Gunnel Cederlöf Examines Nature and Empire on India’s Northeastern Frontiers
The South Asian Studies Council welcomes to its colloquium Gunnel Cederlöf, professor of history at Uppsala University, Sweden. Professor Cederlöf will deliver a talk titled “Rule Against Nature: Founding an Empire on India’s Northeastern Frontiers”. The talk explores two of the critical problems for the British East India Company—climate concerns and subject rights—when the corporation set up an administration on its ‘North-eastern Frontier’ from the 1790s to the 1830s. It draws on a larger study that combines environmental and legal history to better understand the complex and uneven process through which the corporation formed into a governing bureaucracy in the larger region.
4.30pm, March 6 · Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
The colonial administrative ‘frontier’ spans the Brahmaputra to the Burmese border. The region was well known among merchants of all nationalities as a doorway to overland trade between Bengal and Yunnan. It connected to the South West Silk Road, and river communication within the region was known to be among the best in the world. In 1765, a Mughal diwani grant (1765) vested this early-modern mercantile corporation with political power and immunities over territories of a scale that challenged British royal control of its activities. However the grant also forced the Company to shift its gaze from water to territory, and to set up land administration. This required governing functions of territorial control and a sphere in which to communicate with subjects. The Company lacked both.
Historical research has tried to establish the coming of the colonial state in India. Signs of the modern have been traced to boundary making and institution building, and the EIC has been claimed to have been the mediator of modern state formation. By acknowledging the early modern character of the corporation and its dependence on existing institutions of political authority in Bengal, we may identify its incapacity to form viable state functions until well into the 1830s. Access to nature, privileges and rights within Mughal polity were negotiated in social networks based on political, social and religious status and institutions. The East India Company lacked the capacity to enter into such networks and into the polity in which the Mughal grant was framed. Negotiation and compromise characterised colonial governance, and polity was shaped through bureaucratic practice.
The monsoon landscapes of Sylhet, Cachar, Jaintia, and Manipur required polities to be contextual and flexible, and to adjust to climatic and ecological conditions. The Company used large-scale land-revenue settlements to master the situation in the diwani territories. Thus in the emerging polity, we may think of landholders as ‘fiscal subjects’. The Permanent Settlement (1793) was simultaneously the most important medium to tie people to cultivated lands and to agrarian landscapes, and a grand failure to achieve longevity for its profound mismatch with nature, climate and ecology.
Gunnel Cederlöf’s work spans environmental, legal and colonial history of early modern and modern India and the British Empire. It focuses on the formation of governance and subject rights at the time when the British Empire formed in Asia, and enquires into the role of commerce, law and property, and the enabling and constraining conditions of climate and ecology. Her publications include Founding and Empire on India’s North-eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity (2013), Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature (2008), Bonds Lost: Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India c. 1900-1970 (1997), Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia (2005, with K. Sivaramakrishnan).