IMPHAL, Jul 30: A poetry book ‘Malangbana Kari hay’ written by Dr Irungbam Deven was released today during an event organised by Manipuri Literary Society at Dave Literature Centre, DMC campus. The book contains 79 poems.
The post Book released appeare…
IMPHAL, Jul 30: A poetry book ‘Malangbana Kari hay’ written by Dr Irungbam Deven was released today during an event organised by Manipuri Literary Society at Dave Literature Centre, DMC campus. The book contains 79 poems.
The post Book released appeared first on The Sangai Express.
Read more / Original news source: http://www.thesangaiexpress.com/book-released-38/
A new book examining the tumultuous transition of Myanmar from colonial rule to the establishment of its first civilian government was released at an elaborate ceremony by Ambassador Jayant Prasad, Director General, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses at the Constitution Club in New Delhi. The book has been authored by a Southeast Asian Studies […]
A new book examining the tumultuous transition of Myanmar from colonial rule to the establishment of its first civilian government was released at an elaborate ceremony by Ambassador Jayant Prasad, Director General, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses at the Constitution Club in New Delhi. The book has been authored by a Southeast Asian Studies […]
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2016/12/new-book-on-myanmar-political-history-released-in-new-delhi/
By Pradip Phanjoubam (The following is another excerpt from the author`™s forthcoming book written as a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, IIAS, Shimla.) When the British took
By Pradip Phanjoubam
(The following is another excerpt from the author`™s forthcoming book written as a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, IIAS, Shimla.)
When the British took over the administration of Assam in 1826 after repelling the Burmese in the First Anglo-Burmese War, Assam constituted almost the entire Northeast, with the exception of the kingdoms of Tripura and Manipur. Available commentaries and records from the period indicate there were two primary interests of the British in the newly acquired territory of Assam, which was initially kept under the British province of Bengal.
The first was strategic. They were interested in keeping the region as the first layer of buffer between their established Indian territories and possible hostile neighbours and rival European Powers as we have seen in the previous chapter. That the British thought fit to intervene and stop the Burmese push westward beginning 1824, is testimony to this interest. The Burmese kingdom, with capital at Mandalay, would also come to be ultimately annexed into the British India Empire after the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885, and Burma itself would become the next layer of buffer between core British territory and what Lord Curzon called `spheres of interest`™ of rival European power, the French. This too has been discussed.
The second interest was economic. The region, it was soon to be discovered, is rich in mineral and forest resources. Its potential as a tea growing area had already become evident. Robert Bruce, encountered wild tea growing in the Assam hills in 1823, and in the next few decades, tea gardens rapidly spread through the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, causing land pressure and frictions between tea planters and local farmers. These lucrative expanding business interests obviously had to have security cover. Details of how the British charted out their ways to ensure a level security matching their needs and interests, cost effectively, has already been described in the chapter on militarisation of the Northeast.
A convenient entry point to start an assessment of the nature of British administration in the Northeast region would be to briefly refer to the history of the McMahon Line 1914 and the circumstances of its drawing. One of the consistent themes that run through all boundary making exercises of the British in their former colonies is the notion of the frontier, as distinct from a boundary. Here is how Sir Henry McMahon the man behind the McMahon Line described this notion. In his address to the royal society of Arts in 1935 he noted that `a frontier meant a wide tract of borderland which, because of its ruggedness or other difficulties, served as a buffer between two states. A boundary, on the other hand, was a clearly defined line expressed either as a verbal distinction, that is, `delimited`™, or as a series of physical marks on the ground that is `demarcated`™. The former thus signified roughly a region, while the latter was a positive and precise statement of the limits of sovereignty.`™
The Northeast in British hands began as a frontier therefore boundaries were ambiguous for a long time, and some of these ambiguities, in particular that of the McMahon Line, tragically still persists. This outlook is evident in the manner in which the British looked at the hill areas beyond the fertile alluvial plains of Assam. This is also again evident in Henry McMahon`™s effort to create a double layered Tibet, Inner Tibet and Outer Tibet, the southern overlapping perimeters of which would form the border between Tibet and India, during the Simla conference of 1913-1914. This will come up for a more detailed discussion later in this chapter. There are still more evidences of this frontier approach to the Northeast. As for instance, the notion of the `excluded area` and `partially excluded area` declared on 3 March 1936 when the Government of India Act, 1935, came into force, amounts to giving an institutional mandate to this outlook. Much earlier, in the administration of the tribal areas of the Northeast, this approach had been around in different avatars. Hence, by the Government of India Act, 1919, the territories that came to be categorised as `excluded areas` and `partially excluded areas`, were simply called as `backward tracts` and were left un-administered.
The Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation which was promulgated in the year 1873, can be said to be a prominent predecessor of these later declarations. The regulation created an `Inner Line` beyond which no British subject could cross without a permit. However, as if anticipating future misinterpretations, British authorities and commentators of the time repeatedly stated that the Inner Line did not constitute the international border. By implication though, beyond this Inner Line was an Outer Line. Some eminent scholars like Alastair Lamb claim the Outer Line was not just implied, but existed officially, thereby raising the question of where this Outer Line actually was. This is pertinent, for if this Outer Line did exist officially, it would mean this was where the international boundary was between British India and Tibet. Furthermore, the path of the Outer Line, Lamb contends in a map, is nearly identical to the Inner Line. It runs from the southern base of Bhutan along the foothills of Arunachal Pradesh right up to Nizamghat near Sadiya in the Lohit Valley.
Outer Line
The intriguing thing about this claim is, if the Inner Line and the Outer Line are either identical, or else are set apart by only a few kilometres, it does not make administrative sense. The British India government as well as the British home government denied there ever was an official Outer Line, and that the implied Outer Line, was always roughly where the McMahon Line was drawn in 1913-1914. Lamb himself notes that `the India Office, as we have seen, was already in November 1911 implying that the new Outer Line was really the same as the old Outer Line. The Indian Republic is still saying this today.`™ Tellingly however, while Lamb reproduces a number of maps showing separately the Inner Line and Outer Line, there is not one which has both the lines on the same map. He also acknowledges overlaps of the two in certain sectors: `The definition of the Inner line in Darrang and Lakhimpur Districts of Assam adjacent to the Himalayan range, which took place in 1875-6, rather tended to obscure the definition of the international boundary, or Outer Line, which was made here at the same time.`™
Lamb is so passionate about this theory of the existence of two lines that he would go to the extent of calling those who deny this as `apologists of the Indian side`™. Lamb further writes: `Of the existence of the Outer Line, however, there can be no real doubt. It has been implied in such instruments as the British agreement with some Abor gams… It followed the line of the foot of the hills a few miles to the north of what became the course of the Inner Line.`™ Two administrative boundaries running parallel to each other, one of which an international one, separated from each by only a few miles and even overlapping in certain sectors seems to defeat the very purpose these lines were meant for, that is, if at all an Outer Line officially existed.
There apparently were some inter-government exchanges of notes in which an Outer Line was referred to, but this could have been slips born out of bureaucratic mental lethargy so common especially in routine and mundane usage of references, and what was meant could have probably been the Inner Line itself, for unlike the Inner Line which came into existence by promulgation of the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation 1873, there exists no record of any ordinance or regulation or Act by which the Outer Line was created. Since Lamb`™s old `Outer Line`™ runs along the foothills of the Assam hills, this supposed `international boundary`™ excludes the present state of Arunachal Pradesh, somewhat giving credence to China`™s claim of this territory as South Tibet. Lamb claims this old `Outer Line`™ was later pushed northwards as a counter to a Chinese Forward Policy in the first decade of the 20th Century, to become the new `Outer Line`™. This new alignment is where the McMahon Line was to be drawn.
Nobody however disputes or can dispute the existence of the Inner Line which was created by a definite Regulation. The logic for introducing this line, even Lamb admits, is also far from ambiguous: `it was a device to create a buffer zone, as it were, between the international boundary and regularly administered territory, a tract which marked the transition between the tribal hills and the Assamese plains. By limiting access from the south to this area it was hoped to minimise the risk of trouble with the tribes. At the same time, tribesmen who crossed the international boundary from the north, but remained beyond the Inner Line, still passed under British jurisdiction should the authorities choose to exercise it`™.
Colonial historian Edward Gait has this explanation for the Inner Line in `A History of Assam`: `The unrestricted intercourse which formerly existed between British subjects in Assam and the wild tribes living across the frontier frequently led to quarrels and, sometimes, to serious disturbances. This was especially the case in connection with the traffic in rubber brought down by the hillmen, for which there was great competition. The opening out of tea gardens beyond the border-line also at times involved the Government in troublesome disputes with the frontier tribes in their vicinity.`™ In order to prevent the recurrence of these difficulties, `power was given to the local authorities by the Inner Line Regulation 1873 to prohibit British subjects generally, or those of specified classes, from going beyond a certain line laid down for the purpose without a pass or license issued by the Deputy Commissioner and containing such conditions as might seem necessary. As it was not always convenient to define the actual boundary of the British possessions, this line does not indicate the territorial frontier but only the limits of the administered area; it is known as `Inner Line`…`™ This line was `being prescribed merely for the above purpose, it does not in any way decide the sovereignty of the territory beyond. Such a line has been laid down along the northern, eastern and south-eastern borders of the Brahmaputra valley,`™ he further explains. These accounts also indicate how the Inner Line was amenable to changes as per the whim of the administration: `There was also formerly an Inner Line on the Lushai marches, but is has been allowed to fall into desuetude since our occupation of the Lushai hills.`™ Further, the other important purpose of the Inner Line was to limit the land grab by tea planters into the hills causing frictions between the administration and the hill tribes. `Planters are not allowed to acquire land beyond the Inner Line, either from the Government or from any local chief or tribe.`™
An important colonial administrator and author in the northeast, Alexander Mackenzie explained how this regulation was also meant to protect elephants against unauthorised captures. The Bengal Inner Line Regulation `gives power to the Lieutenant Governor (of Bengal and with responsibility for Assam) to prescribe a line, to be called `inner line` in which each and any of the districts affected, beyond which no British subjects of certain classes or foreign residents can pass without a license. The pass or license, when given, may be subject to such conditions as may appear necessary. And rules are laid down regarding trade, the possession of land beyond the line, and other matters, which give the executive Government an effective control. The regulation also provides for the preservation of elephants, and authorizes Government to lay down rules for their capture.`™
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/01/book-excerpt-frontier-to-boundary/
By Soibam Haripriya Highway 39 snakes its way through three states –Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, its winding path could be a metaphor for a river though it is literally a
By Soibam Haripriya
Highway 39 snakes its way through three states –Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, its winding path could be a metaphor for a river though it is literally a slush in the monsoons especially the part of the highway that fall within the territory of Manipur. The title of the book, Highway 39, gives the picture of a road trip. However, the book is refreshingly nuanced unlike other recent books on the still persistent idea of the ‘northeast’, many of which for various political reasons juxtapose the two states –Nagaland and Manipur as two antagonistic entities. It was another book reviewed in the same paper ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ that led me to look at the books published in the past few years on what one might provisionally call ‘the same terrain’.
Highway 39 is not disappointing, and unlike the former it is non voyeuristic in its gaze. One may find the writer’s views critical but he gives convincing arguments and anecdotes in support of his criticism. Rather than brush aside the responsibility of the state and its complicity in what ails the region and many other regions in periphery/ies, Chakravarti is clear on the role of the government and the mechanism of governance. In the introduction of the book he says ‘Governance plummets if the place is both far enough from New Delhi and lacks the heft of population to contribute sufficient numbers to the equation of government formation in New Delhi’ (ix). The idea of refusing to engage with some of the most pressing problems that the region faces, most important among which is governance; and insurgency being propped up as an easy answer to all that ills the region is part of many writings both academic and other non-fiction accounts. To link both –governance and insurgency, the former leading to the latter and the latter as both encouraged and fragmented by a certain investment in it as part of governance strategy is alluded to by him. What marks the two books as starkly different is that ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ is a book that seems to make a passing casual remark at issues that should be dealt with more seriously, for instance insurgency is callously referred to by Bhattacharjee as ‘Insurgency is complex, at the same time boring to elaborate’.
I am afraid that there is no escaping the comparison of the two books published just a year apart as they more or less describe the same region but in ways which are starkly different, not to mention that some of the informants are common to both the writers. The latter fact perhaps points to larger issues of using the same laid out routes and there being a set pattern in understanding an issue. However, this also points to the fact that the same event may not necessarily convey the same to different people; the ‘ways of seeing’ is definitely different. Chakravarti does not use any protagonist, fictional or otherwise, running through the book, it is him and the people he encounters and yet he offers more than an insight at each experience of meeting people or being there where truth collides with lies and conspiracies – ‘Travel here means confronting the truths, lies and bloodshed that have shaped modern India. It means confronting the reality that people whom I was instructed to revere since my childhood, names we as Indians read as streets, stadia and institutes of learning, faces we saw in history books and on increasingly rare postage stamps, treated other citizens –with brutality that rivalled any other in these modern times’ (p.4).
The book also raises pertinent questions of the reconciliation and peace processes; the inter-linking of faith (in one particular religion) and enmeshing it with identity especially on the Nagaland-Nagalim questions that perhaps those involved need to ask of themselves. This and the intrigues played out by the state had been largely ignored by Bhattacharjee. Chakravarti says this and most people would endorse that ‘It is indeed no secret that India’s intelligence services and the home ministry play the game every which way with each faction, and try to tap into separate points of leverage within each faction by using those with political ambition’ (p. 61). Many other such facts that characterise what is called ‘the economy of conflict’, politics of doling out ‘package’ has been discussed at length.
The book is in parts a juxtaposition of different events that lend an unmistakable air of irony – a billboard of a Manipuri film –Bomb Blast in Imphal; Mohandas Gandhi on a truck that reads ‘Sanitation is more important than independence’ brings to mind a statement by the C.M. of Manipur who once in an interview with Tehelka magazine said `Education is more important than right to life` or the most poignant irony of the pomp of building a martyrs’ memorial on the one hand and Luingamla’s grave ( a young girl killed for resisting attempts to rape in 1986, a story which the writer followed to and fro –from official gazettes to different villages) unkempt and without a marker just as the official gazettes hovered between life imprisonment and acquittal and finally the gazette itself abruptly ended without a closure.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/book-review-keeping-war-stalemate-on-a-durable-disorder/
By Pradip Phanjoubam Here is another extract from another chapter of my forthcoming book written as a fellow of the IIAS, Shimla. Here too the citations and footnotes have been
By Pradip Phanjoubam
Here is another extract from another chapter of my forthcoming book written as a fellow of the IIAS, Shimla. Here too the citations and footnotes have been removed to suit newspaper style.
Comprehending conflicts has never been easy. If this was not so, much of the conflicts witnessed in Northeast India today would have been, to use a cliché, history. Here, they have not only lingered, but become progressively much more complex as well. There would obviously be many reasons for this, as indeed all complex human issues would, and the modest object of this chapter, and the book, is to try and size up some of the vitally important ones, particularly those which often have gone unnoticed, largely because of their intangible natures. One of the hurdles in the effort to size up and understand the dynamics behind conflicts has been the tendency to oversimplify, using in most cases only tangible barometers available to assess the issues at hand. Unfortunately, this strategy of conflict resolution, which for the sake of simplicity I refer to as the bureaucratic approach, is not just a bane of the State’s bureaucracy machinery alone, but also of the mindset of a greater section of the intelligentsia. What is forgotten in the process, are the intangible factors which seldom register on the accustomed radars that feed the cognitive faculties of the State as a whole, as also its various official executive apparatuses of governance.
Tangible indexes such as unemployment rates, income, education, GDP growth rate, road connectivity etc, are no doubt very important, but they are by no means everything there is to know or tackle about the problems of conflicts of the nature the Northeast has become stymied by. It is the contention of this study that they may not even be as fundamental as the intangibles which remain unnoticed or else sidelined as secondary and insignificant. This introductory chapter then is meant to sketch the broad conceptual frame within which the rest of the chapters of this book will be located.
The nature of relationships between rivers, river valleys and the mountains where these rivers originate, and the way they shape the psychology of inhabitants of their geographical reaches, is one of these intangibles, and I shall take a survey of some well known cases in the Indian sub-continent, the logics of which will help in understanding some of the internal dynamics of the conflicts in the Northeast too. The proposition then is, river valleys and the surrounding mountains form an integral geography and any effort to disrupt this integrity will cause political and social turmoil.
In a deliberate twist of the familiar piece of trite but insightful observation, English geographer W. Gordon East, said ‘nature imposes and man disposes’ thereby ‘…man’s actions are limited by the physical parameters imposed by geography’. While geography is a given, and politically value neutral, humans who come to settle in any particular geographical region have to come to terms with the interrelatedness of different regions, not just from the ecological point of view, but much more importantly and immediately, from their own primal outlook to security and survival. They therefore attribute their values to geography. Most of the time, these values exist at the level of instinctual understandings, manifesting in myths and legends, religions and beliefs, superstitions and taboos. But very often, they have also manifested as very tangible political issues with tremendous potentials for triggering deadly conflicts. Indeed, such politics predetermined by geography have more often than not been behind many, if not most intractable conflicts all over the world. History is replete with examples, the Nile basin and the Mekong basin to cite just two, but the list can go on. The Mekong example is interesting, for here the Asian Development Bank, ADB, has actually taken cognizance of the significance of viewing the entire river basin as economically, ecologically, psychologically and politically integral, therefore inseparable region. Its ambitious Greater Mekong Sub-region, GMS, project is the articulation of this philosophy and the degree of success this project has met in integrating the economy of the entire region, and with it fostering a new level of cooperation between what in recent history have been five mutually hostile, though culturally related, impoverished nations, is a vindication of this postulate. But even within the same country, these conflicts over river waters and river valleys can get bitter, as India has seen in the Cauvery water dispute.
Without digressing any further from the central focus of this chapter, let me return to a political phenomenon, closer to India and with immediate relevance to its security – the Karakash and Yarkand river basins and their contiguous territory, the Aksai Chin plateau and beyond. This is not any effort to size up the dispute over this territory between India and China, or to be judgmental about it, but to illustrate the original contention of this chapter, that of the integral nature of river valleys and the surrounding mountains. As to the tangible significance of this intangible friction, it is loudly and disastrously evident in the fact that it has resulted in a brief and tragic war between India and China in 1962. The subject has attracted plenty of political rhetoric and posturing whenever skirmishes happen and tensions develop along the India-China border, but not a matching volume of scholarship, for many reasons, not the least of these is the non-accessibility of archival documents related to this dispute at the Indian National Archives from 1913 onwards.
However this is not to say, the issue is totally bereft of quality academic probes. There have been dedicated studies by many authors of renown, who had the resource to access the same archival documents locked up in the Indian National Archives from its counterparts in London and elsewhere. This chapter will be depending a great deal on the data they collected and interpreted, as well as the insights they provided into the problems, not necessarily to draw the same conclusions they did, but to throw light on issues specific to the theme of this book – the Northeast.
The interest of this study then is in another facet of this border issue – the Yarkand river basin, as also the Aksai Chin, which for all practical purposes were no-man’s lands till as late as the advent of the 20th Century, and the manner in which a no-man’s land transformed into a hotly contested political space.
The Yarkand valley is a relatively narrow strip of flatland wedged between the Karakoram ranges in the Indian border and Kuenlun ranges in China’s western province of Sinkiang (now Xinjiang). To its southwest are the Hindu Kush and Pamir ranges. To its east is the Aksai Chin and further on the Tibetan plateau. As in most or all Asiatic societies, there were no definite linear boundaries that demarcated the region, not until the intervention of Western civilisations. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, an explorer in his own right, a geographer and geopolitical analyst who once undertook a 1200-miles trek across the Pamirs had noted that ‘the idea of a demarcated Frontier is itself an essential modern conception, and finds little or no place in the ancient world. In Asia, the eldest inhabited continent, there has always been a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed boundaries, arising partly from the nomadic habits of the people, partly from the dislike of precise arrangements that is typical of the oriental mind, but more still from the idea that in the vicissitudes of fortune more is to be expected from an unsettled than from a settled Frontier… In Asiatic countries it would be true to say that demarcation has never taken place except under European pressure and by the intervention of European agents.’ In this case the Western civilisation is represented by the British. The British inherited the boundary problem in this sector in 1846 after it added to its expanding Indian Empire the State of Jammu & Kashmir with its conquest of the Sikhs.
Ever since this new acquisition was made, the British were uneasy about Kashmir’s un-demarcated boundaries, and began almost immediately thereafter to put in efforts to fix its northern and eastern boundaries. Two boundary commissions followed one another. The first, consisting of two members, was set up in July 1846 and given the mandate of defining the boundary between the British territories in the districts of Lahul and Spiti in the South and those of Ladhak in the north and also Ladakh’s boundary with Tibet. This effort came to nought as China did not cooperate largely by refusing to respond British entreaties to set up corresponding surveys and finally to conclude a treaty on the matter. The Governor General of India at the time, Henry Hardinge did not however give up on its quest for a defined boundary. He appointed a second Boundary Commission on 10 July 1847, this time of three members. This effort also was in vain as the Chinese still did not respond to request for a joint determination of the boundary from Spiti to Pangong Lake. In May 1848 the government abandoned further attempts to secure an agreed frontier with China.
The British however still did not give up the effort and continued to take keen interest in sizing up the frontier and determining how far its territorial interest should extend on this front. Failure of the two boundary commissions halted the efforts to define the boundary with China, but they did not kill the efforts or alter the course. From the point of view of this study however, more than how far the British effort was successful or at what consequences, the significant question is why the British came to consider the matter so urgent. North of the Karakoram ranges is the Yarkand valley flanked to its north by the Kuenlun ranges. Why and how did this narrow strip of inhospitable, virtually uninhabited land become so important for the British to make it persist in the effort to draw a definite boundary and not leave it as a no-man’s land as it always was, and which it was for all practical purposes at the time? On numerous occasions, in various official correspondences within the British administration as well as those of the British administration with the Chinese authorities, the land was indeed referred to as no-man’s land. All the while, before the advent of the British interventions after their acquisition of Kashmir, China and indeed none of the smaller principalities and their tributaries in and around the region, Tibet, Kashmir, Ladhak, Hunza and more, were certain, or probably cared much where their exact boundaries were.
Seventeen years after they acquired Kashmir in 1846, the British were still groping in the dark. After many surveys subsequent to the two fruitless boundary commissions, the unresolved debate that emerged in their official circle was whether the Karakoram watershed or that of the Kuenlun should be the boundary of India. If the boundary was to be made purely by the application of the internationally accepted boundary making principle of the main mountain watershed of river systems, then as Karunakar Gupta points out, in ‘the Imperial Gazetteer of Iidia (1908) Chamber`s Gazetteer (1962), Columbia Encyclopaedia (1963), the Swedish explorer- Sven Hedin, Owen Lattimore – all agree that the Karakoram Mountains (and not the Kuenluns) are the main water-divide in this region.’ But the answer to this increasingly desperate concern came to be determined not by any standard principles of cartography, but by the appearance of Russia in the political horizon. The Imperial Russia was at the period expanding and pushing south and absorbing all the small khanates and other principalities in the area. Under the circumstance, the exchanges of opinions within the British administrative circles, on which of these imagined boundaries would be most defensible and suitable is interesting.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/book-extract-rivers-river-valleys-mountains-as-integral-region/
