The India-Bangladesh border is among the most politicized in the subcontinent. In recent years, the Indian government has implemented a series of drastic measures to identify, corral, and whenever possible expel people it considers illegal aliens—generally Bengali-speakers, generally Muslims—deemed to encroach on its north-eastern regions. This obsession with Bangladeshi immigration has much to do with Narendra Modi and his BJP's drive to fulfil their Hindu Nationalist vision for India, but also to make inroads into north-eastern India by harnessing a century-old issue in local politics. One of the states in question is Meghalaya, the region at the heart of this book.

Discourses on so-called encroachment betray fears about where, and how, to place boundaries between people and places. An increasing number of works investigate how north-eastern India's particularly complex human and physical landscape became a laboratory for all sorts of boundary-making attempts—first by the colonial state, then by the independent Indian, Chinese, Burmese, and Pakistani/Bangladeshi states. Such processes depended on the construction of “savage frontiers,” places where governance—often animated by geographic and climatic determinism and ideas of differentiated historical progress—acquired exceptional characteristics. In India's north-east, this meant the formation of an enduring geo-cultural framework: the concept of a hills-plain divide. Ostensibly spatial, the dichotomy is also ethnic and racial (tribe vs. caste, Mongoloid vs. Indic) as well as historical (backwardness vs. civilization). Reeju Ray expands on the works of Gunnel Cederlöf, David Ludden, Sanghamitra Misra, and others by exploring how a particular part of north-eastern India—the lush highlands north of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta—came to be bordered and identified as Bengal and Assam's backward frontier.

Ray's contribution is to offer an in-depth examination of the role of law in this process, rooted in the forensic examination of legal records alongside the folktales, myths, and oral histories of Meghalaya's people. Placing the Frontier is a book in two parts. In the first section, Ray explores how unequal diplomatic treaties, contracts over mining and forestry rights, administrative regulations, boundary delimitations, and judicial rulings on jurisdiction, customs, and chiefly authority, served to mark out the highlands as separate from the plains, and the people on either so-called side as fundamentally different from each other—and, in doing so, to extend the writ of empire and capital over the areas called the hills and their residents, identified as tribes. The second part of the book shows that, despite colonial law's encroachment, the highlands remained permeated by the Khasis, Garos, and Jaintias’ own engagement with belonging in space.

Law, Ray convincingly argues, travelled up the hills even in the absence of formal colonization and administration, and it did so largely through an overarching mechanism: dispute resolution. Every time a local ruler took up arms against empire; every time a zamindar argued that non-sedentary cultivators be sent back to the hills (where European ethnographers said such agricultural practices belonged); every time a British magistrate in Sylhet argued that, really, the hills ought to begin only once the only way was up (chapter 2); every time a European limestone magnate clashed with a ruler over the right to mine the hills; every time a “heinous crime” was committed “up there” (chapter 3); every time rulers found themselves without clear successors (or the ruled, unwilling to accept the one chosen) (chapter 4), the law intervened to circumscribe, fragment, and climb up the hills. And there were countless such disputes. To capitalist eyes, the highlands’ forests and limestone deposits were ripe for the plucking. Moreover, the hills’ population was ethnically diverse, and their petty rulers (syiems, dollois, wahadadars) ran in the dozens. Their overlapping authority over people became a conundrum once ideas of property and singular jurisdiction took root.

Officially, the highlands were non-British (qua non-revenue-yielding) spaces. In practice, it was bloody hard to figure out where the highlands began. The plains had the bad habit of “undulating” (69), the Jaintia Rajah of ruling significant portions of Sylhet, and the Garo “hill tribe” of living in the plains as much as in the hills. Moreover, while the frontier seemed too costly to administer, its forests and mineral deposits were too costly not to control. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia Hills accordingly came under Frontier Regulations that allowed British colonial authorities to intervene legally whenever exceptional circumstances arose. Conveniently, these circumstances were both vague and plentiful. The threshold for exception was low and the opportunities for disputes high. And so it was that law became, as Ray demonstrates, a strategic instrument for the colonial state to bring the hills under control, even as it shied away from direct administration or making their inhabitants subjects endowed with a modicum of rights. “Differentiation and domestication became concomitant colonial strategies that created the frontier through law” (24). In doing so, law both shaped, and was informed by, determined attempts to gather and systematize geographic, economic, and ethnographic knowledge about the frontier.

Ray then turns to the Khasis, Jaintias, and Garos’ insurgent response to these transformations that sought to reduce the hills as a place of spatio-temporal primitiveness, and their people, as cornered-up objects of ethnographic curiosity and discriminatory laws. From the late nineteenth century onwards, a written public sphere emerged among English-educated Khasis in particular. (The hills, like much of north-eastern India, were a major frontier for missionary work.) Jeebon Roy, Radhon Singh Berry, H. Onderson Mawrie, and others spearheaded the creation of modern indigenous knowledge and identity discourses on the hills. The Seng Khasi organization pushed back against Christianization by collecting, analyzing, and publicizing Khasi thought, religion, and customs. Ray stresses that colonial categories of knowledge nevertheless deeply informed such alternative visions (chapter 6). In particular, “writing superseded orality as the valid, reliable, and dominant source of knowledge in the hills” (143).

And yet, as Ray's final two chapters show, the frontier remained a layered and contested site, where collective memories and practices revealed the enduring influence of other modes of understanding and belonging. Ray emphasizes this through a poignant section on khynmaw, the monoliths that “dot the landscape of the frontier hills” (162), some standing, others not. Tellingly, the word means both “stone” and “memory” in Khasi. Replete with all sorts of meanings, khynmaw above all embody ancestors’ continued presence and insertion in the landscape. And these manifestations emphasize the central importance of matrilineal ties and female roles in local society. Oral culture and sacred spaces, meanwhile—whether through the recitation of myths recalling how sedentary agriculture was historically practiced in the highlands, or the rituals associated with law kyntang, the sacred groves that allow, and require, humankind to engage with a landscape endowed with agency—betray the incapacity of colonial and state-led geography to reduce place to coordinates and usable space (chapter 7).

Even so, indigenous place-making isn't necessarily progressive, Ray reminds us. This is particularly the case in relation to gender. Shaped by Christian missions’ restrictive ideas around girls’ education, the indigenous middle-classes that emerged in the late colonial period were almost exclusively male. This, combined with the colonial state's own patriarchal prisms, meant a certain gendered understanding of Khasi identity and society took control, eliding women's role in it. Gradually, women were excluded from Khasi politics and socially marginalized from decision-making, often on supposedly religious grounds—a process reinforced by the 2005 Khasi Custom of Lineage Act.

This is a book so rich in detail, so close to its sources, that distinguishing the wood from the trees may be hard, particularly for audiences not already familiar with north-eastern India. Yet readers have much to learn from Ray's attentive reconstruction of law's corrosive “ebb and flow” (2) through the land Khasis, Jaintias, Garos—but also Bengalis—call home and of her excavation of memories, identities, and power centers that subvert it. Northeast India is recovering from its erstwhile marginalization in historical scholarship on South Asia, and our understanding of frontier-making in the region has progressed by leaps and bounds. Though Ray might have been more explicit in delineating it, Placing the Frontier makes a significant contribution to this momentum.

Zooming out, even briefly, to adopt a comparative perspective would have enhanced that contribution further. What is clear, by now, is that Northeast India contained a multiplicity of colonial frontiers. So far, the historiographical emphasis has been on identifying what they had in common. In this context, the Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia highlands represent a unique opportunity to highlight the north-eastern frontier's heterogeneity instead. Meghalaya has a unique position vis-à-vis other historical frontier spaces in the region: it experienced widespread immigration from “plainsmen” earlier than other highlands, and its inhabitants (Khasis above all) were soon deemed more civilized than other “tribals” (but also, and therefore, more acculturated) by colonial authorities. Remaining so close to the ground, Placing the Frontier perhaps misses an opportunity to articulate what made these specific highlands both unique and exemplary. And yet, in her passionate commitment to them, Ray has given us a book that splendidly affirms, on its own terms, the importance of a particular place.