Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge

The book is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature of this legal limbo that produced both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions but equally as integral to the imperial project. Through a study of place-making by indigenous inhabitants of the frontier, it further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day.

About the Author

Dr Reeju Ray is an Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. She has a Ph.D. in History from Queen's University, Canada. Her area of expertise is Southern Asian History, and her research interests include Legal History, Human Geography, Memory Studies, and Global Indigenous Studies.