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A hole in the British empire: The ‘Free Hills’ between India and Burma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2026

Willem van Schendel Open the ORCID record for Willem van Schendel [Opens in a new window]
Willem van Schendel*
Affiliation:
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, and International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
*
Email: h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl
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Abstract

This article considers a long-term stand-off between two forms of governance. Until the very end of British rule in India and Burma, a cluster of small polities effectively held imperialism at bay. Despite being surrounded, they remained independent and self-governing (in British parlance: ‘unadministered’) up until the eve of the Second World War. They have so far been overlooked in the historiography, and yet these rugged hills provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the limits of empire in the India-Burma borderlands. The martial Zo (‘Shendu’) inhabitants and their guerrilla tactics matched British aggression and bred anxiety in border officials. The British remained largely ignorant about this region. Under the restrictions of an imperial non-intervention policy, they could not enter it. This policy was inspired by the calculation that conquering these inaccessible mountains might cost more than it would yield in head tax and forest products. The result was a geopolitical rarity: an obstinate island of indigenous governance, cultural continuity, and micro-warfare enclosed by imperial territories.

Keywords

Indigenous governance‘unadministered’ areasBritish IndiaBritish BurmaZo

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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , May 2025 , pp. 589 - 617
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Introduction

The nineteenth century saw British governance in South Asia spreading aggressively eastwards—from Bengal across the Indo-Burma mountain ranges to the borders of Thailand (Siam) and Yunnan.Footnote 1 But imperial maps were misleading: what looked like Pax Britannia enveloping contiguous territory was often merely a claim. British rule could be intermittent, temporary, fiercely contested, or even absent. This article looks at how, for decades, some very small polities held imperial governance at arm’s length.

The area we focus on was not a buffer region. It was neither located at the outer reaches of imperial power nor did it adjoin a large foreign polity such as the Chinese empire or Afghanistan. On the eastern frontier of British India there were several regions that served as a buffer (and were often contested) between Assam, Tibet, and Bhutan (the North-East Frontier Tracts) and between northern and eastern Burma and China (the Hukawng Valley, ‘the Triangle’, parts of the Naga country, and the Wa region of the Shan Hills). On the western frontiers of British India, similar buffer regions existed.Footnote 2 These buffer areas shared a number of characteristics and dynamics that have been studied in detail.Footnote 3 But none of them closely resembled the area that we focus on here. This space, completely surrounded by British-controlled territory without being absorbed, formed a remarkable puncture in the empire. For decades, two rival governance styles faced each other here.

It is not easy to find a term to refer to this area. As far as we know, its inhabitants had no name for it. To them, it was just a segment of the Indo-Burma mountain range that was home to many other people as well. What turned this area into a distinct region was that the British empire expanded all around it. To the British, it was a negative space. They ethnocentrically called the area ‘unadministered’, ‘unexplored’, ‘blank’, ‘undefined’, ‘unsurveyed’, and ‘uncontrolled’. They had no name for it beyond describing it circuitously as lying between areas that they did administer, explore, survey, and control. For brevity’s sake, we will refer to it here as the ‘Free Hills’.

The contours of the Free Hills took shape over a period of about 70 years. The British occupied the coastal plains of Arakan (today Rakhine state in Myanmar) in 1826 and gradually extended their reach to the uplands by moving up the rivers. They named these uplands the ‘Arakan Hill Tracts’. By the 1860s the British had established police posts on the major river, the Kaladan (Koladyne).Footnote 4 The northernmost post was at the village of Dalakmai (Daletmai), and this marked the de facto southern border of the Free Hills.Footnote 5 The early 1860s saw the British occupy the uplands northwest of Arakan, naming these the ‘Chittagong Hill Tracts’.Footnote 6 Their control remained weak, but the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ southeastern border became the western border of the Free Hills. The encirclement of the Free Hills was completed during the 1890s, when the British annexed regions to the north (dubbed the ‘Lushai Hills’)Footnote 7 and east (the ‘Chin Hills’), thereby providing the Free Hills with their northern and eastern borders.Footnote 8 None of these borders was sharply defined or fixed, so the sketch in Figure 1 should be taken simply as a rough indication of where the Free Hills were, and how they faded into British-controlled territory.

Figure 1. Map of the approximate borders of the Free Hills, surrounded by British India. Source: Drawn by Laurie Whiddon.Footnote 9

It is also not easy to find a single term to describe the inhabitants of this independent region. It was home to a bewildering number of language groups and a plethora of identities. Outsiders—notably Arakanese, Bengalis, and Burmese—had projected multiple labels on these identities. These exonyms permeated the earliest written sources, later cementing them into historians’ narratives. Today’s inhabitants of the region, as well as scholars, are still struggling to disentangle local self-identifications from imposed labels of identities and images. Additionally, this task is made more difficult by the fact that identities were layered, fluid, mutable, and overlapping—they could refer to a lineage, village, language group, or political alliance.Footnote 10

For example, British sources consistently expressed fear of a martial group that ruled the roost in the Free Hills, but with whom they had very little contact. They called them ‘Shendus’ (Shindoos, Shandoos, Shendoos, Shentoos, etc.). The identity of these mysterious people was hard to pin down. They did not use script, so they did not record their own names. The first British encounters with them appear to have occurred in 1850 and 1852, and these yielded the earliest known image (Figure 2):

the Shendoos, though well known by name and repute in Arracan, have never yet been visited by the people of the plains, nor has a single specimen of this race been seen, I believe, either by Mugh or European in Arracan, until 1850 when two emissaries or spies from them met me at a hill village some distance up the Koladyne river.Footnote 11

Figure 2. ‘Lebbey—The “Abéu” or Chief of the Bookee Clan of the Heuma or Shendoos’, 1852.Footnote 12

Current scholarship generally equates the Shendus with the forebears of groups who call themselves Mara and Lai. These two groups are not monolithic blocks by any means; they are divided into, and connected by, many smaller groupings.Footnote 13 Both of them belong to a much larger category commonly called Kuki-Lushai-Chin, which contains numerous similarly nested, evolving, and often contested identities, most of them sharing a broadly similar worldview.Footnote 14 One solution to this terminological conundrum has been to foreground an overarching endonym—‘Zo’—for all these groups.Footnote 15 It can be said that the inhabitants of the independent region were largely members of different groups of Zo, among whom the Mara/Lai/Shendu were the most prominent (Figures 3 and 4).Footnote 16

Figure 3. The first known photograph of a ‘Shendu’ person, identified as ‘Likebo, Chief of Boki Shendus’. Source: Photo by T. H. Lewin, 1866.Footnote 17

Figure 4. Lai/Shendu villagers ‘on the Burmese frontier’, 1896.Footnote 18

Zo governance

The Free Hills were, of course, not ‘unadministered’. Here, Zo notions of political control, legitimacy, and territoriality were paramount. It was a sparsely populated region of micro-polities and fluid governance. The basic unit was the village, headed by a chief (male or female), who was the ultimate authority over a village population that was socially stratified. Chiefship tended to be hereditary, and sons could establish their own sub-villages, thereby creating village alliances. Each village was armed (since at least the 1830s with firearms),Footnote 19 and almost all were stockaded.Footnote 20 Chiefs or other powerful individuals could command the young men of their village to act as an attack force, and alliances of chiefs (often related by marriage)Footnote 21 could jointly mount a force of hundreds. As the power of individual chiefs rose and fell, flows of tribute indicated changes in the political landscape. Tribute paid to more powerful polities—in salt, paddy, pigs, and brass cooking-pots—was an expression of subservience in exchange for protection. When power relations changed but flows of tribute failed to adapt, violent retribution came into play in the form of an armed raid on the offending village. Such attacks were about safeguarding future tribute, compensation in the form of resources, and masculine bravery and heroism. Attackers would carry off guns, cash, and gongs as well as retrieve runaway dependents. They could burn the offending village and kill its men, but women and children were led away to become bonded labour in the attacking village.Footnote 22 They were either settled there permanently, traded to other villages, or returned home after payment of ransom. Aggrieved villages could mount counterattacks, sometimes years later, and this created a complex system of vigilance, apprehension, negotiation, and alliance-building, interspersed with bursts of violence that allowed warriors to obtain fame and glory.Footnote 23 Fighting also led to village migrations in search of safety from powerful opponents. Historically, much of this Zo migration was in a northwesterly direction, pushing Zo groups closer to groups living in the foothills and plains near the Bay of Bengal.

This political system was not restricted to the Free Hills. It extended, with minor variations, across the entire Indo-Burma mountain range, well beyond the Zo-dominated zone.Footnote 24 Beyond a strong sense of village sovereignty, there appear not to have been any larger territorial claims. But this did not mean that village raids were conducted over a short distance. Raiding parties could travel stealthily for many days through the steep, thickly forested terrain to attack far-off villages.Footnote 25 This expansionary geography made the Zo well-known to communities in the surrounding foothills and plains. As the British began to annex these regions, we get a sense of the intense fear that the Zo inspired there.Footnote 26

Encountering British governance

The Zo system of micro-warfare led to a sharp confrontation with British ideas of governance. Wherever the British intruded, they introduced novel concepts of spatial control, territorial exclusivity, linear borders, sovereignty, and subjecthood. In British-occupied areas, this confrontation was violently resolved in favour of British ideas, with local adaptations made to reduce the cost of administration and accommodate some Zo sensibilities.Footnote 27 But in the Free Hills, Zo ideas about territoriality survived unhampered and British attempts to explore the area were successfully opposed.Footnote 28 It was only at the edges of the Free Hills that the Zo encountered British notions of governance.

The British found it difficult to acknowledge that the Free Hills formed a separate political universe with its own well-established rules and a completely different sense of spatiality. Only a few officials were aware of these Zo rules. One of them felt that raiders from the Free Hills, who had killed a woman in the ‘administered’ Lushai Hills, should not be punished: ‘Though the wanton murder of an innocent woman is naturally repulsive to a civilised code of ethics, I should not be inclined to look on the raiders as criminals, as by tribal law and custom their action was entirely justified.’Footnote 29

Usually, however, British sources were much less understanding of social realities in the Free Hills, which they only knew based on hearsay. Their texts are strewn with condescending remarks about the inhabitants as ‘savages’, ‘noxious tribes’, ‘wild and fickle people’, ‘inveterate raiders and marauders’, ‘lawless tribes’, ‘recalcitrant Chiefs’, ‘irresponsible tribesmen’, ‘banditti’, and ‘turbulent spirits in unadministered territory’, who were impervious to British attempts to ‘humanize them in some degree’. Life in the Free Hills was assumed to be ‘a state of superstition, fear, oppression and slavery’ and ‘subject to no law’, where travellers ran ‘a great risk of summary decapitation’.Footnote 30

Most British officials supposed that life in the areas which they controlled was infinitely preferable, so the behaviour of Free Hills people was puzzling to them: ‘Even in isolated cases, where Kamees and Shandoos have followed officers to Burma, and enjoyed all the advantages of civilization, they have almost invariably returned to their mountain homes and wild life in the hills, which have far stronger fascinations for them.’Footnote 31 And a chief in British-occupied territory asked to be allowed to move his village away from colonial authorities.Footnote 32 A Zo chief in the Free Hills, coming across a British adventurer, explained why the advantages of civilization were not all that impressive:

In their own country, he said, five days’ journey from here, they paid no tribute to their Chiefs, but lived together in community, the only acknowledgement of fealty being that each male was bound to give the Chief a third of all flesh killed by him either in hunting or for home consumption, and also to follow him upon any warlike expedition; in return for this the Chief was bound to provide his followers with salt.Footnote 33

The clash of governance styles between the Free Hills people and the British was profound. Beyond the borders of each village-level exclusion zone stretched a huge mountain landscape in which the Zo felt entitled to move and impose their political will. It was a mental map that started from the village centre, did not recognize obstructive borders, and measured distances by the number of days it took to travel on foot from the home village.Footnote 34 As one British observer remarked: ‘These people have a tradition that our villages round Ruma [in the Chittagong Hill Tracts] are their legitimate raiding ground.’Footnote 35 Wide-ranging forays by armed groups were commonplace and did not raise issues of governance between them—unless they entered another village uninvited. Jungle footpaths, often following wild elephant tracks, crisscrossed the area, and these were used for trade, hunting, and family visits, as well as for raids. In the Free Hills, borders were not imagined as lines visible in the landscape—they were sensed as flexible zones of rising danger, sometimes marked with warning signs.Footnote 36 A group of travellers, entering the Free Hills from the west, suddenly noticed ‘right in our path … two arrows set trap-fashion with a spring … it might have been accidental, but one cannot be too cautious’.Footnote 37 The dangers involved in crossing into the Free Hills could be military but also health-related—hill people could oppose any people from the plains and foothills from entering their territory for fear of the contagious diseases they might introduce.Footnote 38

The British understood Zo raids as illegal trespassing into British territory, and the killing and abduction of inhabitants as assaults on ‘British subjects’.Footnote 39 In other words, they saw the Zo of the Free Hills as foreigners, so the Foreign Department of British India usually dealt with them.Footnote 40 As one official put it:

I am not aware of any Shindoo clans who either pay tribute, or are in the slightest degree controlled by any British authority. The reason for this extraordinary state of affairs, of the existence of tribes virtually independent at our very doors, is partly the physical difficulty of travelling in the hilly country inhabited by these tribes, and partly the unhealthiness of the country during all but about four months of the year for all races, except the hill people themselves … To the north and north-east is country, similarly wild, inhabited by like tribes nominally subject to the Burmese, but practically as independent and as little known as the tribes of Central Africa before the days of Burton, Speke and Grant.Footnote 41

At the same time, however, the British claimed sovereignty not only over the territory they controlled, but also over the Free Hills and other areas where they had no presence at all. This created a spectacle of politico-legal manoeuvring among British officials: should maps show imperial territorial claims, or only the territory that the British actually controlled? How should the limits to British governance be described? British records reveal the invention of a fine-grained border vocabulary. Subtle distinctions emerged between the ‘nominal’ (or ‘territorial’) border and the ‘administrative’ (or ‘provisional’ or ‘practicable’) border, and between the ‘administered’ territory and a host of other terms: semi-administered, loosely administered, loosely controlled, uncontrolled, unsurveyed, unknown, trans-frontier, independent, and so on.Footnote 42 One official neatly summed up this inside/outside puzzle by suggesting: ‘the area concerned is surrounded by and is within British territory’.Footnote 43 The complete lack of control over the ‘unadministered’ Free Hills was certainly a concern, but at least the area could ‘not be tampered with by any external Power’.Footnote 44

Life at the edges of empire

What did the process of empire look like to those who lived in the Free Hills and faced an expanding British presence, first in the south (Arakan) and west (Chittagong Hill Tracts), and then in the north (Lushai Hills) and east (Chin Hills)?Footnote 45 Although few of their words have been recorded, their actions are all over the historical record. They did not welcome the imperial order that British aggression brought to their doorstep, and they reacted with defiance and alarm to British intrusions. This song of the late 1880s is an example:

Areu siata kiong mai phapa, pachhong tangbi zah lai sacheupa viapi Saipahra daita.

We have always shot the white-tusked elephants and clean-horned bison in the hills to the west and taken their heads to adorn our verandahs. Nowadays the foreign armies have reached Mandalay.Footnote 46

Unlike the lowlands, these hills had never been part of larger states, let alone empires, so the hill people did not see the British as successors to previous imperial rulers. On the contrary, their defiance stood in a tradition of rebelliousness against state encapsulation going back generations. They countered British expansion with open resistance and guerrilla tactics, and this resulted in frontier turbulence. It has been argued that such turbulence often spurred imperial expansion.Footnote 47 Thus, the invasions of the Chittagong and Lushai Hills were ostensibly triggered by continual raids from the east. But ‘turbulence was not merely something experienced by colonial officials: it was also produced and encouraged by them’.Footnote 48 At least one wayward official, T. H. Lewin, played a prominent role in challenging the spatial limitations of British India imposed by his superiors.Footnote 49 His unsanctioned cross-border adventures contributed to the invasion and annexation of the Lushai Hills, but in what remained the Free Hills they led to a long-term stand-off.

Shadowy bordersFootnote 50

Imperial governance showed different patterns around the encircled area of the Free Hills. The oldest pattern developed in Arakan, where British power crept into the hills along the Kaladan river flowing south from the Free Hills. The river valley and immediately adjoining hills were controlled from four riverside police stations, but British control soon faded into ‘unadministered’ tracts beyond these.Footnote 51 By the early twentieth century, there was still ‘a large stretch of unknown, unvisited and unprotected country to the west and north-west of Paletwa abutting on Chittagong and Northern Arakan’.Footnote 52 This river-valley presence, which was anything but a fixed, well-defined line, marked the southern border of the Free Hills.Footnote 53

In the west another pattern of border making developed. Here the British followed their well-established practice of selecting watersheds to create ‘natural borders’ that could appear as lines on a map.Footnote 54 After the Chittagong Hill Tracts were invaded, surveyors carefully determined the eastern border (the western edge of the Free Hills), which, however, remained undemarcated, unguarded, and ineffectual. As a result, the people in the southern Chittagong Hills paid tribute to both the British and the Mara/Lai.Footnote 55

A third pattern of border making shaped the northern and eastern edges of the Free Hills after the conquest of the Lushai and Chin Hills. Here the British refrained from defining the border, leaving the territorial question open.Footnote 56 Invading still unvisited Mara/Lai country to the south was considered highly risky, and too expensive, so for the time being the de facto border was established at a village outpost, Saikao (also known as Serkawr or SherkorFootnote 57).Footnote 58 What followed was confusion and endless (and inconclusive) correspondence between British officials on how to proceed.

However shadowy these borders around the Free Hills may have been, they did separate imperial territories from independent ones. In imperial territories power was considerably centralized, hierarchically structured, and bureaucratically legitimized. The British had disarmed and subdued the population, and they compelled villagers to perform forced labour and pay tribute.Footnote 59 In the independent Free Hills, power was dispersed among many small self-governing polities. Armed men engaged in village-level warfare, servitude existed, and local chiefs collected tribute.Footnote 60

Sub-imperial governance

With the Free Hills encircled, sub-imperial rivalries came into play. British India was divided into various administrative units (each manned by officials with their own interests) under the Government of India. The areas surrounding the Free Hills were conquered from three different provinces: Bengal, Assam, and Burma—and this turned out to be a fateful coincidence. The Chittagong Hills became a district of Bengal; Arakan and the Chin Hills fell to Burma; and the Lushai Hills, invaded from both Assam and Bengal, ended up as a district of Assam. Every British border official had to report to superiors at the district, division, provincial, colonial, and imperial levels.Footnote 61 Thus, information about the southern border of the Free Hills travelled to Paletwa, Akyab, and Rangoon. Information about the northern border would go via Lungleh, Aijal, and Gauhati. And information about the western border passed though Rangamati, Chittagong, and Calcutta.Footnote 62 Provincial officials in Rangoon, Gauhati, and Calcutta could then inform the Government of India (which resided in Calcutta), where it might be collated and, if deemed necessary, sent to London. Thus, seemingly trifling details could be adjudicated in London.

The imperial distinction between ‘territorial’ versus ‘administrative’ borders was replicated at the provincial level. The fiction that the Free Hills were British territory, yet unadministered, forced the provinces to decide which part of the area belonged to Assam and which to Burma (Bengal did not lay claim to territories east of the Chittagong Hill Tracts). But there was a problem: under a non-intervention (or non-interference) policy that the Government of India had laid down in 1879,Footnote 64 officials were not permitted to cross the line between administered and unadministered territories without express permission from their higher-ups, and this was rarely granted.Footnote 65 A visit was allowed in 1896, when officials from Arakan and Assam met in the border village of Saikao, during which ‘various matters connected with the peace of the two districts were discussed’ (Figure 5).Footnote 66 The terms ‘visit’, ‘tour’, and ‘promenade’ were soon used freely in British sources to describe imperial forays into the Free Hills—euphemisms that obscured the well-armed, violent, destructive nature of these incursions. Imperial officials could never travel without military escorts of dozens of soldiers.

Figure 5. British officials in charge of the South Lushai Hills and Northern Arakan meeting in Saikao village, 1896. Around them are Mara (Lakher/Shendu) villagers and Gorkha soldiers.Footnote 63

But where exactly was the line between ‘administered’ territory and the Free Hills? The vagueness of these ‘shadowy borders’ irked the authorities.Footnote 67 A succession of border officials in vain implored their superiors to fix a proper border line. They deplored that ‘British and independent villages lie interspersed throughout a considerable area and especially down a long tongue of land to the south of the village of Sherkor’.Footnote 68 But their superiors could not agree on who was responsible for—and should bear the cost of—border-making, let alone annexing the Free Hills. As one official remarked, it was ‘amusing to see how the Bengal and Burma Governments each tried to foist on to the other the responsibility of controlling’ the inhabitants of the Free Hills.Footnote 69 The result was a standoff—and a large hole in the empire—that lasted four decades.

Although the British encircled the Free Hills, the state’s presence, even on the ‘administered’ side of the border, was light and intermittent. Officials were ensconced in fortified settlements (police outposts and small forts) from which they ventured out on ‘tours’ (foot marches with armed escorts and coerced porters) around their imperial territory (Figure 6).Footnote 70 These tours could not enter the Free Hills—they stayed in British-occupied territory. Their main objective was to collect taxes, settle disputes, and showcase British power to their administered subjects. They embodied the ‘itinerant governance’ that characterized many imperial borderlands.Footnote 71 Moreover, such tours could only take place during what the British called the ‘open season’, the drier, cooler months when the intense monsoon rains had stopped.Footnote 72 As a result, in these parts the empire was merely a ‘fair-weather state’.Footnote 73

Figure 6. Assam Rifles marching in front of their stockade in Tuipang, near Saikao and the northern border of the Free Hills, circa 1920.Footnote 74

Inhabitants of the Free Hills seem to have considered the British presence on their doorstep to be quite weak. In 1903 the chief of a nominally British village told officials that he had allowed an independent chief to take over some of his land for cultivation because ‘he preferred at least to be on good terms with his powerful aggressor and neighbour, of whom even the Government was afraid’.Footnote 75 Not surprisingly, the British worried about their prestige across the unguarded border.Footnote 76 The population ‘on both sides of the border is so completely one, their interests are so intervened, their relations so close, and their intercourse so frequent, that a Subdivisional Officer without personal knowledge of the Chiefs and country across the border, is most seriously handicapped in all his dealings with the [people] whose fortune it is to be within the administered line’.Footnote 77

The people of the Free Hills knew far more about the British than vice versa.Footnote 78 They could move freely in British territory to visit relatives, trade partners, and markets.Footnote 79 The British found it hard to gather information on what they described as ‘trans-frontier tribes’, because ‘administered subjects’ could be tight-lipped about cross-border affairs, and there were long gaps between official tours.Footnote 80 For example, between 1907 and 1918, the Free Hills did not experience a single British incursion.Footnote 81 People from the colonized territory could travel freely in the Free Hills, but this was risky. Sometimes they were robbed, kidnapped, or killed, which enraged the British who were unable to avenge such events but uttered threats nonetheless.Footnote 82 Throughout, the Free Hills remained beyond British governance technologies such as the population census: colonial census maps showed them simply as black ‘omitted’ space.Footnote 83

Sporadic empire

Free-floating mobility in the borderlands turned into an issue of sovereignty only when Free Hills raiding spilled over into British-held territory. After 1890, when the Free Hills had become fully encircled, significant cross-border forays included the Khrum-Shekhruit raid (1900), the Pemthar-Siata raids (1906), the Bahe-Sabong raid (1907), the Zawngling raid (1907), the Laungdu raid (1909), the murder of Ma Rike Pha (1913), the Tuiship raid (1919), the Zylow raid (1927), and the Kanpetlet raid (1946).Footnote 84 Such incursions led to a flurry of official reports, witness accounts, and correspondence on how to react. Border officials would entreat their superiors to lift the non-intervention policy and permit them to enter the Free Hills and punish the culprits.Footnote 85 They would also plead unsuccessfully for the undefined border to be finally settled and for the Free Hills to be incorporated into the empire.Footnote 86

Occasionally a well-armed British counter-raid (‘punitive expedition’) was allowed to cross the border. It would move slowly through the difficult terrain (it took a nine-day march from Saikao in the north across the Free Hills to Kaletwa in the south),Footnote 87 so the offending independent villages were forewarned and often vacated. These British raiding parties were extremely destructive. They would torch the villages and fields, and, if possible, seize guns, cattle, paddy, rice, and other valuables, such as elephant’s tusks.Footnote 88 Sometimes they caught an independent village chief, whom they abducted and took to British territory and later incarcerated.Footnote 89 Essentially, the British found themselves copying—and outdoing—the Free Hills style of transitory micro-warfare.

Sub-imperial disagreements got in the way of fixing the border. Despite several earlier attempts, it was not until the 1920s that this process made any headway, not least because of a large insurgency—the Anglo-Kuki War—that had unsettled imperial rule in the neighbouring Chin Hills between 1917 and 1919.Footnote 90 The British noticed that the rebels used the Free Hills—or ‘the wild unadministered tribal land’—as a refuge and a base of operations, and that ‘the unadministered villages showed considerable hostility’.Footnote 91 The area was ‘an obstacle to free intercommunication between neighbouring administrative units … an Alsatia in which the turbulent and criminal elements of the surrounding administered areas take refuge, and a centre from which murderous raids are frequently made on the villages which are under administrative control’.Footnote 92 This ‘wild unadministered tribal land’ had to go, so Burma and Assam officials met in Maymyo, the summer capital of British Burma:Footnote 93

The decision provisionally arrived at (the matter is one on which the final decision does not rest with the local Government) was, that the more or less imaginary line, which divides administered from unadministered territory, should no longer be recognized, that Government officers should be at liberty to enter what has hitherto been unadministered territory, for the purpose of punishing evil-doers, and that the whole of the territory should be brought under administration by gradual stages … provisional arrangements were also arrived at, as to the portions of the territory which should in future fall within the sphere of influence of the Lushai Hills, the Chin Hills, the Pakôkku Hill Tracts and the Hill District of Arakan, respectively … the inhabitants should be induced to abandon their love of raiding their neighbours, which is at present so fruitful a source of unrest in these regions.Footnote 94

However, the higher echelons of imperial decision-making were still anxious about resistance by ‘stronger tribes’ and the related costs and risks of a military assault on the Free Hills.Footnote 95 Moreover, the Burma and Assam authorities had different governance approaches. Burma propagated a very loose form of control in the Free Hills—a ‘tour of inspection’ every two years and a gradual extension of more direct administration.Footnote 96 Assam wished to bring the area under settled administration, but without levying taxes or disarming the tribesmen ‘until the confidence of the people is secured’. This approach was not sanctioned.Footnote 97

In 1921 London finally gave the go-ahead to expanding loose control. During the following decade new borders began to appear on maps, allocating sections of the Free Hills to different districts, and a new bureaucratic term (‘pre-unadministered areas’) came into existence.Footnote 98 But actual control was elusive: ‘murders and raids prevail in the areas under loose political control, and the periodical tours of civil officers have been treated by the people as no more than incidents to be forgotten as soon as the civil officers have passed’.Footnote 99 Even so, according to one British official, the mood in the Free Hills was sombre during the 1930s:

All these tribes have been taken over against their will … They were not brought under British rule in their own interest; in fact, whether they liked being taken over and whether it was in their interest to be taken over or not were never considered at all … I have not the smallest doubt but that they would much rather have been left independent … Much of the joie de vivre has gone. To replace the old enthusiasm for war, the capture of slaves, the feasts over heads, the free hunting of all kinds of game whenever they pleased, the Lakher [= Mara] has been given security; this he appreciates, but it is doubtful whether security, at any rate at first, fills the place of what he has lost.Footnote 100

Local songs of the period expressed this disenchantment and the hardship that British rule brought:

Kala thang thong napadaita, hratlai chu na Salu ti cha danglei ra pa nawhleu saipina.

Government has now hemmed us in,

on the north, on the south, on the east, on the west.

Henceforth none of our young warriors will drink of the waters of the Salu river, where we always used to raid.

A ngong taka e chei tah ta, a pa nawng chhua chei la e na ti, tle kua pe la che khai aw vei e.

We have to pay two rupees house tax,

and, not content with that,

they now tell us to send fowls in for sale,

would that we were not part of the Lushai Hills.

A raw vepi pe na chhua tlei, da ei khua li theu, ra pa cha la, hre zong e teu pe me aw vei e.

Government has taken over all our country,

we shall always have to work for Government,

it were better had we never been born.Footnote 101

For years, biennial (later annual) British armed incursions continued, imposing spasmodic imperial rule. Arakan and the Lushai Hills did not officially bring their portions of the Free Hills ‘under administration’ until 1930 and 1931, respectively (Figures 7 and 8).Footnote 102 The Lushai Hills portion was ‘only being visited by Government Officers under an Assam Rifles escort, even up to 1940’.Footnote 103 In other words, the Free Hills remained mostly ‘unadministered’ up to the Second World War. The Japanese invasion of Burma obliterated British rule to the south and east of the Free Hills but appears to have largely bypassed the hills themselves.Footnote 104

Figure 7. Mara warriors in Chapi, a village in the Free Hills, probably shortly after it had been ‘loosely incorporated’ into the empire, circa 1930.Footnote 105

Figure 8. Girls in Savang, a powerful village in the Free Hills, circa 1930.Footnote 106

Counter-mapping an imperial legacy

From the 1890s to the 1940s, the Free Hills formed a hole in the British empire but ironically, during decolonization, imperial governance decisions about the surrounding lands became a fateful legacy for these hills. As British India collapsed and was partitioned during 1947/48, the provinces bordering the Free Hills fell to three different post-colonial states with distinct governance styles. Independent India took Assam, independent Burma appropriated the Chin Hills and Arakan, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts became part of Pakistan (Figure 9).Footnote 107 These nation-state borders are still in place, but by the 1970s Burma had transferred the Free Hills previously apportioned to Arakan and Pakôkku to Chin state, and Bangladesh had replaced Pakistan. Most inhabitants of the former Free Hills became Burmese citizens; a minority became Indian citizens.

Figure 9. Map of the Free Hills in 1947. Source: Drawn by Laurie Whiddon.

Before 1947, many inhabitants of the Free Hills had challenged imperial notions of sovereignty and territoriality. They had expressed their own sense of space by sustained ‘counter-mapping’,Footnote 108 which took the form of cross-border raiding, migration, hunting and cultivating land beyond the border,Footnote 109 and removal of imperial border markers.Footnote 110 Occasionally, they even wrote down their ideas on territoriality: in 1945, 23 Mara/Lakher chiefs signed a petition to demand a separate Lakher district covering parts of the Free Hills as well as British-held territory,Footnote 111 and there were also pleas to transfer the entire area to Burma.Footnote 112 The imperial authorities dismissed these demands out of hand.

Such protests carried over into the next era. Newly independent India and Burma upheld imperial notions of territoriality and community, retained the imperial borders, and tended to be equally unconcerned about local interests.Footnote 113 Indian authorities spoke disparagingly of ‘an inappreciable number of Lakhers’,Footnote 114 and set aside complaints about unfair loss of cross-border land to Burma.Footnote 115 Non-recognition of local place names (in Mara and Lai) was another spatial issue,Footnote 116 and so was not teaching Mara/Lai children in their mother tongue.Footnote 117 Local political organizations emerged to claim territorial rights, initially largely accepting the spatial confines of India and Burma.Footnote 118

Over time, however, a ‘cartography of self-assertion’ developed.Footnote 119 Various cross-border territorial imaginations and identities flourished, and these were increasingly supported by digital connectivity. In 1988 the first ‘World Zomi Convention’ demanded unification of all Zo people in Burma, India, and Bangladesh, and launched the Zo Re-unification Organization.Footnote 120 Soon after, the former Free Hills became part of several new and overlapping maps of self-assertion: Maraland, Zale’n-gam, Chinland, Chinram, Zoroland, Greater Mizoram, Kukiland, and Zogam. Post-colonial counter-mapping also took the form of frequent mobility on jungle paths across the still loosely demarcated and largely unguarded Myanmar/Burma–India–Bangladesh border.Footnote 121

Conclusion

The Free Hills are significant because they highlight the limits of empire. They challenge the imperial fiction that this area was British territory, yet ‘unadministered’. What makes them historically important is exactly the fact that they were beyond imperial control—an area inhabited by Zo people who, unlike most, were not subject to British rule. It was their persistent ‘illegibility’ to the imperial state that underpinned their remarkable political autonomy.Footnote 122 In these hills, a long-standing way of life and governance endured until the eve of the Second World War. British control lasted at most a few short years, and it was extraordinarily loose and intermittent. Although the British nominally claimed the Free Hills as part of their empire, they freely admitted that the region effectively remained independent, self-governing, and opaque. Therefore, the rich scholarly literature on governance in imperial India and Burma does not really apply to these Free Hills, even though we remain highly dependent on imperial sources to piece together what life there was like.Footnote 123

The Free Hills demonstrate the survival of a distinctive non-imperial cultural universe in the India-Burma borderlands up to the mid-twentieth century. Though these hills may seem anomalous, they provide a unique vantage point from which to observe the limits of imperial aggression. They throw light on the fictionality of some imperial territorial claims, and they challenge historiographical approaches that accept such assertions. Moreover, they compel us to acknowledge the dynamism of local borderland actors and small polities in the making of their own histories.Footnote 124 The Free Hills also highlight the unevenness of imperial governance by demonstrating sub-imperial divergences at their borders—between different colonial provincial governments as well as between border officials and their superiors regarding non-intervention.

The longevity of the Free Hills resulted from the interplay of several factors. Initially, the British feared the martial image of the ‘Shendus’, who were equipped with firearms and had superior knowledge of the rugged terrain. Second, the British lacked basic information about the region and its inhabitants. They could not gather intelligence except by means of occasional predatory forays; and raids from the Free Hills into imperial territory always took the British by surprise. Third, financial calculations played a role: the cost of conquering this sparsely populated, inaccessible, unknown, and probably recalcitrant region might outweigh future income from head tax and forest products—and the provinces squabbled over who should foot the bill. Fourth, top-level imperial authorities had imposed a policy of non-intervention in affairs beyond ‘administered’ areas. This curbed the territorial ambitions of military officers and civil servants serving on the turbulent borders that surrounded the Free Hills. And finally, the inhabitants of the Free Hills did not covet the fate of their tax-paying, disarmed, and regimented kin across the border. Nobody’s subjects, for as long as it lasted, they lived by their own rules, controlled their own hunting grounds and agricultural land, and could access social networks in British-ruled areas.

Holes in state territories provide an intriguing perspective on the limits of state control. But not all holes are the same. The Free Hills differed from spaces that social scientists have variously conceptualized as liberated zones, failed states, grey zones, and so on.Footnote 125 The Free Hills were self-administering, but not because insurgent or criminal forces took over parts of a state territory, nor because of bureaucratic oversight.Footnote 126 The Free Hills survived because 1) a powerful state was long held back by fierce Indigenous resistance, 2) the region formed a troublesome terrain that could fairly easily be circumvented, and 3) Britain expected meagre economic yields from this ‘unadministered’ territory.Footnote 127 Such cases of state reticence may be rare, but they do exist, even today.Footnote 128 Encapsulated and encircled, these holes of ‘illegibility’ demonstrate that, sometimes, Indigenous governance can persist for many years.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the research group ‘Trans-Himalayan Flows, Governance and Spaces of Encounter’, whose articles also appear in this Forum, as well as the participants in the conference on shared community in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia at Dali University, and two anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Laurie Whiddon for help with drawing the maps in this article.

Competing interests

The author declares none.

References

1 Major imperial additions relevant for this article were Assam and Arakan (in 1826), Lower Burma (1852), the Chittagong Hill Tracts (1860), Upper Burma (1885), and the Lushai Hills and Chin Hills (1890). See Pum Khan Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier and the Making of the Chin Hills: Empire and Resistance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020).

2 Jagjeet Lally, ‘Salt, Smuggling, and Sovereignty: The Burma-China Borderland, c. 1880–1935’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 49, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1047–1081; Thomas Simpson, The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Benjamin D. Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

3 For interpretations of the dynamics of these ‘buffer societies’ in the wider region, see, for example, Jonathan Friedman, System, Structure and Contradiction in the Evolution of ‘Asiatic’ Social Formations (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1998); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Jonathan Friedman, ‘States, Hinterlands, and Governance in Southeast Asia’, Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 61, 2011, 117–122; Mandy Sadan, Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 2013); and Magnus Fiskesjö, Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021).

4 Upstream, this river is also known as Chhimtuipui or Boinu.

5 ‘Submits an account of the operations of the Police among the Hill Tribes on the Northern Frontier of the Arracan Division’, Home Department, Police Proceedings, 16–17 (July 1864), National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).

6 The British had long claimed dominion over these hills without being in control of them. During the 1880s, 20 years after formal annexation, the eastern border of the Chittagong Hill Tracts was still unclear: ‘eastward its limits are undefined, and its ranges merge in the wild, unexplored high-lands that lie between British India and North Burmah’: Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-east Frontier of Bengal (Calcutta: Home Department Press, 1884), p. 329.

7 Lushai is the English rendering of the endonym of the largest linguistic group in the region, Lusei.

8 See Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier for an outstanding overview. The fact that the British did not have control of these hills did not stop them from engaging in simulated border making and virtual territorial allocation, as described, for example, in ‘Transfer of the South-Lushai Hills and a portion of the Arakan Hill Tracts District to Assam’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 1–28 (June 1893), NAI.

9 For a map showing the contours of the Free Hills as imagined in 1920, see ‘Sanction to the proposals of the extension of loose political control over the unadministered area on the Assam–Burma border between the Hill District of Arakan, the Chin Hills and the Lushai Hills …’, Foreign Department, External, Political A Proceedings, 1–17 (September 1921), NAI, facing p. 35.

10 L. Lam Khan Piang, ‘Contestation of Etic Categorizations and Emic Categories: Resurgence of Zo Ethno-national Identity in the Indo-Myanmar Borderland’, South East Asia Research, vol. 28, no. 3, 2020, pp. 284–300. Mandy Sadan proposed the metaphor of fractals to deal with such complexities, to help us challenge the ‘simplicity of ethnic categories … developed largely to efface the hyper-complexity of the social environment that lies beneath’, and to flag ‘the limitations of our conventional forms of representation that focus on central rather than “peripheral” definitions of power’. Sadan, Being and Becoming Kachin, p. 24.

11 S. R. Tickell, ‘Notes on the Heumá or “Shendoos”, a tribe inhabiting the hills north of Arracan’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 21, no. 3, 1852, pp. 206–213. The designation ‘Shendu’ appears to originate from neighbouring groups in Arakan. See also Bianca Son-Doerschel, ‘The Making of the Zo: The Chin of Burma and the Lushai and Kuki of India through Colonial and Local Narratives 1826–1917 and 1947–1988’, PhD thesis, SOAS University of London, 2013, p. 200. First named in English by Francis Buchanan in 1798 and vicariously described in 1799, the Shendus remained a mysterious presence; John Macrae, ‘Account of the Kookies or Lunctas’, Asiatic Researches, vol. 7, 1803, pp. 183–198. Willem van Schendel (ed.), Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798): His Journey to Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Comilla (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1992), pp. 41, 65. In 1856 an officer, who had briefly entered the Free Hills (but had failed to get in touch with Shendus), argued ‘as to the practicability of opening negotiations with the chiefs of the Shindoo tribes, I do not think that I make an overbold assertion in saying that no attempt to open such negotiations would be attended with success. I may go further and say that at present we have no means of even fairly making an attempt … In some part or another of the mountainous regions lying to the north of Arracan, the west of Burma, and the east or north-east of Chittagong, we have testimony of the existence of a race whom we have agreed to call Shindoos, and supposed to be a branch of the great Khyeng [Chin] family; but beyond this fact of their existence we know nothing about them: there is no point in our territory from which we could with any certainty say that we were within ten days or a fortnight’s march of the nearest of their fastnesses.’ Hopkinson, in Mackenzie, History of the Relations, p. 531; Soong Chul Ro, ‘Naming a People: British Frontier Management in Eastern Bengal and the Ethnic Categories of the Kuki-Chin, 1760–1860’, PhD thesis, University of Hull, 2007; Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier, pp. 34–38. See also J. H. O’Donel, ‘Notes on the tribes of the eastern frontier’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 32, 1864, pp. 400–408; and Shakespear’s description of meeting a Lai (Poi/Shendu) warrior: John Shakespear, ‘The Lushais and the land they live in’, Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 43, 1895, pp. 167–185.

12 Tickell, ‘Notes on the Heumá’, p. 206. For another Shendu emissary, visiting British Arakan in 1873, see Administration Report on the Hill Tracts, Northern Arakan for the year 1872–73 (Rangoon: Government Press, 1873), pp. 12–13. See also ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus for the recovery of two captives’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 159–166 (November 1892), NAI. For depictions and descriptions of spears and shields, see Emil Riebeck, The Chittagong hill-tribes: Results of a journey made in the year 1882 (London: Asher & Co, 1885), Plates 9–10; and N. E. Parry, The Lakhers (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), pp. 53, 57.

13 Mara were previously known by an exonym (Lakher) given by their Mizo neighbours. Lai were similarly known as Poi/Pawi. For descriptions of linguistic complexities and social subdivisions, see Tickell ‘Notes on the Heumá’; G. F. Whalley, ‘Note on the unadministered Lakher tract’ (1903), Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 135–139 (March 1907), NAI, pp. 14–21; W. Gwynne Hughes, The Hill Tracts of Arakan (Rangoon: Government Press, 1881), p. 42; Reginald A. Lorrain, Five Years in Unknown Jungles for God and Empire (London: Lakher Pioneer Mission, 1913), p. 88; Parry, Lakhers; ‘Petition of Lakher chiefs for formation of a separate Lakher sub-Division, 1946’, Secretary to the Governor General, Public, Proceedings 77–G, G(A), 1946, NAI; ‘Memorandum, Mara Freedom Party, submitted to the Governor of Assam demanding a separate district council for the Maras on the 20th January, 1964’, CB-73, G 557, Mizoram State Archives; S. Vumson, Zo History (Aizawl: Published by the author, 1986); Ro, ‘Naming’; K. Zohra, ‘The Marriage Customs of the Maras before the Advent of the British in the Maraland’, in History and Ethnic Identity Formation in North-East India, (ed.) J. V. Hluna (Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2013), pp. 280–285.

14 For introductions, see Parry, Lakhers; Vumson, Zo History; Lian H. Sakhong, In Search of Chin Identity: A Study in Religion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Burma (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003), pp. 21–45; Pum Khan Pau, ‘Transborder People, Connected History: Border and Relationships in the Indo-Burma Borderlands’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, 2020, pp. 619–639; Pum Khan Pau and Thang Sian Mung, ‘Fragmented Tribes of the India–Burma–Bangladesh Borderlands: Representation of the Zo (Kuki-Chin) People in Colonial Ethnography’, Asian Ethnicity, vol. 23, no. 3, 2022, pp. 608–629. Pau speaks of a ‘Zo culture area’: Pum Khan Pau, ‘Amalgamation Policy Revisited: Three British Proposals toward the Indo-Burma Frontier’, Journal of North East India Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–16.

15 Vumson, Zo History; Pau, ‘Transborder People’; Pau and Mung, ‘Fragmented Tribes’.

16 Reid suggested that ‘Shendu’ was an Arakanese term that did not ‘really apply to any particular tribe’ but on the same page also quoted a letter from 1888 equating Shendu with Poi [Pawi], a colonial term for the Lai. Robert N. Reid, History of the Frontier Areas Bordering on Assam: From 1883–1941 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 1. Zohra suggests that ‘Shendu’ is derived from a Khumi word meaning ‘wearing hair knots above the forehead’. K. Zohra, ‘The Maras of Mizoram: A Study of their History and Culture’, PhD thesis, University of Gauhati, 1994, pp. 27–28. The terms ‘Shendoo’ and ‘Lakheyr’ are used interchangeably in ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state of the Akyab frontier—Full report called for’, Foreign Department, Political, 1871, British Library (hereafter BL) IOR/L/P&S/6/581, Collection 2, p. 13. ‘Shindoos or Lakkeys or Pooies’ are mentioned in Administration report, p. 6.

17 The Lewin Family Papers (MS 811/II/27), Senate House Library, University of London. Lewin met this chief in the western Free Hills, near the Kaladan river and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. T. H. Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary of the Hill Trip’, Foreign Department, Political A Proceedings, 124–129 (July 1866) (‘Supervision of the hill tribes in Northern Arakan’), NAI, pp. 25–44.

18 J. H. Lorrain, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford.

19 Parry, Lakhers, pp. 45–46. In the 1830s, arms were said to be supplied to the Free Hills via Chittagong and the estate of Kounglhaphroo, a chief in the Chittagong Hills. ‘Arracan— outrages by the mountaineers bordering on the Koladyne River’, Judicial, 1836, BL, IOR/F/4/1666/66577. ‘All the tribes can make their own gunpowder, the only difficulty being scarcity of saltpetre: this the Shendoos and Loosais, when hard up, make from cow manure.’ ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, p. 45.

20 Lorrain, Five Years, pp. 164–167.

21 Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, pp. 44–45.

22 This system of governance is likely to have been in place for centuries. Manrique provides a hint of such a system already operative in the seventeenth century. Fray Sebastien Manrique, Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique 1629–1643. Vol. I: Arakan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Hakluyt Society, 1927), p. 156.

23 A Mara song conveys the cultural value of martial masculinity: ‘Ka si te khua ve, te kaw ravana ke zo khua e lamaw tluang zo e he long ka tha ke’ (I have raided our enemy village, I have killed a man with my chopper. My name will indeed be famous when we approach the village). Parry, Lakhers, p. 179. See also Vumson, Zo History, pp. 182–183.

24 Segments of this mountain range are known by other names, such as Patkai and Arakan Yoma. Guite provides a detailed analysis of territoriality among the Kuki, another Zo group. Jangkhomang Guite, ‘Colonialism and its Unruly? The Colonial State and Kuki Raids in Nineteenth Century Northeast India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1188–1232.

25 For example, in Manipur, the Chittagong Hill Tracts and coastal Arakan. ‘Raid on Munnipore territory by a party of Shindoos’, Foreign Department, Political Proceedings, 127–135 (February 1870), NAI; ‘Postponement of the amalgamation of the North and South Lushai Hills into a single charge’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 301–334 (May 1894), NAI; Parry, Lakhers, pp. 10–11.

26 ‘The most powerful among them are the Shentoos, who being beyond our frontier, are known to us only by their devastations on those tribes which pay us tribute; the suddenness, secrecy, and never-failing nature of these attacks, cause them to be held, by the rest, in a dread of which it would be impossible to give an idea’: T. Latter, ‘A note on some hill tribes on the Kuladyne river—Arracan’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 169, 1846, pp. 60–78, at 60. Fear of Zo raids in the foothills and plains long predated the British period. Dineschandra Sen, Eastern Bengal Ballads (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1928), vol. 3, p. 30.

27 Notably by leaving chiefs in charge of local communities and making them responsible for local law and order. See David Vumlallian Zou, ‘Vai Phobia to Raj Nostalgia: Sahibs, Chiefs and Commoners in Colonial Lushai Hills’, in Modern Practices in North East India: History, Culture, Representation, (eds) Lipokmar Dzüvichü and Manjeet Baruah (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 119–143.

28 Perhaps the first attempt was made during 1847–1848 when a posse of over 60 British-led armed men entered the Free Hills from Arakan in the south. See Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 336, 525–530. Another attempt, to enter from the west during 1865–1866, ended in failure and rapid retreat when confronted with armed Shendu/Mara/Lai. See Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary’.

29 ‘Murder in territory, lying within the jurisdiction of the Lushai Hill district, of Ma Rike Pha …’, Foreign Department, Secret-External Proceedings, 381–386 (September 1913), NAI, p. 6. This woman was decapitated, and her head taken home by the raiders. The practice of taking head-trophies during warfare was reported in the Free Hills before 1900 but appears to have become rare after that. For example, see ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’, p. 7. In 1931 a touring official took what may be the only surviving photograph of trophy heads in the Free Hills. ‘A very rare sight—heads of enemies hung on bamboo poles at the edge of a village … in the Zawngling area … in 1931, soon after it had been taken over’: Papers of Major A. G. McCall, Indian Civil Service 1921–47, Superintendent of the Lushai Hills, Assam 1931–43, BL, Mss Eur E361/95, Photo no. 3. See also Lorrain, Five Years, p. 165; Ian Bowman, ‘Border Patrol: Memoir of Lushai Hills and North Arakan 1942–1943’, BL, Mss Eur F229/35, pp. 44–47, 55, 67.

30 ‘Sanction to the proposals’, p. 35; ‘Policy to be pursued in respect of raids and other offences committed by Chins living in tracts beyond the administered area of Burma’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 72–73 (September 1905), NAI, p. 7; Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 7; Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, p. 8.

31 Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, p. 23. See also Mackenzie, History of the Relations, p. 529; O’Donel, ‘Notes’.

32 This was Chief Tholing from the Saikao region, in 1897. Kyle Jackson, The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj: Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 42.

33 Controlling the salt trade was an important tool of imperial control in borderlands and it was repeatedly advocated to subdue the Free Hills, but without effect. Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary’, p. 5; Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, p. 35; Report on the Administration of Burma for the Year 1917–18 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1919), p. 10; Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier, p. 46. See also Lally, ‘Salt, Smuggling’.

34 Pau, ‘Transborder People’.

35 ‘Postponement’, p. 44 (emphasis added). Note that the term ‘our villages’ indicated that these villages were British administered. See also ‘Arrangements for the future political and military control of the Chin-Lushai country. Political boundaries between Bengal Assam and Burma, 1890’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 221–277 (August 1890), NAI, p. 54; Mackenzie, History of the Relations, p. 346. For an overview of raids on villages in the Chittagong Hill Tracts between the 1770s and 1870s, see Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 332–365. See also Tamima M. Chowdhury, ‘Raids, Annexation and Plough: Transformation through Territorialisation in Nineteenth-century Chittagong Hill Tracts’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 53, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183–224; Angma Dey Jhala, An Endangered History: Indigeneity, Religion, and Politics on the Borders of India, Burma, and Bangladesh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

36 See Guite on the flexibility of borders. He asserts that Kuki raids in a more northerly section of the Indo-Burma mountain range should be understood as ‘acts of resistance against colonial encroachment over a territory to which they laid claim’: Guite, ‘Colonialism’, p. 1232. In the Free Hills some attacks targeted British survey parties and touring officials, but most targeted other Zo villages, only some of which lay in British-controlled territory.

37 Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary’, p. 31. See also Tickell, ‘Notes on the Heumá’, p. 209; ‘Arakan Hill Tracts—Expedition against the Yaklaing Shandoos’ 1877, Foreign Department, Political, BL, IOR/L/P&S/7/14, Enclosure No. 3, p. 2.

38 T. H. Lewin, The hill tracts of Chittagong and the dwellers therein: With comparative vocabularies of the hill dialects (Calcutta: Bengal Printing Company, 1869), pp. 78, 108; Vumson, Zo History, p. 183. Conversely, the British feared for their health on entering the Free Hills: ‘For eight months in the year the tract has been rendered inaccessible by a malaria which is almost fatal to Europeans and Hindustanees’: ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, pp. 10, 13.

39 This included the killing of elephants: ‘In 1904, a distant chief living in the stateless mountains south of the region was seized and fined 100 guns for crossing into the borders of the Lushai Hills District and killing an elephant near Palak Dil. The elephant’s tusks had been sent to market in the Arakan Hills, but colonial officers smashed the trophy head in the chief’s home and warned that his village (and all his subsequent villages) would be burned if the heavy fine was not paid’: Jackson, Mizo Discovery, p. 76.

40 On colonial interpretations of ‘foreign’ in this region, see Anandaroop Sen, ‘Insurgent Law: Bengal Regulation III and the Chin-Lushai Expeditions (1872–1898)’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 56, no. 5, 2022, pp. 1515–1555.

41 A. P. Phayre, ‘Supervision of the hill tribes in Northern Arakan’, Foreign Department, Political A Proceedings, 124–129 (July 1866), NAI, pp. 1–2.

42 For example, Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary’; Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, p. v; Administration report on the Hill Tracts, pp. 6–7. As one official observed in 1870, the Free Hills had ‘not hitherto been regarded as British territory, inasmuch as no authority or influence is exercised within that area either by British Burmah or Bengal … A debatable region … occupied by tribes who are only known to the local administrations of Arakan and Chittagong by their occasional raids into British territory’: ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, p. 9.

43 ‘Sanction to the proposals’, p. 34.

44 Lord Curzon of Kedleston, The Romanes Lecture 1907: Frontiers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 40. Shakespear speaks of ‘protected territory’: John Shakespear, ‘The Lushais and the land they live in’, Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 43, 1895, pp. 167–185, at 167.

45 Occasional administrative changes in the British empire led to various names being attached to spatial units. For example, in the southeast, the Free Hills were for a time bordered by the ‘Pakôkku Hill District’: Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier.

46 Parry, Lakhers, p. 177. The British subjugated Mandalay in 1885.

47 John S. Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 2, no. 2, 1960, pp. 150–168.

48 Thomas Simpson, ‘Bordering and Frontier-making in Nineteenth-century British India’, The Historical Journal, vol. 58, no. 2, 2015, pp. 513–542, at 539.

49 Lewin was enchanted by this mysterious region, as evidenced in his own words: ‘the unknown country towards which I felt myself so irresistibly impelled’. He explained that he had no compunction to travel ‘outside my legitimate sphere of action’. Given to understand that ‘no official sanction could be given to my expedition’, he nevertheless travelled into the Free Hills ‘strictly at my own risk’. Thomas H. Lewin, A Fly on the Wheel, or How I Helped to Govern India (London: Constable & Company, 1912), pp. 142, 144, 145. Simpson suggests that Lewin treated the imperial border as ‘an invaluable margin for self-fashioning’ and that his border-crossing signified ‘a case of a British imperialist self-deifying as an awesome agent of reform’: Simpson, Frontier, pp. 2, 5, 52–53.

50 I take this term from Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 17.

51 In the 1830s, some 10 years after the British had driven the Burmese away and annexed the coastal plains, the people of the Arakan foothills remained independent. Those living closest to the plains paid tribute to the British, as they had done to the Burmese, but they also regularly raided villages in the plains. The British (who described these as ‘outrages’, ‘dacoities’, ‘affrays’, and ‘daring and atrocious acts’) had a police post (Kaladan) at the point where the Kaladan river entered the plain, and they were contemplating a second one (Paletwa), higher up the valley, to curb attacks and extend British control. Later, British influence crept further up the valley, when two small police outposts (Dalakmai/Daletmai and Kaletwa) were set up. Markets developed around these posts, drawing customers from the Free Hills. Raids from the Free Hills continued, however, even after the British appointed a ‘Superintendent of Hill Tribes’ in Northern Arakan in 1866. In 1870, it was admitted that ‘the authority, if any, which has been exercised by the local administration of Arakan to the northward of the Koladyne station has been hitherto little more than nominal’. ‘Arracan—Outrages by the mountaineers’; and ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, Collection 1, p. 16 and Collection 2, pp. 9, 19–31, 49. See also Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 533–534; ‘Submits an account’; Northern Arakan District (or Arakan Hill Tracts): Burma Gazetteer, Volume A (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing 1910), pp. 3, 7, 28, and ‘sketch map of Northern Arakan’. The British territorial claims shown in a map of 1892 (reproduced in Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier, p. 44) clearly overstated actual imperial control north and east of Dalakmai.

52 Northern Arakan District (or Arakan Hill Tracts), p. 28. See also Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 533–534; ‘Submits an account’.

53 The territorial fading of colonial control over ‘hill tribes’ in Arakan was expressed as follows. Those living near the plains were to pay two rupees per year, if they owned a pair of bullocks (which few did because these are not used in mountain cultivation). Those living in hills ‘inaccessible for ordinary purposes’ were exempt, but their chiefs had to pay a small annual tribute ‘in token of fealty’. And those living even further away were completely independent and appeared ‘to hold [the British Government] in contempt’: ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, p. 11, see also pp. 29, 35, 41, 47.

54 Kyle J. Gardner, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India–China Border, 1846–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

55 Lewin, ‘District Superintendent’s Diary’, p. 25. A Shendu raid that especially outraged the British occurred near Rangamati, the district headquarters, in 1888. The attackers killed four soldiers (three British and one Indian), who were on survey duty. It became an important argument to support the British invasion of the Lushai and Chin Hills. Bertram S. Carey and H. N. Tuck, The Chin Hills: A history of the people, our dealings with them, their customs and manners, and a gazetteer of their country (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1896), vol. I, p. 36; Reid, History of the Frontier Areas, p. 1.

56 ‘[T]he southern boundary of the Lushai Hills district has up to the present never been authoritatively defined …’. ‘Murder in territory’, p. 2. See also Ranju Bezbaruah, ‘Evolution of the Chin Hills-Lushai Hills Boundary’, in History and Ethnic Identity Formation in North-East India, (ed.) Hluna, pp. 227–247.

57 ‘Saikao’ is the Mara/Lakher name of this village, ‘Serkawr’ the Mizo/Lushai name, and ‘Sherkor’ the way British documents of the period spell it.

58 This small mountain-ridge village became the only imperial observation post and operations base at the northern edge of the Free Hills. Apart from a military node it also became a centre of Christian evangelization when the Lakher Pioneer Mission was established there by a single family in 1907. After their arrival (described in Lorrain, Five Years, pp. 64–69) they began to proselytize in and beyond the imperial borderland. Martin F. Walker, ‘The Lakher Pioneer Mission’, 2009, pp. 35–37, available at: http://lakherpioneermission.blogspot.com/2009/08/lakher-pioneer-mission-written-by.html, [accessed 2 July 2025]. In 1924, they may have been the first unarmed foreigners to visit the Free Hills: Walker, ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’, Chapter 4. Lorrain spoke of the Free Hills as Lakher-Land: ‘while the countries which border Lakher-Land come under the British flag, Lakher-Land itself does not own allegiance to any Government, but is ruled entirely by its own chiefs, presiding over their own villages, with the exception of a few Lakher villages on the Assam frontier who own in some slight measure allegiance to the Assam government, and the Lakher Pioneer Mission Station is built on the extreme frontier amongst these Lakhers’: Lorrain, Five Years, p. 11. See also Reginald A. Lorrain, The Wonderful Story of the Lakher Pioneer Mission, Founded on Prayer, Launched in Faith… (London: Lakher Pioneer Mission, 1920); Parry, Lakhers.

59 Jackson, Mizo Discovery. For an officer’s struggle to get chiefs to provide him with forced labour in the form of porters, see R. H. Greenstreet’s diary in ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’, pp. 12–22.

60 Different forms of servitude are described in Willem van Schendel, ‘Beyond Labor History’s Comfort Zone? Labor Regimes in Northeast India, from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century’, in The Lifework of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden, (eds) Ulbe Bosma and Karin Hofmeester (The Hague and Boston: Brill, 2018), pp. 174–207.

61 Over time, some of these units would be renamed and rearranged but this had little effect on imperial dynamics at the border. Across these colonial units there were communications about raids thought to involve Shendus—for example, an urgent telegram that the commissioner of Arakan sent to his counterpart in Chittagong in 1870: ‘My frontier very much disturbed: three very recent raids. How is your frontier? Please telegraph at once. General Fytche is here’: ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, p. 5.

62 Today many of these place names have changed. Akyab = Sittwe, Rangoon = Yangon, Lungleh = Lunglei, Aijal = Aizawl, Gauhati = Guwahati, Chittagong = Chattogram, and Calcutta = Kolkata.

63 The Lakher Pioneer Mission collection, Saikao. The names of these officials were Major John Shakespear and Mr. R. H. Greenstreet. For an earlier meeting between Greenstreet and R. H. Sneyd Hutchinson, in Saikao in 1892, see ‘Transfer of the South-Lushai Hills’.

64 ‘The principle should be clearly maintained of accepting no responsibility for the protection of life and property beyond the administrative line of British territory wherever it may for the time being be fixed’: ‘Policy to be pursued’, p. 4 (emphasis added). In 1893 it was stated: ‘It has always been recognized as unnecessary in cases of this kind to push forward the administrative frontier as far as the extreme limits within which we claim supremacy … We have long had in the Arakan Hill Tracts an administrative frontier within which our laws are enforced, but beyond which the tribes may do as they please’: ibid. See also Report on the Administration of Burma during 1895–1896 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1896), p. 6; Ranju Bezbaruah and Raju Bezbaruah, ‘Kami–Sabong Affairs, 1906–1916: Question of British Intervention in the “Unadministered” Tract between Burma and Assam’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 52, 1991, pp. 643–649.

65 ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’; ‘Sanction to the proposals’, p. 42. See also Parry, Lakhers, p. 11; Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 37.

66 ‘Postponement’, p. 44; Report on the Administration of Burma during 1895–1896, p. 6; Northern Arakan District (or Arakan Hill Tracts): Burma Gazetteer, Volume A, p. 14.

67 Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 17.

68 ‘Proposed delimitation of the southern boundary of the Lushai Hills District’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 135–139 (March 1907), NAI, p. 2. This source further explained ‘that the villagers have a tendency to migrate, and that, in the absence of a boundary, they have been permitted to maintain their relations with the British Government after leaving the administered area. The Local Government may therefore be acquitted of any suspicion of having deliberately permitted the administrative frontier to expand in contravention of the orders of May 1899.’ See also Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 17, on ‘anomalous villages’; ‘Exaction of satisfaction for outrages committed by the inhabitants of Zongling…’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 113–117 (February 1908), NAI, p. 7.

69 Parry, Lakhers, p. 9. For reluctance by Bengal, Burma, and Assam to take on the Free Hills, see, for example, ‘Postponement’, p. 44; ‘Control of the tract between Northern Arakan, Sherkor’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 46 (April 1895), NAI, p. 5; ‘Report on the administration of the South Lushai Hills for 1895–96…’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 28–35 (October 1896), NAI, p. 9; ‘Proposed annexation of the tract of unadministered territory bordering on the present southern boundary of the Lushai Hills …’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 41–42 (October 1900), NAI, p. 5; Report on the administration of Burma for the year 1905–06 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1906), p. 8; ‘Proposed delimitation’, pp. 2–3; Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier, pp. 41–48.

70 The logistic complications of such forays are highlighted in a detailed diary kept by Mr H. Buckle, officiating superintendent of Hill Tribes, Northern Arakan, during the British raid on the ‘Yaklaing Shindoos’ in 1876. This punitive attack on two small villages, seven day-marches beyond the ‘administrative boundary’, was intended to subdue ‘the most turbulent and troublesome of all the clans in these parts’, who had raided a village in British-administered territory. It required a party of 384 men (four Europeans, 104 police armed with guns and rockets, 210 coerced porters carrying over 5,000 kg of provisions and cooking pots, 11 ‘tributary’ and 11 ‘non-tributary’ village chiefs, and 44 others): ‘Arakan Hill Tracts—Expedition’, Index 13, pp. 4–19.

71 Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, ‘Tour Diaries and Itinerant Governance in the Eastern Himalayas, 1909–1962’, The Historical Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1023–1046.

72 For example, Report on the Administration of Burma for the Year 1919–20 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1922), p.15; Reid, History of the Frontier Areas, p. 44.

73 Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States. As Daniels puts it, ‘Empires ran thinnest at their peripheries’: Christian Daniels, ‘Strategic Fluidity: Expansion by Kengtung (Chiang Tung) into Siam-controlled Lan Na, 1869–1892’, in this Forum.

74 Shakespear, History of the Assam Rifles, p. 107. Tuipang is now in southernmost Mizoram (India).

75 Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 16 (emphasis in the original). Such practices continued: ‘Certain unadministered villages of the Zongling group cultivated jhums [fields] in the Lungleh subdivision against orders and their crops were destroyed by the Subdivisional Officer’: ‘Annual report on the frontier tribes of Assam for 1920–21’, Foreign and Political Department, External B Proceedings, 495 (September 1921), NAI, p. 4. On perceptions of ‘British fear’ among the inhabitants of the Free Hills: ‘It is necessary to counteract the effect which many years’ abstention from such tours has produced, to dissipate the idea that British officers are afraid to cross the border’: ‘Sanction to the proposals’, p. 42. See also Shakespear, ‘Lushais’, pp. 167–169; Bezbaruah, ‘Evolution’, pp. 234–235.

76 For example: ‘The fact that there are villages within a day’s march from Sherkor [Saikao] which pay no tribute, are never visited, and are allowed to raid each other just as they like cannot help being bad for our prestige’: ‘Administration report, South Lushai Hills, 1893–94’ (by J. Shakespear), Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 76–79 (September 1895), NAI, p. 7; ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’, p. 6.

77 Whalley, ‘Note’, p. 18. This emphasis on Mara cross-border oneness is repeated in ‘Petition of Lakher chiefs’.

78 As one British officer remarked about his colleague serving at the border: ‘It is very clear … that the raiders had better information of his movements than he had of theirs’ (emphasis in the original). ‘Arakan Hill Tracts—Expedition’, p. 2.

79 The Free Hills had long been integrated into wide-ranging networks of trade, importing salt, salted fish, piece-goods, muskets, gunpowder, brass items, gongs, silk thread, lead, cloth, coral, conch-shells, carnelian, beads, amber, rupees, metal belts, steel, and red dye. Exports included ivory, cotton, tobacco, bee’s wax, gongs, homespun plaids, and turban cloth. Tickell, ‘Notes on the Heumá’, pp. 209–210; ‘Letter from Captain Henry Hopkinson, Commissioner of Arracan, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal (7 May 1856)’, quoted in Mackenzie, History of the Relations, pp. 531–536, at 534; Lorrain, Five Years, p. 136; Parry, Lakhers, pp. 39–48, 65; Joy L. K. Pachuau, ‘“Circulations” along the Indo-Burma Borderlands: Networks of Trade, Religion and Identity’, in Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing, (eds) Gunnel Cederlöf and Willem van Schendel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), pp. 105–136, at 119–124.

80 Such expeditions could yield information about previously unknown groups, and fragmentary maps. ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’. On ‘British subjects’ not cooperating with their imperial rulers, see Jackson, Mizo Discovery. British administrators’ lack of geographical knowledge of the Free Hills was exemplified by Lewin’s vague remark: ‘The Shendoo country is said to be very extensive, some fifteen days’ journey across’: T. H. Lewin, Wild Races of South-Eastern India (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1870), p. 285.

81 Parry, Lakhers, p. 11.

82 ‘It is intolerable that our peaceful subjects should not be able to travel in safety in that tract, but should be liable to be kidnapped, held in slavery, tortured and murdered … Sir Herbert White [Lieutenant-Governor of Burma] would now also announce that punishment will be inflicted if residents of administered territory are robbed, kidnapped, tortured or killed in unadministered territory’: ‘Policy to be pursued’, p. 6. See also ‘Expedition against the Bôke Shandus’; ‘Proposed delimitation’, p. 7; ‘Murder in territory’; Annual Report on the Frontier Tribes of Assam for the Year 1915–16 (Shillong: Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1916), p. 5; Report on the Administration of Burma, for the Year 1928–29 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1930), p. 7.

83 See maps for 1901 and 1911 in Webb, and maps for 1911 and 1921 in Grantham. The omitted area is shown somewhat smaller for 1931 in Bennison. C. Morgan Webb, Census of India, 1911. Vol. IX: Burma, Part I. Report (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1912), p. xiv; S. G. Grantham, Census of India, 1921. Vol. X: Burma, Part I. Report (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1923), p. 2; J. J. Bennison, Census of India, 1931. Vol. XI: Burma, Part I. Report (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1931), facing p. 2.

84 ‘Raid committed by men from Khrum upon a village called Shekhruit on the Che Chaung in the Pakokku–Chin Hills. Measures for the punishment of the raiders’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 23–26 (February 1901), NAI; ‘Raid by villagers from Khrum on Chin Police near Mindat’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 5–11 (January 1903), NAI; ‘Affairs in the unadministered territory adjoining the Pakokku Chin Hills’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 26 (October 1903), NAI; ‘Policy to be pursued’; ‘Proposed delimitation’; ‘Exaction of satisfaction’; ‘Murder of certain members of the Shandu tribe by men of Kon tribe in un-administered territory lying between Burma and Eastern Bengal and Assam: Proposals for the assumption of administrative control over the territory in question’, Foreign Department, External A Proceedings, 40–80 (February 1908), NAI; ‘Rejection of a memorial from the Kon Chief Bahe in the Akyab Jail, praying that he may be permitted to return to his village, or that he may be kept at Paletwa in the Arakan Hill Tracts’, Foreign Department, Secret E Proceedings, 195–196 (August 1908), NAI; ‘Raid by tribesmen from unadministered territory on the village of Londu in the Arakan Hill tracts’, Foreign Department, External E Proceedings, 30–38 (May 1909), NAI; ‘Murder in territory’; Northern Arakan District (or Arakan Hill Tracts): Burma Gazetteer, Volume A, pp. 13–14; Lorrain, Five Years, pp. 8–9; Lorrain, Wonderful Story, pp. 13–14; ‘Sanction to the proposals’; Bezbaruah and Bezbaruah, ‘Kami–Sabong Affairs’; Walker, ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’, Chapter 4; ‘Frontier Areas: Chin Hills and Arakan Hill Tract’, Government of Burma, Foreign and Frontier Areas Department, 1947, BL, IOR/M/4/2817, p. 211. Parry describes the last raid carried out by the Free Hills village of Savang—on the village of Teubu in the Arakan Hill Tracts—as told by a leader of that raid: Parry, Lakhers, pp. 208–213.

85 In Arakan, formal ‘Rules for the guidance of police officers in pursuit of raiders in the Arracan Hill Tracts’ were formulated. ‘Looshai affairs: Pursuit and arrest of raiders in Chittagong Hill Tracts’, Foreign Department, Political Proceedings, 297–302 (August 1877), NAI, p. 3. For a list of early raids, see ‘Supervision of the hill tribes’, pp. 9–10; Parry, Lakhers, pp. 8–12. See also ‘Raid on Munnipore territory’.

86 Their pleas often included detailed reports and maps suggesting the most convenient border lines to be established. The Bahe-Sabong raid (1907) led to a map showing how border officials of the Lushai, Chin, and Arakan Hills proposed to divide the western part of the Free Hills between India and Burma. The proposal was rejected. ‘Rejection of the proposal to bring under settled administration of territory situated between Northern Arakan and the Lushai Hills’, Foreign Department, External E Proceedings, 9–12 (January 1909), NAI. See also Bezbaruah, ‘Evolution’.

87 ‘Postponement’, pp. 43–44.

88 Gunnel Cederlof, ‘Armed and Bureaucratic Violence in the Formation of British Governance in Southeast Asian Contested Tracts’, in this Forum, details this strategy at the outer margins of empire. See also J. H. Hutton, ‘Diaries of Two Tours in the Unadministered Area East of the Naga Hills’, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1929, pp. 1–72, at 18, 32, 55; ‘Arakan Hill Tracts—Expedition’, pp. 15–17.

89 ‘Murder of certain members’. See also Sen, ‘Insurgent Law’.

90 Jangkhomang Guite, ‘Colonial Violence and its “Small Wars”: Fighting the Kuki “Guerillas” during the Great War in Northeast India, 1917–1919’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, pp. 447–478; Jangkhomang Guite and Thongkholal Haokip (eds), The Anglo-Kuki War, 1917–1919: A Frontier Uprising against Imperialism during World War I (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); L. W. Shakespear, History of the Assam Rifles (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929), p. 212.

91 ‘Report on the operations undertaken in connection with the disturbances on the Assam-Burma frontier during the season 1917–18: Appreciation of the services of the officers and men employed in connection therewith …’, Foreign and Political Department, Secret-External Proceedings, 23–30 (June 1919), NAI, pp. 25, 32, 36, 55, 125; Report on the Administration of Burma for the Year 1919–20, p. 14; Reid, History of the Frontier Areas, p. 46; Robert N. Reid, Lushai Hills—Culled from History of Frontier Areas 1883–1941 (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited, on behalf of the Tribal Research Institute, Aizawl, 1978 [1942]), pp. 63–64.

92 ‘Sanction to the proposals’, p. 31. The comparison with lawlessness in the European region of Alsatia (Alsace) also surfaces in Report on the Administration of Burma during 1895–1896, p. 6, and Shakespear, History of the Assam Rifles, pp. 107, 253.

93 Bezbaruah, ‘Evolution’, pp. 241–243. Maymyo is now called Pyin Oo Lwin.

94 Report on the Administration of Burma for the Year 1919–20, p. 16.

95 For example, ‘Sanction to the proposals’, pp. 9–10. See also ‘British Burma—the unsatisfactory state’, p. 19.

96 Ibid, p. 53.

97 Ibid, p. 15.

98 See, for example, ibid., facing p. 35. Border lines remained nebulous, and they differed considerably between maps (Bezbaruah, ‘Evolution’). Even the trijunction point of Bengal (Chittagong Hill Tracts), Assam (Lushai Hills), and Burma (Arakan) was not established until 1938. ‘India–Burma boundary’, Ministry of External Affairs, Historical Division, Research & Intelligence Section, No. HI–107(9)73, NAI. For an early map overstating British control south of the Lushai Hills, see Shakespear, Lushais, p. 168.

99 Governor of Burma in 1928, quoted in Pau, Indo-Burma Frontier, p. 216; see also pp. 192–195. Shakespear concurs that these tours, which he describes as ‘small annual winter military promenades [that] will soon reduce this part of the country to order’, still had not imposed imperial control: Shakespear, History of the Assam Rifles, p. 253. For a Chin Hills official’s report of his first tour into the Free Hills in 1929–30, see ‘Frontier Areas: Chin Hills’, pp. 166–167. See also Indian Statutory Commission, Memorandum submitted by the Government of Assam to the Indian Statutory Commission, 1930, vol. 14, p. 114.

100 Parry, Lakhers, pp. 14–15, 17–18.

101 Ibid., p. 174.

102 C. Chawngkunga, Important Documents of Mizoram (Aizawl: Art and Culture Department, 1998), pp. 47–48.

103 Anthony Gilchrist McCall, Lushai Chrysalis (London: Luzac and Co., 1949), pp. 64–65, 226, 265; Report on the Administration of Burma, for the Year 1931–32 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1933), p. 42. See also Bowman, ‘Border Patrol’, p. 55; Walker, ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’, p. 36.

104 Japanese soldiers visited a Mara village in 1943, Paletwa was bombed, some Japanese aircraft crashed in the area, and a British patrol came across a few Japanese soldiers in a Free Hills village. Walker, ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’, Chapter 6; Ian Bowman, ‘Notes on military operations in the Lushai Hills and North Arakan 1942–44’, BL, Mss Eur F229/35, pp. 14–15: Bowman, ‘Border Patrol’, pp. 51–54, 107–108, 189; Vumson, Zo History, p. 178. Although the state moved decisively into the Free Hills after the war ended, many locals refused to believe that British rule had been (re-)established. ‘Frontier Areas: Chin Hills’, pp. 213–215.

105 Parry, Lakhers, facing p. 45. The Lushai name for the village is Chapui. Photographer unacknowledged, possibly Mrs Parry or Louise Marguerite Tlosai Lorrain.

106 Parry, Lakhers, facing p. 80. The girls are standing in front of a granary. Photographer unacknowledged, probably Mrs Parry or Louise Marguerite Tlosai Lorrain.

107 The southern border of the Lushai Hills was described in 1933, surveyed during 1934–1935, and shown on survey maps. ‘Prescription of Inner Line of the Lushai Hills district, Assam, under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation (V of 1873)’, Foreign and Political Department, External Proceedings, 83-X (1933), NAI. These maps formed the basis for the India-Burma Boundary Agreement of 1967. The border was demarcated in 1968–1969 and some border pillars were placed. The border near the trijunction point of Burma, Bangladesh, and India, notified in 1933 and again in 1938, remained undemarcated. ‘Border Pillar 1’ of the India–Burma border was not placed until after 1974. ‘Indo–Burma Joint Boundary Commission—Meeting, 1972’, Ministry of External Affairs, Historical Division, Research & Intelligence Section, No. HI–554(11)72, NAI, pp. 5, 121; ‘India–Burma boundary’, pp. 78–79, 81–82, 144–145.

108 Reuben Rose-Redwood et al., ‘Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings’, Cartographica, vol. 55, no. 3, 2020, pp. 151–162; Ute Dieckmann (ed.), Mapping the Unmappable? Cartographic Explorations with Indigenous Peoples in Africa (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021); Ulrich Oslender, ‘Decolonizing Cartography and Ontological Conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “Cartographies Otherwise”’, Political Geography, vol. 89, 2021, pp. 1–12.

109 ‘Proposed delimitation’; Whalley, ‘Note’.

110 In 1929 it was reported that ‘The Superintendent, Pakôkku Hill Tracts and the Assistant Superintendent, Haka, demarcated the boundary between the Chin Hills and Pakôkku Hill Tracts. It is now reported that the villagers of Kraman and Kwenam in the new area of the Pakôkku Hill Tracts have pulled down some of the stone cairns erected by these officers’: Report on the Administration of Burma, for the Year 1928–29, p. 7. In 1973, the Mara border village of Chapi (Chapui) complained that the border had been moved and Burmese policemen refused to let them cultivate their traditional fields. ‘India–Burma boundary’, pp. 81–82.

111 They stated that the Mara/Lakher region stretched ‘as far as the Sekul Chhua in the Arakan Hill Tracts and in the Chin Hills as far as Hnaring, and in the Lushai Hills as far as Cheural and down to Zitlang’. ‘Petition of Lakher chiefs’, p. 7. See also V. B. Nopha Azyu, ‘Movement for Autonomy among the Maras: A Historical Study (1924–2010)’, PhD thesis, Mizoram University, 2021, pp. 87–88.

112 ‘Petition of Lakher chiefs’, pp. 10, 12; Azyu, ‘Movement’. In late 1947, political movements in both the Chin Hills (still colonized) and the Lushai Hills (already allocated to independent India) demanded that these areas be reunited and become part of independent Burma. ‘Frontier Areas: Chin Hills’, p. 39.

113 L. Lam Khan Piang, ‘Ethnic Mobilisation for Decolonisation: Colonial Legacy (The Case of the Zo People in Northeast India)’, Asian Ethnicity, vol. 14, no. 3, 2013, pp. 342–363. See also David Ludden, ‘The Process of Empire: Frontiers and Borderlands’, in Tributary Empires in Global History, (eds) Peter Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 132–150, at 133–134.

114 Constituent Assembly of India—North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas Sub-Committee. Vol. I: Report (New Delhi: Government of India, 1947), p. 4. See also ‘Lok Sabha Debates, Constituent Assembly Debates (Proceedings) (9th December, 1946 to 24th January, 1950)’, p. 1520.

115 ‘India–Burma boundary’, pp. 81–82.

116 On assigning place names as ‘acts of national appropriation’, see David Ludden, ‘India’s Spatial History in the Brahmaputra–Meghna River Basin’, in Landscape, Culture, and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, (eds) Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy L. K. Pachuau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 23–37, at 33–34.

117 In 1964 the Mara Freedom Party demanded that schoolbooks in Mizo (Lushai) be replaced by books in ‘Lakhers’. ‘Primary education in Lakhers, letter from Mylai Hlychho, General Secretary of the Mara Freedom Party, Saiha, to the Chief Minister, Assam, 18 April 1964’, CB-73, G 557, Mizoram State Archives.

118 The first political organizations were the Pawi-Lakher Company (1947), the Chin Association (1947), and the Pawi-Lakher(-Tlanglau) Tribal Union (1948). Rejecting inclusion into the ethnic categories of Lushai/Lusei and Mizo, they were successful in 1953 when their demand for autonomy within India resulted in the establishment of the Pawi-Lakher Regional Council. As competition between Mara and Lai developed, ethnic boundaries between them hardened, and new parties surfaced, including the Mara Freedom Party, the Chin National Front, and the Chin National Union. In 1972 the regional council in India split into three separate ones. ‘Memorandum, Mara Freedom Party’; Roluahpuia, ‘Unsettled Autonomy: Ethnicity, Tribes and Subnational Politics in Mizoram, North-East India’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 27, 2021, pp. 412–426; Azyu, ‘Movement’. In Burma, the Free Hills were incorporated into a Special Division of the Chins, and later Chin state; a revolt followed in 1964. Vumson, Zo History, Chapter 6.

119 Pum Khan Pau, ‘Cartography of Self-assertion: Superimposed Boundary and Local Response in the India–Myanmar Borderland,’ in The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent (1947) and Beyond: Uneasy Borders, (ed.) Chhanda Chatterjee (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 46–66.

120 Pum Khan Pau, ‘Administrative Rivalries on a Frontier: Problem of the Chin-Lushai Hills’, Indian Historical Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, pp. 187–209. The convention declaration stated: ‘We, the people of Zo ethnic group, inhabitants of the highlands in the Chin Hills and Arakans of Burma, the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, the Mizoram State and adjoining hill areas of India are descendants of one ancestor … The British colonial rulers after subjugating us during the later part of the 19th century, exercised the imperialistic policy of “Divide and Rule”. As a result, our ancestral homeland was divided, so were members of the Zo community distributed like cattle sold and separated. Adding grave insult to injury, the emergence of the sovereign state[s] of India, Burma and Pakistan in 1940s had the administrative fragmentations aggravated and gave birth to deeper agonies of separation … Now with political consciousness gaining momentum, and the spirit of nationalism quickening [in] us come fuller realization of our human rights and of our political prerogatives’: Ṭenphunga Sailo, A Soldier’s Story (Aizawl: Published by the author, 2000), pp. 213–225. See also http://www.zogam.org/ist-world-zomi-convention1988, [last accessed 25 April 2024].

121 Jasnea Sarma, ‘The Edge of Kaladan: A “Spectacular” Road through “Nowhere” on the India-Myanmar Borderlands’, in Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean, (eds) Luke Heslop and Galen Murton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), pp. 125–154, at 147–149; Walker, ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’, pp. 6–7. On local protests against oppression by border-crossing Arakanese insurgents, see ‘Armed Conflict in Paletwa, Southern Chin State’ (Chiang Mai: Chin Human Rights Organization, 2015); ‘Common Enemy—“We have a common enemy”: Paletwa dispute on hold but unresolved’, https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/we-have-a-common-enemy-paletwa-dispute-on-hold-but-unresolved/, [accessed 2 July 2025]. During anti-government fighting in 2024, the insurgent Arakan Army took over the town of Paletwa on the Kaladan, and then almost all of the erstwhile Free Hills. Grant Peck, ‘Arakan Army resistance force says it has taken control of a strategic township in western Myanmar’, AP News, 15 January 2024, https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-arakan-army-paletwa-chin-rakhine-e124bb0ff3dbfef6c84b39f141e972ca, [accessed 2 July 2025].

122 On ‘illegibility’, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

123 Pau and Mung, ‘Fragmented Tribes’; Elliott Prasse-Freeman, ‘Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst “Failed” Governmentality in Burma and India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 65, no. 3, 2023, pp. 670–701.

124 See Daniels, ‘Strategic Fluidity’, in this Forum.

125 Charles T. Call, ‘Beyond the “Failed State”: Toward Conceptual Alternatives,’ European Journal of International Relations, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011, pp. 303–326.

126 As in the case of the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves that emerged during 1947 and survived until 2015. Willem van Schendel, ‘Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India- Bangladesh Enclaves’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61, no. 1, 2002, pp. 115–147.

127 This element of restraint is not present in the concept of ‘nonstate spaces’, which is concerned with the state’s ‘particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority’: Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 13.

128 There are few parallels in the region, but a small island in the Andaman archipelago in the Bay of Bengal provides a contemporary case. The inhabitants of this island (dubbed ‘North Sentinel Island’) have warded off outsiders for generations, and their lifeworld and language remain unknown to the outside world. Only nominally part of India, they continue to preserve their own system of governance.

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Figure 1. Map of the approximate borders of the Free Hills, surrounded by British India. Source: Drawn by Laurie Whiddon.9

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Figure 2. ‘Lebbey—The “Abéu” or Chief of the Bookee Clan of the Heuma or Shendoos’, 1852.12

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Figure 3. The first known photograph of a ‘Shendu’ person, identified as ‘Likebo, Chief of Boki Shendus’. Source: Photo by T. H. Lewin, 1866.17

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Figure 4. Lai/Shendu villagers ‘on the Burmese frontier’, 1896.18

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Figure 5. British officials in charge of the South Lushai Hills and Northern Arakan meeting in Saikao village, 1896. Around them are Mara (Lakher/Shendu) villagers and Gorkha soldiers.63

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Figure 6. Assam Rifles marching in front of their stockade in Tuipang, near Saikao and the northern border of the Free Hills, circa 1920.74

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Figure 7. Mara warriors in Chapi, a village in the Free Hills, probably shortly after it had been ‘loosely incorporated’ into the empire, circa 1930.105

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Figure 8. Girls in Savang, a powerful village in the Free Hills, circa 1930.106

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Figure 9. Map of the Free Hills in 1947. Source: Drawn by Laurie Whiddon.