The northeast frontier of the British Empire framed within a reconceptualized geography of the Himalayan borderlands forms the focus of Indrani Chatterjee's book Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. This book prefigures the transformation of this borderland region into a colonial frontier with an innovative approach and compelling arguments. The thematic concerns raised in the book are of crucial importance for historians and also for sociologists and political thinkers invested in the region. The book attempts to recover lost or forgotten narratives of monastic orders and their social, religious, and political networks spread across the northeast, thereby dislodging the rich and varied histories of this borderland from homogenizing national histories.
Chatterjee's project can be located within the dominant trend in recent historical literature on the northeast, which emphasizes the spatial reconfiguration of the Himalayan borderland region into a colonial frontier. She examines colonial processes of spatial production through a new interpretive framework called “monastic geographicity.” The spatial unit described in the book encompasses Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions in Burma, Tripura, Tibet, Assam, and across Bengal down to the coast of the Bay of Bengal. This space, Chatterjee postulates, formed a spatial unit in the precolonial period through the political, commercial, and social networks of Vaishnav, Buddhist, and Sufi monastic orders and their lay disciples. Her book offers a reading of the simultaneous processes that gradually dismembered monastic geographicity on the one hand, and created the northeast frontier as a colonial province on the other.
The narrative traces the shifts in precolonial spatial, governmental, and politico-economic forms through an analysis of the transformation in gender roles and relations. Chatterjee explores various aspects of colonial fragmentation and production of a frontier space, including the creation of rigid hill-plain boundaries, the ethnologizing of groups as “tribals,” and the emergence of singular male proprietary authority. An analysis of the masculinization of property relations and political authority from the late eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries underscores all six chapters of the book. Finally, Chatterjee contends that the corrosion of monastic governmentality, which accorded women significant religious, economic, and political roles, simultaneously transformed ruler-subject relations, gender relations, and property relations.
The establishment of strict boundaries separating hills and plains was related to the development of ethnological categories used to describe inhabitants of the region. The relationship between these two processes is not clearly indicated. Instead Chatterjee emphasizes the colonial use of preexisting words such as Naga, Lushai, Cosseah, and others to define different ethnologized groups. Naga chiefs, she notes, were relicts of an old Ahom monastic bureaucracy, while colonial records identify the Lushai as groups or bands of militant warriors, ascetics, and bairagis. Despite the recognition of certain differences among these groups and identifying colonial processes that homogenized inhabitants across the frontier space as “tribal,” their migratory histories or linguistic diversity remains overshadowed in Chatterjee's emphasis on their genealogies as erstwhile monastic order subjects, disciples, and authority figures. For instance, variations in linguistic genealogies used to distinguish the Khasis of Mon Khmer descent from the neighboring Garos of Tibeto-Burman descent is of historical relevance to inhabitants of the Khasi and Garo Hills in the present day. The histories of movement and migration, and the double confinement of these groups within taxonomic categories and as inhabitants of hills are related processes, recalled and remembered in the present day through oral traditions, folk tales, and myths.
The book presents a rich analysis of monastic and itinerant hermeneutics in sources including Buranjis, poetry and narratives written by Tantric composers, and heteroglot genealogies. Chatterjee translates both English and regional-language sources and explicates the descriptive terminology and nomenclature used in colonial records against their vernacular meanings. She argues that monastic geographicity's imprint in cosmography and vernacular thought remained strong until the nineteenth century, after which it was forgotten due to the impact of colonial forms of knowledge. However, colonial knowledge did not erase memories but reconstituted them with its dominance. Chatterjee's argument tends to marginalize the conceptions of the inhabitants’ past that were reconstituted over the period she examines. Historical memory of the various groups inhabiting the region in the present day, and their mutually constitutive conceptions of the past and self, inflected in contemporary identity-based movements, can be used to magnify the important analyses in this book.
Colonial knowledge disrupted, erased, and marginalized local knowledge and imposed new understandings of space and identity. An intersection of geographic, anthropological, and legal discourses produced colonial taxonomic categorizations of communities spread across the frontier space. Such ideas of social difference and civilizational hierarchy separating communities living in the plains from those living in the hills, “tribal” from “non-tribal,” and “migrant” from “indigenous” have plagued the social milieu of the northeast in the postcolonial period. The timely publication of this book offers a much-needed perspective on the shared histories of the different communities in the region whose self-understanding within the colonial and later nation-state frameworks has been the cause of severe conflict. This book is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of histories that wrest the region and its inhabitants from homogenizing national narratives.
