Reeju Ray’s Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom and Knowledge (published by the Oxford University Press in 2023) seeks to establish the central role of law in shaping the northeast frontier in British India, particularly the Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia hills in present-day Meghalaya and Sylhet in Bangladesh. In the main, it argues that the extension of colonial law into this region was closely linked to its articulation as a frontier and of its inhabitants as “tribals.” Law assumed, the author writes, “the task of defining both the people and the land in relation to what was understood as an uncivilized and untamed frontier landscape” (p. 1). The book thus begins by foregrounding the question of understanding the formation of the northeast frontier through the colonial project of law.

Set against important issues in colonial legal history, such as the nature of colonial sovereignty and rule of law, violent paradigms of frontier governance, and correlation of legal and administrative practices with conceptions of culture and geography, this seems like a promising project. But contrary to the expectations that it sets, the book does not engage in rigorous historiographical or theoretical discussion of these issues thus rendering them incidental to the overall narrative. This substantially takes away from the potential of this work which then comes across as a straightforward account of the political changes that the frontier undergoes under British rule and the myriad ways in which it gets typecast as “primitive” and “backward” in colonial discourse.

The first half of the book describes the advance of law in the frontier hills and the resultant transformations. The author here confines herself to detailing boundary-making initiatives by the Company from the late-eighteenth century onwards and its impact on local rulers. She discusses, among other things, the deployment of a misconceived hill-plain distinction to separate revenue-paying Company subjects from “unruly” hill tribes which precluded colonial sovereignty (this is not entirely surprising given the long association of hills with lack of civilization and legal primitivism in European intellectual traditions). The hill tribes marked as non-British subjects were still drawn into the framework of colonial law through the policy of “non-regulation” which suspended ordinary laws and regulations in the frontier in favour of special laws unless specifically applied.

One of the major limitations of this scholarship is its superficial treatment of the extrajudicial violence expressed through non-regulation. Although this violence is presumed in the movement of law in the frontier and sets the tone for its discursive production, the forms that it takes in everyday politics are not mapped out. This is in contrast with contemporary scholarship on the northwest frontier which not only looks at the conceptual underpinnings of “exceptional” frameworks used to govern the frontier and their relationship to colonial legality in general but through investigations of specific legislations (such as the Murderous Outrages Act) and excessive forms of punishments meted out also paints a striking picture of the everyday violence that raged in the frontier.

The reconfiguration of custom and customary authority in the frontier through the practice of colonial law is explored in the fourth chapter. The author here attempts to critique the ideology of indirect rule based on adherence to custom. She shows how in the everyday practice of law in the frontier custom was applied selectively in ways that allowed the colonial state to extend its control over the region. This led to the sidelining of certain customs such as the right of subjects to choose their ruler and the sovereign status of the syiem (head of the polity) whose role was reinterpreted as a nominal elected male representative. The latter indicates the general non-recognition of the traditional socio-political authority of women in the new legal order. The reconstitution of custom through law makes for an important and original argument but could have been better substantiated by looking at a more diverse archive of civil law (the author mainly provides instances of disputes related to jurisdiction and succession of syiems).

In the second half of the book questions of law and legal practice assume a backseat as attention is cast on the nature of colonial knowledge production, and how colonial discourse on multiple levels framed the frontier in singular terms: as “primitive” and “backward” and in stark contrast with the modern progressive colonial state. We get a fairly good sense of how these representations circulate, prevail, and impact notions of place. But how these representations feed into and determine the functioning of law is not addressed; in fact from this point on, the link with the question at the heart of this scholarship, that is spatial transformation through law, becomes very tenuous. What becomes clear in these final sections is the primary problem with this investigation present throughout: it is supposedly driven by the question of how law brings the frontier into being and yet it is the story of law in the frontier which never really comes to life and is constantly overshadowed.

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Srishti Narain is an incoming PhD student at the Department of History, University of Toronto.