The Friends Who Never Were

Abstract

The manner in which the British Empire categorized the Abors and the Miris as “hill tribes” and transformed their habitations in the Siang Valley (present-day Arunachal Pradesh, India) into “borderland” is historicized in this paper. Differentiation between the plains subjects and “hill tribes” has been recognized by extant scholarship over the past two decades as the nonpareil British imperial strategy of the extension of imperial political control beyond the cartographic limits of British imperial jurisdiction (Kar 2009a; Misra 2011, 2016; Simpson 2021; Ray 2023). However, the present analysis focuses on an understudied aspect of the differentiation between the two groups for the task of this historicization. This aspect of differentiation, by no means inconspicuous in the imperial archive, was “reclamation.” “Reclamation” can be understood by focusing on the British government’s desire to bring those they understood as “hill tribes” from their habitations higher in the submontane areas down to the valley, where they could then be used as labor. By training our focus on “reclamation,” this paper aims to make an original contribution to historicizing the relationship between the British Empire’s politics of differentiation and of bordering in the first three quarters of the 19th century in what it called its Northeast Frontier.

Keywords

• hill tribes
• borderland
• Siang Valley
• British Empire
• reclamation
• differentiation