A recognition of the imperialism of categories—‘tribes’, ‘civilization’—as well as of the historicity of the politics of wildness will not, however, suffice for writing the histories of communities such as the Garos, whose pre-colonial pasts were defined by a porosity that refuses to be sealed into compartments of either hill/forest people or settled peasants of the plains. Oppositions of settled–nomadic do not work for the Garos, for their history in the pre- and early colonial period is a negation of these very lines of difference and speaks instead of lives lived in the hills and plains but also in the passes and foothills in-between. Even as we draw upon the rich body of work on the ‘tribe’ in India, our enquiry will have to mark its lines of difference as it dwells upon a connected but distinct line of argumentation that sees ‘tribes’ as peasants. It will have to explore their embedding in, as well as production of, structures of land, market, and politics in the lowlands and in the highlands. It will find its affinities with historians who have returned to the archives to historicize the process of the construction of the ‘tribe’ in northeastern India,Footnote ¹² but also elsewhere in colonial India where the target of peasant insurgency—the oppressive trio of the sarkar-sahukar-zamindar—Footnote ¹³is easier to discern. For the colonial spatial order and its associated ideas of civilization—the designation of ‘hill’ polities as isolated zones and as various peripheries of valley state formations—to be truly challenged, the historicizing of the conjunction of ethnicity and habitat must be accompanied by more robust enquiries into the actual practices that constituted political orders which, more often than not, straddled not just hills and plains, but also the hill passes, rivers, and river ports.Footnote ¹⁴ As the producer of a fine variety of hill cotton, a skilled agriculturist, and a trader who carried these bales of cotton down from the hill slopes to trade in the markets in the valleys and hill passes below, the Garo peasant straddled many worlds, refusing to be confined to any one of them. It is to some of these practices that we now turn in order to comprehend how this community of people came to be sequestered in the hills, defined and denounced, inspiring fear as well as a fierce will to control in colonial officials, their signs of violence providing the rationale for the British conquest of northeastern India.

Our interest here specifically lies in the zamindari estates of the three Istemarry Mehals (lands paying rent in perpetuity) of Karaibari, Kalumalupara, and Mechpara, with some necessary references to Sherpur and Shusung, the object of numerous Garo acts of violence in the first decade of the nineteenth century, with their estates the theatre of headhunting and murderous raids. After the acquisition of the Diwani in 1765, the Company issued a series of Acts to regulate taxes and dues charged upon trade in transit. In the interest of maximizing their acquisition of revenue from customs, the Company abolished the practice of issuing dastaks (trading permits) in 1771, imposed restrictions on private trading by Company officials in 1773, and abolished all private tolls across Bengal in 1773 and government customs houses in 1788.Footnote ¹⁵ During the restructuring of the economy in the course of the Permanent Settlement, the right to collect sair duties was taken away from the zamindars, awarded to itself by the Company in 1790, and (with certain exceptions) abolished in 1791.Footnote ¹⁶

Listed as the chief landholders of northeastern Bengal in contemporary as well as later records, Karaibari, Mechpara, and Kalumalupara (and Habraghat), according to some colonial sources, were included in this rule of exception and exempted from the laws against sair collection that were in force in the rest of the British empire in India.Footnote ¹⁷ While insufficient revenue from land, these estates’ location in the midst of ‘inaccessible hills and jungles’, their separation from the nearest magistrate and the Collector by the Brahmaputra, and the expenses involved in policing a vast tract are offered as tentative explanations for this exemption,Footnote ¹⁸ it is the primacy of the cotton trade with the Garo Hills that establishes itself as the sole basis for this exception in colonial records: ‘These zamindaris are different from others in this: they pay their revenue from the sair and not from the mal [revenue].’Footnote ¹⁹ In 1789 the payment in cotton had been commuted to money, but the payment of revenue was still from sair from the cotton trade.Footnote ²⁰

A set of letters from a quarter of a century later makes this governmental reason more intelligible:

The ‘earliest times’ was a reference to the Mughal period, when these three Istemarry Mehals paid their peishkash ‘from a traffic carried on with the Garrows in cotton and from duties laid on cotton’.Footnote ²²

In the Company's positioning of resources, the forests, hills, and valleys inhabited by the Garos were identified as the most significant for governing the Bengal and Assam plains, and these pre-colonial conditions of assessment and payment, the archive argues, were allowed to persist without any significant increase in revenue or alteration in the management of the estates until 1794. The late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century archive is saturated with references to the profitability of the trade in cotton, along with trade in other products from the Garo Hills such as agar wood, sago, and chunam (lime). The first British official to visit the Garo Hills did so in order to enquire into the volume of a superior quality of hill cotton which, he noted, was ‘a source of immense profit for the zamindars’.Footnote ²³ About two decades after John Eliot, cotton (with seed and without seed) cultivated by the Garos in the Garo Hills and in the hilly areas of Karaibari and Mechpara estates was sufficient not just for consumption of the whole of Assam but additionally for export to Bengal. In Bengal, the quantity of Garo cotton equalled that produced in its most prosperous districts.Footnote ²⁴

A significant node in the political landscape of northeastern/eastern Bengal during this period was the figure of the zamindar/choudhury/raja which necessarily combined within itself functions of an overtly military and political character. Colonial records and, following from them, recent historiography have portrayed these zamindaris and their relationship with the Garos as the quintessential example of an anarchical region where petty chiefs were in perpetual conflict. A more convincing historical interpretation might rest, however, on a recognition of the European understanding of limited sovereignty in which ‘(r)ather than signifying a quality that a state either possessed or failed to retain, sovereignty could be held by degrees, with full sovereignty reserved for the imperial power’.Footnote ²⁵ The zamindar of the Karaibari estate, in particular, appears to have achieved a measure of supremacy that potentially challenged British imperial sovereignty at several points in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁶

In the early years of British rule, or at least until 1794, primarily on account of the rules of exception that allowed zamindars to pay their revenue with sair, the economic fortune of these chiefs continued to be tied to the wealth accrued from the regional trade in cotton. In the last instance, claims to political authority were dependent on the ability of each zamindar to mobilize individuals and groups in defence of the trade routes. The several recorded fights between zamindars over the control of trading passes,Footnote ²⁷ but also between them, the powerful Garo traders, and the East India CompanyFootnote ²⁸ make this character of regional political power more than apparent. A much-cited case from 1793 involving two such Garo traders of significance, Rengta BooneahFootnote ²⁹ and Chila Booneah, reveals this intense contest over the monopoly of this very profitable trade in cotton as well as the determined resistance of zamindars to imminent changes in the structure of the pre-colonial economy by the colonial state.Footnote ³⁰

The spatial variations of sovereignty that the zamindars continued to command in the late eighteenth century were evident in their control over not just the lowlands but also over forts built strategically in hills, passes, and forests. These forts, which tended to be located at the intersection of land routes and connected to riverine ports, had decisive political and economic advantages, allowing zamindars to establish their monopoly over the products of the surrounding hills, including the most important local resource—cotton.Footnote ³¹ That the Karaibari zamindar excelled in exercising control over the production of Garo cotton in the trading passes in the hills and owed his measure of sovereignty to this control is reiterated across colonial sources.Footnote ³² The increase in the number of forts and guards in the passes controlled by him is noted with disapprobation by colonial officials who saw this as an attempt to establish a monopoly over this trade.Footnote ³³ Underlining the importance of this trade for the trading fortunes of the East India Company was the enquiry conducted by the Commissioner of Cooch Behar in August 1790 at the behest of the Board of Revenue regarding ‘the nature of the connection between Rungtah and the Karaibari zamindar’.Footnote ³⁴ The Commissioner's report confirmed all of the above: that Rahdarry duties from the trade in Garo cotton, paid by Garos and lowland merchants alike at the markets in the hill passes, formed the nucleus of the Karaibari zamindari economy (and of other estates such as Sherpore); that Rengta, the Garo ‘chief’ was the most important producer of this cotton and sold it all in a market near the Karaibari estate for at least the previous 40 years such that ‘this conduct had received the sanction of custom’; and, finally, that the relationship between Rengta and the zamindar was ‘amicable’.Footnote ³⁵

Sovereignty in the pre-colonial period nested itself in alliances of kinship and marriage, and in individuals of influence; claims to territorial authority were therefore necessarily tenuous and transient. The ‘patchwork of identities’Footnote ³⁶ that characterized the lowlands over which the Garos laid claim in this period ensured that many of the zamindars/tributary rajas belonged to this community.Footnote ³⁷ The overlapping character of sovereignty that these conditions generated continued for generations to come, and was on display in the ceremonial grandeur accorded to Agund, Rengta's son, by the Karaibari zamindar and in the influence that the former continued to command over the cotton trade and ‘over local chiefs (Bhooneas and Gerees)’.Footnote ³⁸ Traces of this political order persisted into the late eighteenth century, despite the East India Company's interventions as Mohendranarain protected his uneven sovereignty, shared and contested with contiguous zamindaris and the Garos, with some military help from the latter.Footnote ³⁹ The above narrative of Garo agency counters the singular inability of modern historiography on the region to acknowledge the display of sovereignty in non-territorial forms.

The neat cataloguing of the colonial archive sometimes makes it easy for us to forget that the zamindars of northeastern Bengal shared their milieu with the nawab of Bengal, the French merchant Jean Baptiste Chevalier, and traders associated with the East India Company such as Henri Vannsitart. Cotton produced by the Garos and sold at the markets of Bengal was the primary concern in the debates over the monopolization of the trade in eastern India by traders associated with the East India Company and otherwise in the middle and late eighteenth century. In a series of letters to Vannsitart, Mir Qasim, the nawab of Bengal, accused private traders such as Chevalier and his gomastahs (trading agents) of depriving him of his rights to revenue amounting to Rs 40,000 in the form of duties on this trade.Footnote ⁴⁰ The cotton brought down by the mountaineers, Vannsitart acknowledged to his colleagues, constituted the only form of revenue from the region of Rangamati in Bengal, a district bordering the Garo Hills.Footnote ⁴¹ From John Eliot's account and correspondence, it is evident that until his visit of 1788 the East India Company had been ignorant of the rich sources of cotton in the Garo Hills in the immediate vicinity of Bengal. It therefore required him to present his collection of taxes as a sovereign indivisible right, as a constitutive process of every imperial polity, Mughal or British.Footnote ⁴² Eliot was also instructed to seek ways of establishing monopoly, through force and persuasion, over the considerable revenue accrued in this trade.Footnote ⁴³ Resistance to colonial interference therefore also manifested in the zamindars’ reluctance to share details of revenue collection, both sair and mal, at the markets in territories they controlled. This dimension of the regional political order is concealed in later colonial correspondence, buried as it is in the language of severe moral condemnation of the zamindars.

However, a terrain where seasonal markets were scattered over a vast expanse of thickly forested hills and lowlands, unmarked by surveys and borders, would have allowed for a very uneven implementation of the official order to abolish the right to sair, if it happened at all. Eliot's exhaustive reports are peppered with frequent expressions of exasperation at the practices of the zamindars of Sherpur and Shusung, conveying the difficulty of monitoring the markets they controlled. Throughout the last decade of the eighteenth—and certainly into the early decades of the nineteenth—centuries, the zamindars of both these estates continued to collect the highly remunerative sair duties on the trade in cotton produced in the Garo Hills. In 1789, the raja of Susung collected Rahdarry duties on Garo cotton in a long list of haats (seasonal markets) or kotes (seasonal markets) in the Garo Hills bordering the Sherpur pergunnah (subdivision of a tehsil [district]): Ramsingpore, Nithree, Aughar, Sheebpore, Suffore, Nulchupurrah, Punchgong, and Burradowarah. The raja of Sherpur had an equally long list of chowkis (toll/custom houses) at the Garo Hills passes in his part of the estate: Ghosegong, Foolbareeah, Bishnuparah, Bainjaun, Abrahamabad, Susung, Shokonah, and Baljury. Acutely aware that the rates in this very lucrative trade with the Garos were being manipulated and were unverifiable, Eliot nevertheless wrote about tables of ‘general and monthly accounts’ that included details of the volume of cotton sold at each of these passes and the duties collected by the zamindars.Footnote ⁴⁴

The duties collected at these haats were finely calibrated according to the rank of each trader, classified variously as merchants granted a sunnud (a deed/charter bestowed by a ruler), peddlers, shop merchants, confectioners, barterers, fishermen, salt merchants as well as sellers who had not sought permission earlier and therefore had to pay a fine to secure permission to sell their goods.Footnote ⁴⁵ For the right to sell his cotton in the mart, the Garos paid a duty—the ‘Bucha Para’ or the ‘child load’—in the form of cotton to the moharir or mukhtar (clerks) of the haat.Footnote ⁴⁶ More than two decades after the official abolition of sair by Lord Cornwallis, Buchanan dreamed of a world with no monopoly or duties, except that of the Company's, and named Bijni and Howraghat, along with Karaibari, Mechpara, and Kalumalupara, as the pergunnahs where the zamindar continued to exercise their right to duties on the transit of goods: ‘The Garos pays a share of the cotton (Phull) to the Raja for permission to trade in his market’, while the other merchants paid transit duties.Footnote ⁴⁷

The willingness of these merchants to pay these duties commented upon in colonial records can be explained by the continued presence of the zamindar as the provider of infrastructure for trade in these markets, which they were responsible for maintaining. Available commentaries write about the regular farming out of the passes (frequently to the raja's old servants); the regulation of weights, measures, and rates of exchange;Footnote ⁴⁸ the security provided to the person and property of the merchant; parity in the rates of cotton duties across the hill markets; the monetary currency in use, as well as the function of cotton as a measure and currency for all articles traded in the passes.Footnote ⁴⁹

These commentaries on the concrete practices and conventions of the cotton trade in these haats also make the grid of the regional political order intelligible. That Garos as a community and their primary product—hill cotton—were at the centre of this grid is more than apparent. The zamindar provided the conditions under which cotton trade could prosper. The Garos determined its order and orientation: the markets opened with the ritual feasting of prominent Garo traders by the lowland zamindars,Footnote ⁵⁰ and the terms of sale and exchange, including the sale of cotton on credit to lowland merchants, were decided by their leading traders,Footnote ⁵¹ as was the price of cotton and the number of days of trading in these seasonal haats.Footnote ⁵² The following description of the opening day of a haat at a Garo Hill pass is echoed across the eighteenth-century archive:

Despite the careless use of the term ‘tribute’ in modern historiography, the duties paid by the Garos at the haats on the estates of the zamindars are nowhere classified as such in contemporary accounts of Henry Vannsitart, John Eliot, or Francis Buchanan. If tribute is understood as ‘an essentially one way flow of resources (agricultural good or other commodities) from the members of politically subjugated and socially ranking strata of society to an “elite stratum”’,Footnote ⁵⁴ then it is difficult to discern any of this in the relationship of the Garos with the zamindars. In fact, as the subsequent sections will argue, the origins, strategies, and flow of Garo resistance carried within them the signs and traces of these layered polities and political alliances.

Understanding the signs of violence: the Garo peasant rebellions

The structure of power and authority that sustained rural trade in this part of eastern India began to come under greater pressure when, from 1794, the government started intervening directly in the collection and disposal of sair revenue.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the numerous markets along the Garo Hills and its passes, sair was now to be collected directly by the officials of the East India Company. A prehistory of establishing ‘direct routes of conduit’ with the Garos—that is, direct taxation without the mediation of the choudhuries/zamindars—lay behind the objectives of Eliot's visit nearly a decade earlier. Eliot's task had been to replace the zamindar's customary rights to transit and haat duties in cotton in the district of Mymensingh (which had limited Company access to just a portion of the profits from the cotton trade) with direct access to Garo traders of importance, thereby erasing all ‘ambivalences’ that had come to be associated with sair in this part of Bengal. The estates immediately under review by Eliot were those of Sherpur and Susung on the southern borders of the Garo Hills which, unlike Karaibari, had formally lost their rights to the collection of sair in 1788. In 1793, when both estates were formally brought under the Permanent Settlement, the right to collect duties on the cotton brought down for sale in the markets were taken away from the zamindars and instead farmed out annually by the government to the highest private bidder.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the absence of sufficient and complete records from the zamindari estates, it is difficult to estimate their income from sair during the pre- and early colonial period. As an aggregate of all the markets in the land controlled by them, and with comparable figures from large zamindaris in Bihar, however, the income of both Sherpur and Susung from sair seems to have been considerable in the pre-colonial period.Footnote ⁵⁷ The prohibitions on the collection of sair, combined with the high rates of revenue under the Permanent Settlement, reduced the zamindars of these two estates to falling into debt and mortgaging their land within a few years of the establishment of the Settlement.

On the northern borders of the Garo Hills, the estates of Karaibari, Mechpara, and Kalumalupara, though not formally under the Permanent Settlement, had their rates of land revenue fixed in 1793.Footnote ⁵⁸ Subjected to high and fixed rates of revenue assessment and an unprecedented rigour in revenue collection, the effect of these new revenue laws on those zamindaris dependent on sair, in the form of seasonal duties acquired through trade with the Garos, was dramatic and instantaneous. Like many zamindars in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, the zamindar of Karaibari too went into arrears almost immediately after 1794, with its irregular kisht (instalment) payments stopping altogether in 1796 and its proprietor, Mohendranarain, in debt by 1798.Footnote ⁵⁹

The assumption of the Company's right to collect sair was only one element in its expanding monopolization of all internal trade in eastern India; a further hollowing out of the institution of the haat would follow. In place of the many classes of traders and the conventions of free trade and exchange between Garos and non-Garos (described earlier in this article), there now stood the sole-monopoly might of the colonial state. With the duties previously paid to zamindars by traders now classified as ‘undefined exactions’ and ‘various illegal monopolies of trade’, the Company proceeded to determine the rates for the cotton brought down by the Garos from the hills.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Company's exclusive monopoly to the Garo cotton would have meant that the Garo cultivators lost their autonomy to engage with or desist from cotton cultivation at will. As officials pressed for the realization of arrears of revenue due from zamindars and trading began to be conducted under military authority, the solitary daroga found himself substituted with a more legitimate means of dominance: the Company troops posted in the haats. The presence of these troops, whose salaries were paid from duties on cotton paid by Garo cultivators, ensured that the mode of collection of taxes in the markets would have allowed for very little slippage.

Though yet formally ‘unconquered’ and therefore legally outside the new regime of political economy,Footnote ⁶¹ the effects of the economic policies of the colonial state had thus begun to radiate upwards into the Garo Hills too by the late eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth centuries. The state apparatus put in place for the collection of sair converged with the East India Company's assessment of the immense profitability of the cotton trade from the Garo Hills:Footnote ⁶² in some sections of the archive, the conquest of the Garos was now stated to be eminently desirable, as ‘a very great acquisition to the Government’, their ‘industry’ manifest in the production of fine hill cotton and in its potential increase.Footnote ⁶³ Officials agreed that Garo cultivators could be induced to increase the production of hill cotton by almost double the current amount: from 60,000 maunds to 100,000 maunds. There was also trade in precious agar wood, sago trees, and limestone.Footnote ⁶⁴

The earliest recorded massacres by Garo peasants in the Karaibari pergunnah in 1807 in the days leading up to the sale of Mohendranarain's estate acquire a new legibility and purpose when situated within this context of profound historical change. Over a period of one week in August 1807, 60 to 80 Garos attacked four villages—Goluknath, Falakhanah, Tikree, and Shital Kukree—killing dozens of people and burning the landlords’ offices (kutcheris) and houses.Footnote ⁶⁵ Colonial officials noted that the last incident took place at a time when ‘the police officers and party of sepoys were within a coss of the place’.Footnote ⁶⁶ These violent attacks were repeated across other estates in northeastern Bengal such as Sherpur and Susung. The state of revolt that appeared to prevail among the Garos during this period would only intensify in the next decade or so.

Denying them even the possibility of a common form, and hence any historicity or conscious political will,Footnote ⁶⁷ officials charged with the task of writing a contemporary narrative of these incidents of violence in the pergunnah of Karaibari classified them as ‘crimes and offences perpetrated by that uncivilized tribe of people’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Garo attacks on the villages of Karaibari pergunnah, however, were anything but a series of disparate, discrete encounters. Rather, they anticipated the rebellions that were to come as well as the common element that would bind them together. In 1807, the effects of the critical, irreversible changes introduced by the East India Company in the political economy of the lowlands around the Garo Hills in the previous decades constituted this element, and this was made apparent in another series of rebellious attacks by the Garos on Karaibari on the estate of Sherpur in October of the same year.Footnote ⁶⁹ Colonial records noted that in both instances, they sought refuge in the fort of the Karaibari zamindar after the attack.Footnote ⁷⁰ This was, however, perhaps a mere dying flicker of a political authority in extremis; in the absence of regular surveys, undefined estate boundaries could also account for some lingering traces of Mohendranarain's political presence.Footnote ⁷¹ It is possible too to interpret these moments as instances of solidarity between the Garo polity and the zamindars and choudhuries in the face of the dismantling of their earlier shared world of sovereignty and ethnicity.Footnote ⁷²

Mirroring these pre-colonial affinities and associations was the protracted conflict over Soondakhali, a portion of the Karaibari estate that consisted of hereditary rent-free portions (mahals) that Mohendranarain claimed were part of his son's Ultumgah estate gifted through a sunnud of the Mughal emperor.Footnote ⁷³ After the failure of a series of coercive methods to extract revenue,Footnote ⁷⁴ in 1809 the East India Company had sold the estate of Karaibari at a public sale for Rs 93,500.Footnote ⁷⁵ Invoking a shattered visage of his pre-colonial sovereignty, Mohendranarain now asserted that the purchaser of Karaibari, Ramnath Lahiri, could have no claims over the Ultumgah portion, which consisted of 185 villages and was also the pergunnah's most fertile and revenue-yielding portion—a claim that was contested by both the purchaser and the state.Footnote ⁷⁶ A protracted legal struggle over the possession of Soondakhali ensued for the next few years, but Mohendranarain's residence among, and his collaboration with, the Garos (‘hill dependents’) transformed this portion of land into a pièce de résistance of Garo peasant rebellion against the expanding logic of capital: Ramnath Lahiri, notes the file jottings, ‘cannot be said to have had entire possessions of his purchase for a single hour’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The threat of violence from the surrounding Garo Hills was effectively conveyed: ‘the purchaser would never be able to retain possession of even the lower hills and at a period when appearances might promise tranquillity, irruption might return in all its horrors and lay waste the whole country. The possession of the estate would subject the purchaser to continued alarms of conflagration and massacre’ of Garo attacks.Footnote ⁷⁸

The Collector of Rangpur reported a complete inability on the part of the purchaser to collect the annual jumma (assessment or evaluation)Footnote ⁷⁹ and the government dropped its offers to buy the estate on account of its financial insolvency. In 1813, Karaibari, one of the most prosperous of the Istemarry Mehals during the Mughal imperium, was in a desolate condition, its purchaser reduced to penury and imprisoned for ‘non payment of one of the many pecuniary demands’ and the colonial state forced into confessing that ‘in a tract of such dimensions and so remotely situated, the difficulty and expense of supporting a police establishment are so great, that were it not opposed by political considerations it would be better to relinquish the sovereignty’.Footnote ⁸⁰

These displays of solidarity apart, the long afterlife of sair in the zamindaris after its ‘abolition’, along with the colonial state's new and coercive regime of taxation, irreversibly altered the Garos’ relationship with the zamindars of the plains in just a couple of decades, beginning in the late eighteenth century. It is not clear from the records whether the zamindars of the estates bordering the Garo Hills continued to collect sair on behalf of the East India Company. Some records do suggest that, despite the persistent disinvesting of territory of the zamindar's long-held genealogical claims in the interests of the CompanyFootnote ⁸¹ and promised punitive measures, the erstwhile Istemarry Mehals of Karaibari, Mechpara, and Kalumalupara (but also Shusung and Sherpur) continued to be dependent on the now ‘illicit’ collection of sair on Garo cotton to meet the Company's increasing demands for revenue as well as for the maintenance of the estate and personal expenses of the zamindar. In 1811 and 1812, the duties levied on all articles sold in the markets by the Garos, but particularly on cotton, classified as ‘cotton sair’, were still recognized as the principal resource of the Kalumalupara estate.Footnote ⁸² Within the pergunnah of Karaibari, 127 Garo villages continued to pay khunta (a house tax), hence classified as sair, to the zamindars well into the first decade of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸³ Similarly, kurm collections (cotton in return for capital advances from zamindars), though abolished along with sair, continued to be claimed by the new purchaser of Karaibari from the Garos.

In parts of Mechpara and Karaibari, mutated forms of sair continued to add to the increasing tax burden for the Garo peasant. The flow of sair in duties in hill cotton during the Mughal imperium in these areas was maintained through a complex system of poonjee (capital)Footnote ⁸⁴ advances from the zamindars to the Garo peasants for which they were allowed an exemption from taxes (such as khunta) if they were cultivating lands within zamindari estates.Footnote ⁸⁵ The cotton acquired in return constituted the revenue paid by the zamindars to the Mughal faujdar. An early nineteenth-century petition from the zamindar of Mechpara claimed that this practice was still prevalent in their transactions with Garo and RabhaFootnote ⁸⁶ peasants,Footnote ⁸⁷ despite the monetization of land revenue by the Company,Footnote ⁸⁸ and pleaded for its continuation. Since the colonial state classified the collection of poonjee cotton as sair duties, the petition and its enclosed pleas were summarily rejected.Footnote ⁸⁹

As with the collection of other forms of sair, the collection of poonjee cotton (and similar forms like kurm) therefore did not vanish under the new juridical regime; it persisted instead with a different meaning, in a reduced ‘illicit form’ that was definitive of the irregularities of colonial sovereignty itself.Footnote ⁹⁰ From the many recorded complaints of Garo peasants, it is certain that by making the collection of poonjee cotton illicit, the colonial state fundamentally transformed the economic relationship between Garo cotton producers and the zamindars as purchasers into a deeply exploitative one. Garo peasants categorized the poonjee advances forced upon them by zamindars for growing cotton as exploitative since they were paid only one-sixth of their value for the same, a rate determined by the colonial state.Footnote ⁹¹ What in the pre-colonial period had been a system of duties connected to the trade in cotton was now converted under Company rule into a form of tribute to the state, its arbitrariness underlined in the monopolization of the rates paid for poonjee cotton by Company officials.Footnote ⁹² The pre-colonial ratio of poonjee to cotton was upset and, with it, the ratio of power between the hills and the lowlands. It is this very quality of irregularity in its definition and applicability that rendered sair politically incendiary and marked out the haat as an analogical site of violent political confrontation for the first time in the modern history of the Garo Hills.

At the haat, the Garo cotton trader now paid heavier, fixed taxes on cotton. Apart from the market infrastructure, which was paid from the duties collected at the haat, duties from the cotton trade were also expected to cover the expenses of ‘a native judicial establishment, a local corps and Garrow haat police’.Footnote ⁹³ In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the community also found itself bearing the additional burden of the karanjama (house tax), imposed to balance the Company's ledgers after the payment of compensation to the zamindars of Karaibari, Kalumalupara, and Mechpara after their rights to collect sair were abolished.Footnote ⁹⁴ This was in addition to the existent, but now formalized, khunta.Footnote ⁹⁵

Into the second decade of the nineteenth century, the conditions of Garo sovereignty were evidently in danger of being irreversibly altered. A pre-colonial regional political order that hinged on the production and trade in cotton, which enabled claims and counterclaims of sovereignties, was being replaced by the colonial state with a territoriality that had the sovereignty of the economy alone as its condition. The annihilation of the old order meant that the coercive force of the colonial state was now being used by the zamindars against the Garos as well.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Garo violence of this decade may well be comparable to that of the better recorded peasant rebellions of neighbouring Rangpur when it is understood as resistance to these changes, an attempt to reinstate their sovereign selves against both the zamindar and the state in its methods of mobilization and insurrection.Footnote ⁹⁷

In February 1815, the Judicial Department of the East India Company received a thick file on the Garos, containing a report from Thomas Sisson, the joint magistrate of Rungpore district. Sisson's report, consisting of several pages, reflected on the conditions considered endemic to British rule in northeastern Bengal. It is the immediate context for the report, however, that interests us here:

The results of Sisson's enquiry resemble an inventory of death and plunder perpetuated by the Garos, the signs of their terrifying violence strewn across several zamindari estates in northeastern Bengal and their practices of headhunting on spectacular display. While some of the ‘most atrocious occurrences’ were bracketed in the period between 1807 and 1814, several episodes of violence directed specifically at the estates of Karaibari, Mechpara, and Kalumalupara took place between 1815 and 1816.

The unprecedented nature of this violence produces immense disquiet across the archive, encouraging several seemingly contesting, but actually converging, discourses on the Garos and their violence. The strand within nineteenth-century colonial discourse emptied the violence of the Garos of meaning and content, and reduced it to a vector of primitive unreason. ‘The Garrows are, in common with most other savages, of a most vindictive disposition,’ notes Sisson;Footnote ⁹⁹ others of his ilk reiterated a similar tautological logic—the Garos are irrational, they raid, and hence they are primitive. Crude evolutionism proliferates: ‘the barbarous and uncivilized nature of those tribes may frequently have led them to commit acts of wanton ferocity and rapine without their having been actuated by any motive of revenge for real or supposed industry’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The condition of primitiveness needed only to be enunciated in these sources—the Garo is indisputably primitive—without qualifying exactly what this condition was.

Casting the Garos as the very image of violence, the archive then proceeds to bracket this violence outside of the surrounding plains: the moment of the raid is now inevitably the only moment of visibility of the Garos in the colonial archives—appearing suddenly in a moment of certain terror, the Garos raid, plunder, and carry away heads of plainsmen. Then just as suddenly, they disappear, scattering into the thickness of the surrounding hills. The passages which detail the rituals of headhunting among the GarosFootnote ¹⁰¹ speak forcefully of the imperative of protecting the civilized plains from the contagion of violence emanating from the hills;Footnote ¹⁰² they therefore resolutely fix the Garos as isolated savages in the hills. As the perpetuators of ‘primitive violence’, the Garos are now a constant threat to social order, to the regime of taxation and cultivation in the plains. Over the next few decades this manoeuvre, repeated across colonial notes, letters, and commentaries, helped to operate a framework for expanding colonial rule into the hills. The figure of the headhunter will serve as a necessary trope in this story of conquest and spatial reordering.

A variation within this strand achieved a curious simultaneity: it historicized the violence by ascribing it to the loss of Garo primitive sovereignty to the zamindars, but located this sovereign presence in an ahistorical, inaccessible past: ‘It is the oppressive behaviour of the zamindars which forces the Garos to commit outrages on the inhabitants of the zamindaris rather than a natural inherent depravity of heart.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Frozen in time and space, the Garo is reduced to a typology of ‘a hill man’ trapped in a permanent ahistorical binary with his antonym, the plains’ zamindar; a perceived racial and cultural difference gave this binary the hold of primordial difference. Here Company rule is absolved of any historical role in the violence (itself understood as a fragment of a pre-colonial past) and presented as an extraneous intervention with altruistic motives of restoring peace and order into a region fraught with ‘internecine feuds’. This approach surfaces in later colonial narratives as well as in more recent writings on the Garo Hills.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Taken together, these strands anticipate the logic of the separation of the Garos from the zamindars, the hills from the plains, the savage from the civilized, the raison d’état for the colonial state's unfolding territorial sovereignty of the nineteenth century. By rationalizing ‘a practice which places itself between a state presented as given and a state presented as having to be constructed’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ these strands necessarily obfuscate the imperial intent of conquering the Garos.

This intent is unmasked in a singular schism in the archive in the voice of the colonial official H. Fuller. The immediate context for Fuller's observations and letters to the judicial department in Calcutta was a series of murderous attacks by Garo peasants living in the hills around the Karaibari and Mechpara estates.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His search for causality—‘the just cause’—led him to question the Garos’ ‘primitiveness’ as the rationale for this collective violence and acknowledge instead the social and historical contingencies of their world in the early nineteenth century:

Fuller's statement rejects a representation of Garo violence as transparent and ahistorical; its insistence on giving this violence some shape and purpose constitutes that rare admission in the colonial archive—that welcome tear in the pages of history—that helps the historian render intelligible the violence of these raids.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Departing from the standard colonial official narrative which encases the rebellious violence of its subjects in a discernible pattern so as to effectively suppress it, Fuller acknowledged the relationship between the disruption of the regional political and economic order in this part of eastern India under East India Company rule and the violence emanating from the Garo Hills.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ More specifically, he recognized the stark manifestation of this disruption in the abject conditions of Karaibari and its sale in 1809. While officials noted ‘some sort of outrage almost every year from the time of the sale of the (Karaibari) pergunnah’, the incidents of violence begin to exhibit a greater frequency and regularity from around 1811 onwards, gradually acquiring the character of a widespread political rebellion.

The three consecutive attacks on the village of Saftoka in Karaibari perhaps constitute one of the earliest instances of Garo insurgency. They were led by the charismatic Garo, Manick Booneah, his name inevitably marked by the deep antagonism of the colonial state towards its rebellious subjects: ‘barbaric’, ‘the leader of savage invaders’, for example.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A thousand rupee reward for his capture to ensure the ‘tranquility of the pergunnah of Karaibari’ was the only allusion to his able leadership in the rebellion.Footnote ¹¹¹ A series of attacks on the contiguous estate of Kalumalupara, this time under the leadership of the Garo rebel Kunker, confirmed the presence of ethnic solidarity, as did the spread of the violence across two of the largest Istemarry Mehals. Displaying organization and conscious leadership, thereby affirming the political character of their rebellion,Footnote ¹¹² these attacks also confirmed the Garo peasant's comprehension of their increasing loss of control over economic processes, including commonly held fishing rights to the Julkeer Mehal in the Kalumalupara estate.Footnote ¹¹³

In its initial responses, it is this territoriality and the growing landscape of insurgency that the colonial state was determined to circumscribe. Denying the territorial scale of the rebellion, officials labelled these attacks ‘local’, to be responded to with punitive action, as with earlier incidents.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Garo peasant's landscape of resistance was evidently vast enough, however, for the regular police officers posted at Karaibari to ask for military troops from neighbouring Bengal and Assam to be sent to their aid, along with a large posse of burkandezes. Footnote ¹¹⁵ As the insurgency spread, colonial officers demanded—and effected—a change in the territorial jurisdiction of Karaibari pergunnah from Mymensingh to Rungpore ‘on account of some of the police stations of that district being better situated in point of contiguity for affording assistance in Karaibari, in case of any necessity, than any thanahs in Mymensingh’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

All three Istemarry Mehals were the targets of well-planned Garo violence in the years of rebellion that followed. In 1815, several hundred Garos attacked the Rajbari or the residence of the late zamindar of Karaibari, Mohendranarain. The rebels ‘burnt the house and the property contained in it and carried off the heads of seven persons amongst whom was the youngest son of Mohendranarain. They also wounded three persons severely and what is still more serious, they are said to have possessed themselves of about 150 stands of fire arms of various descriptions.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ Officials estimated the number of Garo rebels in the Karaibari attack at ‘several hundred’, a sharp increase from the hundred involved in Kunker's attack. A year later, the rebellion had taken on the character of an open and public event—‘collective, destructive and total [in] its modalities’—Footnote ¹¹⁸and any assembly of Garos inspired fear among officials.Footnote ¹¹⁹ On 9 Magh 1816, Garo peasants assembled in their thousands to attack the zamindar of Mechpara, Mohiram Choudhury, when he was returning to Chattabari haat from Mechpara after collecting revenue. So severe was the attack and so intense was his fear of the rebels that Mohiram decided to seek safety by living in the middle of a lake on a boat:

In some of their most sustained and prolonged moments of rebellion in 1815 and then in January of the following year, Garo rebels displayed their hostility by burning the residences of both the Mechpara and Karaibari zamindars, which they then proceeded to plunder: ‘of everything including cash, grain, cotton, and the zemindari documents’.Footnote ¹²¹ Thereafter the violence appears to have spread ‘analogically’, from a specific to a more general attack on the entire domain constituted by authorities—the plundering and burning of ‘the granaries and Moffusil Cutcherries’, the storehouses of merchants, and even an object of great economic value to themselves: cotton collected over five years.Footnote ¹²² That the shift to a cash economy was total but forced was evident in the looting of cash during the rebellion.Footnote ¹²³

As the peasants fanned out into the lands of the Mechpara pergunnah, they burned villages (the daroga's report listed 12 such villages) and, according to the petition of the zamindar, killed more than 200 of his ryots, the rest fleeing to the neighbouring pergunnahs of Habraghat, Chapar, and Rangamati: ‘these outrages have not been confined to any particular spot, but the whole pergunnah has been the scene of murders and the conflagration of villages, and no one can say who has fled and who has been murdered and how many villages have been burnt’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Evidence cited in colonial correspondence contradicts this story, however, emphasizing instead that the enmity of the Garos was not directed against the inhabitants of the low country villages, but against the person and property of the zamindars.Footnote ¹²⁵ When asked why they had ‘murdered and committed such excesses’ in the pergunnah of Mechpara, captured Garo rebels explained that their beheading of ryots and zamindar's men were acts of retributive justice, publicly performed, against the loss of their erstwhile economic sovereignty at the hands of the zamindar:

The ‘taking of heads’ was also an act of restoring, albeit transiently, the pre-colonial order of political equilibrium. The disruption of the regional political order by the zamindar's presumed plans of invading Garo country with ‘large guns’ and men assembled at Tikri fort demanded a reciprocal action: ‘I and Dang Sing and Daful and Ram Dang … with our relations about 400 or 500 hundred garos with knives and spears and shields, laid in ambuscade to cut off the zamindar in Dhaharedurrah jungle when he should return from Tiekree. We accordingly attacked him and got 9 heads that day.’Footnote ¹²⁷ At any rate, the position occupied by their erstwhile owners in the hierarchy of a new political economy of auctions and purchases would appear to have been a significant factor in determining the prices of heads.Footnote ¹²⁸ Contemporary accounts offer a graded range in the value of heads:

The destruction of land and property was such that even two years after the attack, the ryots who had fled Mechpara refused to return and the ones who did, returned on condition of rent-free tenures, a situation that reduced the now mal-dependent zamindars to pay their revenue from borrowed credit. The enormity of the scale and destruction of the Garos rebellion is brought alive in the accounts of the daroga of the thana (police station) of Rangamati, of the colonial official in charge, and of the Mechpara zamindar, all of whom feared the inadequacy of the police and military establishment when faced with the methods of Garo warfare—cautious and hence perfectly secure against attack by regular troops.Footnote ¹³⁰ The impeccable fearlessness that the rebels exhibited, such that they could overpower the armed retainers of the zamindars, even when in close proximity to British troops, would have drawn substantially upon the solidarity in ethnic affinities found among Garos of contiguous regions. Anticipating later solidarities with neighbouring polities such as the Khasis, the rebellion in Mechpara saw the participation of Garos from across the lowlands and foothills girdling the Garo Hills: the Garos of Bara Hazaree, Karaibari, Singimari, Mechpara, Habraghat, Sherpoor, and Shusung came together in groups of between 2,000 and 4,000 for combined attacks with those of Mechpara.Footnote ¹³¹

Contemporary sources unanimously attribute a causal connection between what they classified as disparate, limited incidents and the ‘explosion of mass violence’ in the pergunnahs of Karaibari and Kalumalupara and the appointment of David Scott as commissioner of Cooch Behar and as joint magistrate of Rangpur. For its manifest display of Garo violence, Karaibari was listed as Scott's additional charge;Footnote ¹³² after the rebellion broke out in 1816, Mechpara too was placed under his jurisdiction. The legal and political authority possessed (and claimed) by Scott, his role as an imperial representative in determining the trajectory of British conquest of the Garo Hills and its people, his characterization of indigenous legal and political systems, and constant pushing of his jurisdiction beyond the line of political control are all deserving subjects of study which can only be gestured to here very briefly. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellions, as well as during the months when Garo rebels laid siege to the pergunnah of Mechpara,Footnote ¹³³ Scott's extensive tours reported on the conditions in the Istemarry Mehals. They allow us to discern, if only partially, the workings of the official mind: the system of repression of the peasant rebellion would be in the manner of ‘war with an independent state … (with) the inconveniences that attend it; amongst which is to be reckoned the probability of the innocent suffering with the guilty’.Footnote ¹³⁴ The article will conclude with an examination of some critical historical implications of these administrative perceptions.