Reeju Ray’s Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the relationship between law and colonial rule, particularly as it operated in, and constituted borderlands. It is about the region that is referred to as the “North-East” of India and is set, for the most part, in the nineteenth century. Across seven deeply researched and eloquently written chapters, Ray shows us how colonialism thrives under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. It examines how geographical, anecdotal, and scientific knowledge is produced under conditions of colonial rule, the terms of negotiation between colonial and indigenous rule, the possibilities, and the perils of law as/and custom. In the process, it offers important reflections on the kind of histories marginalized by the imposition of jurisdictional boundaries. Placing the Frontier deserves a wide readership among law and society scholars, particularly scholars of law and colonialism and scholars of South Asia.

As the title suggests, this is a book about placemaking—and the role that law plays in this process. It is about the Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia hills and about Sylhet, Assam, and Bengal in India. It is also about frontiers and frontier-making in the Himalayan borderlands and the subcontinent generally. The narrative begins in the late eighteenth century and ends with South Asia’s partitions in 1947 and 1971—the creation of India and Pakistan and the liberation of Bangladesh, respectively—and traces the historical subjectivities of borderland dwellers.

Placemaking is a topic that legal historians, legal geographers, and scholars of law and society have long engaged with. In the introduction and Chapter 1, Ray joins this vibrant conversation, suggesting that frontiers are not static places but are constituted and reconstituted under conditions of colonial rule. Jurisdiction is the key conceptual category here. It is through jurisdiction—the who, what, and where of the authority to speak the law—that we might see law’s constitutive power. Contributing to this conversation, Ray shows us, particularly through the last two chapters, that law constitutes not only place but also that legal knowledge is also leveraged to create hierarchies of history and history writing, and indeed of memory. In doing so, Ray moves beyond Bernard Cohn’s framing of law as a form of knowledge to explore its indelible impression on borderlander lives.Footnote ¹

To do so, Ray draws from a range of archival materials in India (in Bengal, Assam, and Meghalaya), the UK, and Canada, from colonial correspondence to memoirs, travel accounts, and maps. Importantly, Ray also works with oral histories, collected both by community members and folklore and ethnographic notes. Their engagement with the place about which they are writing is compelling and palpable. It is such an impressive strength of this book.

In Chapters 1 and 2, titled “Frontiers of Law,” Ray discusses how law frames geographical and topographical divisions through the exercise of jurisdiction—between British and non-British territory, hills and plains, tribe and caste, etc.—the making of a frontier. In engaging with anomalous legal zones, Ray notes that anomalies were features of colonial rule as markers of difference. It begins with the Bengal Regulations in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, their (intentionally) hesitant introduction into the hills of the Himalayan borderlands that make up the “north east.” This was not only about making law as a form of knowledge but also the very real involvement of the chiefs—syiems—and colonial administrators, which declines over the course of the nineteenth century. As the chapters progress, we read of conflict and dispute through petitions and court cases. In one case, for example, a planter claimed that a river (a natural boundary) meant that his property was part of the plains rather than the hills, but administrators were unable to find any evidence of such a boundary (71). These claims employed legal—and sometimes actual!—fictions to make claims to property, but they pointed to the still unsettled nature of jurisdictional boundaries.

Chapters 3 and 4 contain valuable sections on treaty-making and indirect rule. Here, Ray shows that the hills and plains could not be neatly divided from each other because the Khasi and Sylheti/Bengali polities on either side upset these arrangements. In Chapter 4, we see the importance of these treaties. Through treaties with the local chiefs, the inhabitants of the Khasi hills were neither legal nor revenue subjects, but the lands and the forests were prized as capital. Both land and labor were converted into resourceful commodities without the need to establish direct rule (113). As these chapters progress, another key feature of nineteenth-century colonial legal discourse becomes apparent, i.e., the creation of civilizational hierarchies owing to the end of the Company monopoly, the expansion of imperial designs, and the rise in missionary activity. These led to multiple forms of knowledge formation, including “scientific” inquiry, the focus of Chapter 5. For example, in the naturalist JD Hooker’s treatise, he described the Khasis as “bloodthirsty” and brought within the ambit of the law owing to the force of law. Similar accounts are examined—of language and script—to note how the civilizational hierarchies and primitiveness were constructed with the full assistance of jurisdiction as out-of-sight and out-of-time and employed to describe the “hills” and the “hill tribals” in contrast to the “modern” and “civilized” people of the plains. In the final two chapters, Chapters 6 and 7, Ray attempts to reconstruct ways of being for the borderlanders that are not refracted through colonial violence. Particularly striking is their discussion of kynhaw—repositories of landscape and memory—erected after the resolution of a social conflict. Even as Ray notes that ecological spaces such as a sacred grove or a forest are validated by colonial law, they also seem to be getting at other forms of conflict resolution and forms of accountability than an adversarial court proceeding and a printed judgement; here, the kynhaw also monumentalizes a “verdict”—oral histories are a woman-centered practice that is not only a space of authenticity. At the end of the book, Ray is careful to note that this is not a project of retrieving or recovering an “authentic” historical subjectivity. If custom is not the opposite of law—oral traditions, folklore, living megaliths, and sacred forests are also spaces of law—so are women’s bodies and desires. Placemaking is a contested and negotiated process in which the coercive potential of law—in corporeal and epistemological senses—plays a central role.

There are at least three different topics for further discussion that stem from the book’s contributions. The first is that of anomalous legal zones. I was struck by the observation that in colonial India, anomalous legal zones—which include hills, islands, and the high seas—were not inconsistent geographic zones but instead consistently a marker of difference. As I note in my own work, seen through the lens of jurisdiction, everywhere is a border. Scholars might think through the relationship between fluid geographies and changing jurisdiction, especially in places that are not typically seen as margins, limits, or borders. The second is about the interplay between law and custom—that custom is not law’s “other,” here suggesting that “law” proper continues to be understood as codes or statutes. This is central to the argument in the book. Scholars might usefully think about legal afterlives of pluralisms, visible within Indian constitutional frameworks, in the creation of “extraordinary” legal regimes to deal with borderlands and their intersection with freedoms of movement, speech, travel, and residence. A third related theme is about the use of literary retellings, landscapes and the environment, and oral histories. The use of these sources is a crucial aspect of the book. Historians might ask whether we might offer these as evidence of the limits of the legal archive, showing us what radical possibilities exist outside typical spaces of law, or indeed if there are productive ways of illustrating the relationship between the two.

Ray’s argument is constructed seamlessly and moves from themes around the civilizational hierarchies created through descriptive accounts of the hills to how the exercise of jurisdiction creates distinctions between British and non-British territory, hills and plains, and tribe and caste, among others. Of particular note, the difficulty in reproducing maps of frontier regions today from the collections of the National Archives of India is a stark reminder that these are still ongoing processes that impact the everyday work of historians of law in South Asia.