Measuring Tribal ‘Otherness’

The chapter examines the role of enumerative data in defining identity and ethnicity during the late colonial period. Focussing on two surveys of the CHT from 1876 and 1909 by W.W. Hunter and R.H. Sneyd Hutchinson respectively, it investigates how the census created standardized labels, relating to religion, tribe, and caste, which often undermined the region’s porous border-crossing, interethnic, and interreligious history. It reveals the inherent contradictions, vagueness of definitions, and, at times, gross inaccuracies within official bureaucratic documentation. Further, it notes how colonial demographic categories would influence later nationalist determinations of cultural and religious identity based on population numbers.

‘Beware Oh Petticoats! There Be Leeches in These Parts’

This chapter critiques the voluminous published and unpublished writings of Thomas H. Lewin, the first British deputy commissioner and would-be ethnographer of the CHT during the 1860s and 1870s. He had complex and, at times quixotic, views on indigenous history and the limits and nature of colonial intervention. In particular, this chapter interprets Lewin’s writings through the lens of gender and sexuality, by analyzing his interactions with both indigenous hill and British women. In particular, it examines his contentious relationship with the Chakma regent queen Rani Kalindi as well as his close epistolary relationship with his mother in London. Lewin’s record is a fascinating account of a (male) colonial administrator who was strongly influenced and jostled by two maternal figures: one indigenous and the other British. The chapter also examines the way he frames the geography and landscape itself in gendered language.

‘Promiscuous’ Planting

During the eighteenth century, the travelogue flourished as a genre and was used to describe peoples both familiar and unfamiliar to the western observer. Chapter 1 examines one such account, the 1798 travelogue of the Scottish doctor Francis Buchanan in the CHT. In his tour diary, he deployed the language of natural history to describe not only the region’s unusual soil quality, topography, and local jhum or swidden agriculture, but also the religious, cultural, and linguistic practices of the various hill tribes he encountered. In the process, he exposed the tumultuous history of this border region, which found itself at the crossroads of imperial ambition by both the East India Company and the kingdom of Burma. He is also an intriguing example of an Enlightenment era man of science and reason in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

The Administrator (as) Anthropologist

This chapter addresses the ways in which early twentieth century anthropological ideas were applied to administrative policy, particularly the traditional leadership of the three circle chiefs in the CHT. It interprets J.P. Mills’s 1926–7 Tour Diary, the first anthropologically oriented study of the CHT. Mills defined tribal ‘authenticity’ through investigating later layers of cultural accretion; in the process, he reinvented aspects of tradition and ceremonial power. His proposals would influence the later 1935 Government of India Act, which further circumscribed the agency of the local chiefs, and would have implications for their subsequent engagement within the Indian nationalist movement and the partition of east Bengal. In particular, his work reveals how CHT chiefs increasingly saw themselves as transregional and global cosmopolitans, linked to an India-wide and world map, that crossed narrow definitions of language, religion, education, travel, gender, social etiquette, and dress.