Manjeet Baruah

Orality remains a powerful idiom, a point of reference and meaning in the politics of ethnicity in the India-Burma borderlands. In a recent body of works on the area, the continued significance and meaning-bearing capacity of orality has been studied through departures from earlier colonial anthropological frameworks. For example, what constitutes the relation between oral form and social relations? Or is orality ideologically embedded? Or what would be some of the methods to read and understand orality beyond their popular representations in the societies? While highlighting the importance of these questions, this essay critically engages with this recent body of work on the above topics. At the same time, the essay also points to some of the limitations in the approaches applied, and indicates possible aspects that could be considered in this regard. The essay also argues that the relationship between orality, identity and the sense of the past needs to be studied beyond the framework of there being a necessary correspondence between form and context. In this regard, identifying the discontinuities in the relationship could provide further insights into the nature of the oral field.

British Assam holds an important place in the history of the British Empire in South Asia. This is especially so in the context of colonial frontier- making. It is in this regard that the book examines what it culturally meant to be a hunter, peasant or rebel between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in the British Assam frontier. The book highlights that these figures are of conceptual significance. While the figures were of contrastive nature, the complexity of underlying relations through and in which British colonialism constituted and reproduced itself in Assam could be uncovered from a study of these contrastive figures. Using a wide spectrum of archival sources, the hunters’ memoirs, the peasants’ ballads and a rebel’s worldview are examined as the cultural forms through which one can study these relations that generated the sense of colonial reality in these figures. Through these issues, the book examines what constituted the nature of the British Assam frontier, and how colonialism and capitalism shaped and reproduced an imperial frontier.

Part of the Empire and Frontiers book series, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, cultural studies, anthropology, literary studies, frontiers and borderland studies and South Asian studies.

Hunting encompasses a range of sensory experiences such as sight, smell and taste (game as food). On the tea frontier of British Assam, such a sensory world of hunting was closely connected to the ideas and practices of empire, as well as to the production of the global commodity of tea. In this regard, A.R. Ramsden's memoir, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in Assam (1945), provides a rich illustration of sensory experiences in the making of such a tea frontier and a global commodity. Furthermore, the memoir is constituted through the complex interplay of senses that is mapped onto the plantation social order. In the process, the sensory experiences of the 'sahib' and the 'native' are organised in an imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making. Yet, given its historical moment, the context of imperial crisis is also reflected in the memoir through the contradictions of sensory experiences and, thereby, the problems faced in producing the imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making.