1. Bengali Khasis

1.  Bengali Khasis

 and the first boundaries of Bangladesh

The watershed events that marked the production of a modern boundary between present day Sylhet and Meghalaya started way back in the 1780s. There were two distinct sets of violent conflicts on Sylhet’s northern frontiers[1]. According to Ludden, both escalated during the 1787 famine and ended abruptly in 1790. Though connected, they had different origins and distinct implications. They fell on either side of the boundary that would separate the later histories of Sylhet and Meghalaya (specifically Khasi and Jaintia Hills).

The first set of conflicts had begun before 1780. It focused sharply on Pandua and concerned control over commercial routes and resources in the high mountains (Khasi Hills) above this river port town. Present day Pandua lies in Meghalaya, largely forgotten. Yet this town played such a central role in the history of the Khasi Hills. Pandua was described by Robert Lindsay, the resident and Collector of Sylhet in the 1780s, as being, along with Jaintia(pur), Sylhet’s main port for trade with Assam. Ludden states that these conflicts involved East India Company officials, mountain Khasia Rajas and warriors, Bengali settlers and merchants, private European merchants of various nationalities, Bengali Khasias, and jungle zamindars.

In 1780, Lindsay was warmly welcomed by mountain Khasia Rajas (see Chapter 2) probably because they hoped that he would help them, and he needed their help in return. Their alliance controlled Pandua for 3 years, but in 1783, one of his former allies attacked Pandua and Lindsay brought sepoys to secure Pandua merchant assets, including his own. For the next 5 years, a rough balance of power held at Pandua, where the East India Company had enough force to protect trade and collect some revenue but not enough to protect Europeans, who did business there through resident Bengali and Khasia middlemen.

In 1788, as mountain peoples (Khasias) recovered from famine, some Khasia Rajas wanted to bring European merchants back to Pandua, but other Khasia Rajas captured the town instead. Sepoys seized Pandua in 1789, but lost it a year later, when the East India Company silently abandoned the idea of making Pandua part of Sylhet, and then sought instead to foster mountain commerce across a strictly enforced state border between Khasia and Sylhet territories. Prospects were bright for this plan, because mountain trades had continued through Pandua during the previous decade of hostilities, and resident merchants at Pandua could easily deliver all desired commodities to buyers in the lowlands.

The second set of conflicts occurred in jungles and farming frontiers below the mountains (Khasi Hills) down to the Surma River around Sunamganj and Chhatak. Local conditions became turbulent after 1780, as hill trades increased on routes to Pandua, while Omaid Rezah’s[2] authority declined, and new settlers and investors like Gowar Hari Singh arrived with East India Company authority. Violence erupted in 1788, dispersed rapidly, and focused periodically on markets (ganj) where subsistence goods, especially salt and rice, came from villages and left for the mountains (Khasi Hills).

Widespread conflict raged for 2 years. It involved Khasia and Bengali Khasia merchants, who carried goods to and from the mountains. Bengali Khasias, who moved among high and low lands where they held various proprietary interests, Bengali merchants, villagers and zamindars, and Afghans and so-called “Moguls”; and the East India Company’s army. Most residents got embroiled in conflicts. Zamindars, talukdars, chaudhuris, tankadars, wadaddars, patwaris, and other local men in the ranks of East India Company Raj joined the fray.

Ganga Singh, a Bengali Khasia leader, and his relatives emerged as warrior Rajas, whose mountain pathways provided routes of escape and supply, and who focused particularly on controlling river routes. War ended in 1790, after Lieutenant Cheape spread terror in the region. Ganga Singh probably surrendered, perhaps to prevent more death among his people, and appears to have been influential in securing local submission. Many surviving local officials rejoined the East India Company ranks after prescribed acts of contrition and terms of imprisonment.

In 1790, the East India Company drew a new boundary below Pandua that institutionalized the outcome of war in mountains around Pandua and forests behind Sunamganj. This new boundary of Bengal Presidency in Sylhet became a reality based on Khasia victories in the mountains and British victories below. It ran along the base of the mountains and bisected the route from Sunamganj to Pandua. It marked the northern limit of British Bengal, which only then extended indisputably to the mountains, and equally indisputably, did not include Pandua.

The primary justification for the boundary was that it secured East India Company territory against threats to British authority posed by unregulated mobility between the mountains (Khasi Hills) and plains (Sylhet). According to Ludden, the English drew the boundary to restrict mobility and sever social bonds between people in the mountains and lowlands. The boundary altered Sylhet’s geography by crimping mobility, defining the northern mountains (Khasi Hills) as alien Khasia territory, making northern Khasias aliens in Sylhet, and defining all the farmland below as Bengali.

In the official culture of East India Company Raj, the new boundary separated “races” of Khasias and Bengalis. It restricted “intercourse and intermarriages” that produced the so-called “degenerate Race called Bengalee Cosseahs.” As Lindsay’s successor, John Willes, explained most eloquently, state problems addressed by the new boundary did not arise from the inherent character of the Khasia “race,” but rather from Khasia and Bengali intermarriage, and hence from Khasia and Bengali alliances that threatened the East India Company’s territorial order by mixing lowland popular culture with the wild, unruly culture of the mountains (Khasi Hills), where people did not respect the symbols or comply with the rituals of state authority.

The new state border became a boundary of “free trade” that separated groups who could be and could not be trusted by officials to obey the rules of the state. Willes began to concoct this new commercial geography in September 1789, when he still hoped Sylhet might keep Pandua; but a year later, that hope had vanished, when he detailed a plan to manage limestone trades in the manner of the salt monopoly, as “one mode of preventing wars and disturbance with numerous clans of independent barbarian borderers and on secondary view as an aid toward the protection of the low country against these borderers.”

He did not want to limit private trade in limestone and rejected the idea that “competition among European manufacturers of Chunam [was directly] connected with the incursions and depredations of the Cosseahs,” because merchant “advances seem to be made to inhabitants of the lowlands bordering upon the Cosseah Country, who procure the stones and in reality are contractors for the delivery of the stones to the manufacturers.” But he did believe that, “a promiscuous intercourse with the Rajahs has been and will be productive of constant disputes in the lowlands,” because,

“The mode of getting the stone in the first instance is by purchasing a Stone Hill from Cosseah Rajahs. The Comars or Chunam manufacturers are then permitted to break the Hill and draw the limestone from thence. In an agreement formed between Rajahs and a European, which I laid before the Supreme Board, it was expressed that the Cosseah Rajahs should support him in carrying out his business against all opposition. In another agreement it was expressed that one of the Cosseah Rajahs should receive duties in preference to another. In other instances, I have known provisions for muskets and powder”.

He sought to “remedy this evil without taking the management of the drawing of the stone,” by leaving “the power of trading with the bordering [lands of limestone supply]” to Company servants, who would sell stone from the mountains to private merchants in the lowlands. He then prohibited European merchants from operating personally inside all Khasia territory, including Jaintia and Cachar. To engage in limestone trades, Europeans had now to procure a license from the Collector to buy stone only at Sunamganj or Companyganj (which seems to have been established specifically to regulate mountain trades).

He prohibited Khasia traders from northern mountains (Khasi Hills) from operating personally in Sylhet, but not Khasias merchants from Jaintia or Cachar; and he explained this distinction by saying,

“Wax, ivory, and iron principally from from Cutchar and Jointah from whence limestone are not procured. But these articles as well as Mugadooties are brought to sale in the lowlands by the Cosseah traders who are considered as quiet and inoffensive and are not as some of the Cosseah Rajahs desirous of living by oppression and plunder. The Cosseah traders have and ought to receive encouragement [because] they are oppressed by every independent chief of a little hill and are anxious to live on good terms with our government.”

The new boundary did not end all troublesome travels between the mountains (Khasi Hills) and plains (Sylhet). In 1793, during the East India Company’s wide-ranging confiscation of Bengali Khasia and Khasia land, the Tahsildar of Zillah Bungong reported that Khasias had come and beheaded 5 people and taken away women to the [Khasi] hills. Sepoys then burned Khasia villages before Khasia Rajahs met the Collector and convinced him this conflict continued an old struggle between some Bengalis in the plains and Khasias in the hills, it appears, over land.

Convinced that the violence had not involved unilateral Khasia aggression, the Collector then pursued judicious discipline to prevent further conflict, sending sepoys under orders not to use their weapons to bring Khasia suspects to Sylhet, where the accused received individual treatment as criminal offenders. Another telling incident occurred 2 years later, when Willes traveled to Pandua, where he delivered customary presents to Khasia rajas and then surprisingly marched sepoys on a sightseeing trip to a famous cave nearby, apparently without local permission.

A fight broke out and Khasias gathered “in great force around [his] troops,” sending “arrows flying all around in every direction.” Despite wounds to his men, none died, and Willes escaped without injury. He described the event as “a minor incident” and said that despite their “treachery and duplicity,” the Khasias had overall been “remarkably peaceable.” Nevertheless, while at Pandua, Willes “devised a scheme to punish [the] treacherous Cosseah chief,” by having his village “at the summit of a high mountain” burned. One sepoy died and others received wounds in this punitive action, which must have met the approval of some Khasia Rajas.

Willes explained to his superiors, alluding to local custom, that “Cosseahs cannot be allowed to believe [he] retreated out of fear,” and that he had inflicted this punishment to maintain peace, “in accord with precedent.” Though the new boundary between Khasia mountains and Sylhet District remained open for ongoing mobility, it also marked a new phase in the geographical history of state discipline and territorial order, which imposed a new regime of private property rights in old forests north of the Surma River.

This imposition entailed a forceful, protracted partitioning of old agrarian domains, where shifting cultivation, hunting, permanent farms, trading and fighting had mingled in spaces of boundless mobility between mountains and plains, and where local mixtures of proprietary cultures emerged in mixed Khasia and Bengali environs. In 1780, mixtures of proprietary practices included local respect for the authority of the East India Company, Omaid Rezah, clan leaders, zamindars, Khasia Rajas, and others.

Men like Ganga Singh worked in this realm to create mixed proprietary interests in land, labour, crops, and cash. After 1790, all this mixing faded away as the East India Company’s Sylhet property system extended up to the new northern boundary. With the completion of the Hustabood and Bandobast for the rest of the district, property rights had become more strictly tied to taxation than ever before; and this new rigour, instead of old indulgences designed to woo powerful locals, now encompassed the northern forests.

Four years after his 1789 tour of “devastated parganas,” Willes declared all indulgence for their landowners should end, and they should now be accountable for jamma on normal terms, meaning their land could be sold for arrears. Instead of giving away tax-free grants of forest, as Willes had proposed during the war, Collectors kept old tax rates in force and endeavoured to sell defaulting estates at government auction to new investors.

Land buyers in northern forests now entered a state-managed land market where, as in the case of commerce, individual rights rested on ethnic classifications. The East India Company prohibited all Khasias from owning land in Sylhet District, on the grounds that all their legally owned land had all been acquired illegally, and that they could never abandon alien mountain methods for establishing property rights. Collectors then expropriated Khasia property.

Even major figures like Ganga Singh must have either lost their land to become tenants and labourers, or turned themselves into Bengalis, at least for official purposes. In this context, the land market thrived, as buyers acquired state-defined land rights to support the long, laborious process of clearing jungle, creating new farms, attracting tenants and labourers, establishing markets, and generating crops to sustain a growing population.

North of the Surma river, clearing jungle to make farms involved clearing Khasias from records of land rights and expelling them or making them tenants and labourers. In August 1792, the first recorded auction of Khasia taluks went to Lal Barker. A year later, the Collector reported that he had completed the sale of all the land expropriated from rebellious villagers, except for a “trifling remainder of Cosseah land.” Lal Barker’s purchase typifies two apparent patterns: most buyers bought very small parcels of land, and former Khasia land sold at much lower prices than other land on auction, especially in “devastated parganas” toured by Willes in 1789.

The general reason for the extreme cheapness of northern land on government auction appears to be that it remained covered with jungles where substantial numbers of Khasias still lived. In addition, high tax rates continued to plague potential investors. Jamma remained pegged to the productivity of cultivated land, and thus to the jungle’s potential, rather than current productivity. Owners of jungle found it difficult to expand cultivation, in part because property rights rested on state tax demands poorly calibrated to encourage, let alone subsidize, investment.

All this did not prevent forest investments, but encouraged investors to concentrate on land already farmed, which they might sell or let go on government auction, where they would reap any excess in the sale price over arrears. Sale proceeds might eventually go into clearing forest for new cultivation, but Collectors complained constantly that investors concentrated attention only on already cultivated land, despite much lower tax rates on forest.

All across Sylhet District, many more estates than ever before went on auction in 1792 and 1793. Their jamma in general rose as their proportion of jungle declined, and only a small number attracted no bidders, despite harsh floods in 1791 and 1793.

At the same time, however, by 1797, tracts of land north of the Surma river, formerly owned by Khasis and Bengali Khasis, had been occupied by Bengali cultivators, who “[had] become very willing and eager to enter into regular engagements to pay Revenue.” Again saying that Khasias had held this land by force, failed to bring it to cultivation, and rather “scared away farmers,” the Collector reported that after the East India Company “secured the area and confined Cosseahs to the hills,” peace came to the region along with people who turned forest into farms. This land had not been included in the Bandobast and its cultivators were now anxious to secure their rights, by having land duly recorded in their names. Their total jamma, he said, would be at most 6,000 Cawns, which “[could] be used to defray the cost of Tannahs that defend district against Cosseahs.”

Thus it seems that in the 1800s, Sylhet’s northern boundary marked off Khasia mountain territory from a lowland agrarian region of state authority where farming expanded primarily in and around the small village family estates. In the surviving domains of larger estates, north of the Surma river, however, new farms expanded more slowly, leaving more old jungles in place for the pursuit of traditional Khasia ways of life.

Conclusion

The boundary of Bangladesh formed all at once in 1947, but its oldest segment, separating Sylhet and Meghalaya, indicates much older, more complex, and diverse local histories in the borderlands, which carry meanings quite distinct from meanings inherent in the singular, continuous line we see on national maps.

National boundaries often cover older boundaries, whose meanings have changed dramatically over time, and all boundaries have different meanings for different people in different places. National boundaries are sacrosanct symbols of sovereignty, but for people who move across them routinely, these same boundaries often appear as mere obstacles to mobility.

This popular experience reflects a much older reality than national maps, because for most of human history, states had little power to regulate mobility across their borders. Before 1790, north-eastern frontiers of Bengal remained as open to mobility as they had been during Mughal times and before. Sylhet embraced an array of social environments spanning mountains and plains that comprised a historical space with a very long past and boundless geography.

In 1790, British military victories in lowland forest frontiers of northern Sylhet and Khasia military victories in the mountains above combined to produce the first boundary in the region that endeavoured specifically to restrict mobility from one side to the other. This political boundary became a social boundary on both sides.

Below the mountains, old Bengali boundaries acquired new geographical forms and cultural meanings. Land rights authorized by the state now defined all the local elites who owned bounded plots of agricultural property, including farms and jungles. Khasias became official aliens, disallowed from participating fully in what became for the first time a definitively Bengali agrarian territory.

The first boundary of Bangladesh thus defined Sylhet as a Bengali territory in British India, where alien Khasias might live and work but could never really belong. Ironically, in present day Meghalaya, the reverse may be true - Bengalis might live and work there but can never really belong. Initially, and still today, this boundary defines Bengalis and Khasias as peoples with separate histories, homelands, and cultural identities, which mingle in the local history of the borderlands, where each defines the other, and where the memory of Bengali Khasias north of the Surma river indicates a distinctive borderland cultural past outside the reach of the national imagination.

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[1] The First Boundary of Bangladesh, on Sylhet’s Northern Frontiers,David Ludden, 26 June 2003, For the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.

[2] Omaid Rezah’s family received a Mughal jaghir in return for protecting Sylhet Sarkar against Khasia warriors, and he was last in a line of Mughal frontier commanders, called Tankadars. Omaid Rezah was the largest landholder in Sylhet and the only true zamindar in the district. Bengalee Cosseahs lived mostly inside Omaid Rezah’s jaghir.