Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Introduction
Until the late nineteenth century the world described in this paper had been identified on the colonial map as 'Wild Tribe', akin to an irregular inverted triangular shape, located between latitudes 21° and 24° north and longitudes 92° and 94° east, and encircled on all sides by established valley states. To the east and south were the Kale-Kabaw valley and Arrakan states of Burma, to the west was the British Indian district of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the northwest was the state of Tipperah (Tripura), and to the north lay the British district of Cachar and the state of Manipur. Today, this region is part of the Mizoram state of India, the Chin Hills state of Myanmar, and some contiguous territories around them. Just as it received the uniform civilizational name of 'Wild', it is also treated here as a separate sub-cultural zone within the larger region known as 'Zomia'.1This sub-cultural zone was, and still is, inhabited by the 'Kuki-Chin' people of the Tibeto-Burman language family (excluding Meitei/Manipuri).2It was from here that a series of sanguinary raids upon British territory were committed before the zone was annexed into the Empire. This paper looks at the period prior to the annexation in 1892-1893 beginning with the early decades of the nineteenth century. This period is crucial to the history of this 'Wild' country, in that some Kuki chiefs obtained western-made firearms which led to the emergence of a new political formation. Their territorial expansion resulted in the subjugation, displacement and migration of its people in a series of chain reactions that ultimately pushed many of them out into Manipur, Tripura, and the British districts of Bengal and Assam.3
This paper attempts to understand the Kuki raid in relation to colonial spatial ideology and its hill-valley binary. Although forms of tribal and peasant resistance differ from one context to another, it is an accepted view now that they resisted established authority when their very existence, such as their historical rights over land and resources, was under threat, and/or against different layers or forms of exploitation and control which they regarded as intolerable.4This paper makes the point that the Kukis raided British territory...