2“Reclamation” is usually studied with a focus on land and, more specifically, concerning the construct of “wasteland.” This construct was used extensively by the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent over the more than a century-long territorial conquest of the Brahmaputra-Meghna Basin (Sivaramakrishnan 1995; Sharma [2011] 2012:34; Chakraborty 2012; Behal 2014; Cederlöf 2014; Hilaly 2016). “Wasteland” was automatically understood as “unoccupied” or “vacant” lands as land ownership in imperial discourse was closely tied up with European philosophical and Christian notions of “productivity” as the marker of ownership (Hilaly 2016:55–56). Such “unoccupied” lands in the Northeast Frontier and throughout the Indian subcontinent were then “reclaimed” into so-called productive endeavors such as “forest reserves” and “agricultural lands” which involved forceful removals of indigenous peoples and the arbitrary dismissal of their claims to these lands (Kumar 2005; Misra 2024).

3We can see “reclamation,” therefore, as instrumental in transforming the submontane tracts south of the extended eastern Himalayas into a “resource frontier,” whereby the assumed political boundary in the foothills did not stop the British Empire’s extractive activities beyond the said limits (Majumdar 2016). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2003:5100), in her work on late 20^th century South Kalimantan, Indonesia, argued that a “resource frontier” came into being “where entrepreneurs and armies were able to disengage nature from its previous ecologies.” “On the resource frontier,” Tsing (2003:5100) further argued, “the small and the great collaborate and collide in a climate of chaos and violence. They wrest landscape elements from previous livelihoods and ecologies to turn them into wild resources, available for the industries of the world.” Tsing focused largely on the displacement of existing indigenous rights in her work, and such was the (desired) outcome of the processes linked with “reclamation” too.

4Of resources that were turned “wild” and extracted from previous livelihoods and ecologies in the area and period under study, rubber has received some attention. Existing scholarship agrees that the British Empire’s rubber trade in the frontier spaces north of Assam constitutes a history of attempting to wrest it away from the control of the indigenous population (Kar 2009b; Majumdar 2016). However, in this paper, we historicize how humans were projected as “wild” through the category of “tribe”: we demonstrate that the objectification of humans as “tribes” was analogous to the “discovery” of “wild resources” waiting to be appropriated in the “industries of the world.” This speaks to Benjamin D. Hopkins’s (2015:381) characterization of the ratio of the tribe vis-à-vis the British Empire as “imperial objects.” This process of appropriation, we argue, can be located in the imperial archive as “reclamation” and tells a different story of the transformation of the Siang Valley into a resource frontier. We argue that it is not a coincidence that “reclamation” characterized the future in which the British Empire understood its relationship with those it presupposed as “hill tribes.” Just as “wastelands” had to be “reclaimed” and made “productive” so did those who were categorized as “tribes.”

6Our use of “reclamation” as an analytical lens also engages with the notion of “Zomia,” as formulated by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Our engagement, however, is indirect. According to Scott’s formulation, Zomia “hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys.” State evasion in this formulation becomes the cornerstone of the existence of the “hill people” (Scott 2009:ix-x). Jelle J. P. Wouters provided a powerful critique of this formulation, arguing that “the history of those dwelling in the hills can equally be read as the history of their deliberate attempts to access state resources. A consequence of this is that the survival of a valley state depended on its ability to keep marauding hill tribes at bay” (Wouters 2012:61). Our study of “reclamation” aims to give nuance to Wouter’s thesis of plain states “keeping the hill tribes at bay.” As stressed above, the act of presupposing the difference between the “hill tribes” and the plains subject was couched in the British Empire’s self-projection as the harbinger of “civilization” around the world. As the “civilizing” agent, the Empire posed itself as being responsible for overcoming such differences. In such a discourse, resource appropriation could be projected as “reclaiming” populations, and integrating them into “civilization” just as conquest could be described as the “extension” of “civilization.” Through “reclamation” the British Empire obfuscated an attempt to appropriate those categorized as “hill tribes” as laborers into an act of their “reclamation” by “civilization.” Although there is nothing novel about arguing that the British Empire obfuscated economic processes as forces of “civilization” however, this work is necessitated by the scant attention “reclamation” has received in the historiography of such obfuscations as well as the historiography of the hill and plain binary in the Northeast Frontier of the British Empire.

7Finally, as we will see, reclamation (or its relative failure) contributed to the graduation of the politics of differentiation into the kind we are more familiar with through the extant scholarship we cited above. This kind prioritized “keeping hill tribes at bay” (Wouters 2012:61). To demonstrate this, we juxtapose the politics of “reclamation” with the British Empire’s desire to “cheaply” effect the extension of its commercial and strategic networks into Tibet and China. As we will show, reclamation was also aimed at effecting this extension. While the British Empire sought to empty the Abors of their submontane habitats and settle them in the plains, the Empire simultaneously envisioned what would have become the Abor families” erstwhile habitats as launch pads for the commercial and strategic networks into Tibet and China. Therefore, both reclamation and extension were the British Empire’s designs of conquest. However, as we will also see, the British Empire faced stiff resistance from the Abors in their designs to reclaim and extend, leading to years of hostilities from the middle of the 19^th century onwards. These hostilities, we argue, signaled the British Empire’s failure to reclaim and led to the drawing of a boundary along the foothills south of the habitations of the Abors in 1862. This event did not completely cut the Abors off from the plains, nor did this invalidate reclamation as the horizon of expectation in which the category of tribe was understood. However, it can be seen as the inauguration of an era of the frontier where the empire was just satisfied in “keeping the hill tribes at bay” as reclamation kept receding into further futures. This failure to reclaim, we argue, contributed to the advent of a new phase of differentiation in the second half of the 19^th century. This phase of differentiation prioritized the repelling of the “hill tribes.” It intensified the racial and ethnogenetic nature of the British Empire’s projection of the presupposed difference between “hill tribes” and “plain subjects.” Therefore, it can be argued that “reclamation” played a significant role in intensifying the transformation of the area under study into an imperial borderland, a site of conflict and violence.

8In this way, reclamation brings into sharp relief the difference between the concepts of “frontier” and “borderland.” In this paper, we understand the frontier as a zone in which the geographic and cultural borders were presupposed by the British Empire allowing it to play the role of the agency that makes those borders ineffective in a way that politically and economically benefits it. If we take Adelman and Aron’s (1999:815) understanding of a frontier as “a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined” as what a frontier is, then this paper argues that the notion of the frontier was the future the British Empire aimed at. However, as this paper argues, with the failure of reclamation, by the 1860s the British Empire had in its hands a “borderland” in the south of the Siang Valley, i.e. an area characterized by contested boundaries between the British Empire and the Abors.

ABORS, “RECLAMATION,” AND “EXTENSION”

• 7 Letter from E. T. Dalton, Officiating Political Agent, Upper Assam in charge of Luckimpore to Franc (...)

It is likely to prove advantageous to all parties they spend the cash paid to them as soon as they receive it and (which is all for the good of the trade) and as they seldom think of buying food with it they are thrown on their own resources are thus tempted to work or to cultivate in the plains for their subsistence whilst living there, and this will eventually I think lead to their settling permanently in our territory… I trust I may be allowed to assure them that their settlement in our territory will make no difference in regard to their black mail claims though, of course, after a fair period of grace they will be required to pay revenue like other ryots (Emphasis added).7

10The “Abors,” however, who are the subject of this chapter are the “Abors of the Dehang Debang Dowars” and “Meyong Abors.” The posa boundary was established as part of the Anglo-Abor Engagements of 1862 although at the time the payment was christened as a “stipend.” That it took till 1862 to institute the posa for the Abor chiefs is an indicator of a different mode of “reclamation” than that the British Empire had sought to utilize up until then. And the following is that story. It is the story of the conflict between “reclamation” and “extension.”

THE ROAD TO CHINA

11From 1826 to 1835, many officers in the British Military Forces were employed to find all the possible routes into Burma from the Brahmaputra Valley, Sylhet, Kachar, and Manipur. Numerous British military officers also explored suitable routes into China through the Eastern Himalayas and the Kachin State in Burma.

12Possible hostilities with the Burmese Empire were still on the horizon. Fort William had to ensure that Burma was well connected by land. Captain R. Boileau Pemberton synthesized the findings of all these explorations in the Report on the Eastern Frontier of British India, submitted to Fort William in 1835, which was then printed by the latter. While his text focused on possible routes into Burma, he also discussed possible routes into China and Tibet from the West and East of the Dihang River (1835:1–2).

13Pemberton’s report included descriptions of explorations by officers of the British military force in the east and the west of the Siang River in present-day Arunachal Pradesh, where they encountered the Abors (Adi) and Miris (Mising) among a host of other peoples identified as “tribes” on the North and West of the frontier bordering the district of Lakhimpur in Upper Assam. In the course of these explorations, they discovered traces of possible routes from the Dihang-Lohit Valley into China, which seemed a readymade financial avenue the British could exploit. In this report, we get a glimpse of the full force of the commercial motivations behind the imperial designs in the Northeast Frontier when it states:

routes of commercial intercourse which already exist from Assam into Bhootan, Thibet, and the provinces of Ava, and from the latter into China, Muneepoor, Arracan, and the Tenasserim provinces, maybe still more widely opened, and the traffic which is now carried on between the inhabitants of these several countries be indefinitely extended (Pemberton 1835:165, Emphasis added).

15Topography of Assam belonged to the tradition of medical topographies, a tradition of colonial medical literature that usually concerned itself primarily with the salubrity and the potential healthiness of a landscape. It aimed to support the argument for further annexation and colonization of Assam. However, discussions on salubrity and its contingent factors were pushed to later chapters in the Topography, while the importance of the route to China found was included in the first. This testifies to the importance attached by the British Empire to how these routes were perceived. M’Cosh wrote:

Considering the small extent of land that intervenes between the navigable branches of the Brahmaputra, and the sources of the great rivers of Ava, of Martaban, of Cambodia, and of Nankin, an overland communication by means of a good road would be mutually bene­ficial to the three great nations (India, Ava and China) whose territories there meet; and would open a direct inlet for the importation of all the valuable productions of Northern Central Asia. It would also tend to civilize (sic) the Hill Barbarians who inhabit these regions; and enable a force to penetrate into the center of their country whither they can at present retreat before a superior force with compative (sic) impunity; and in the event of its ever be­coming [sic] necessary to take vengeance on the Chinese, an armed force embarking on the Brahmaputra could march across the mountains and enter Yunan, one of the richest provinces of the empire (M’Cosh 1837:12).

16Road building always preceded conquest, as has been argued by Lipokmar Dzuvichu (2013) in the context of Naga hills in the 1860s–1910s. This is also revealed by the zeal with which the British Empire protected the road over the Khasi hills in the late 1820s (Barpujari 1970:37; Cederlöf 2014:88–91). The road to China, as imagined by Mc’Cosh, could be made to serve the same purpose, with the extension of “civilization” to the “hill barbarian” further legitimizing this conquest.

17However, British officials had been facing difficulties in accessing these routes since they first found out about them. Pemberton’s report also lamented the opposition to British movement in these areas by indigenous peoples. He wrote:

The Abors occupy the lower ranges extending from the Dihong River to the Soobunsheri, and the Meerees principally, the plains stretching from the foot of the Abor hills up to the right northern bank of the Burhampooter. Captains Bedford and Wilcox are the only officers who have ever penetrated into this tract of country, in endeavouring to trace the Dihong River, and the knowledge acquired of the tribe is still very trifling, their intercourse having been confined to short interviews with the Abors and Meerees, who opposed their further progress up the river… The Bor Abors occupy the more lofty and retired ranges, and appear to be held in great dread both by the Meerees and Abors below them. They are apparently held aloof from any communication with our local authorities, and have uniformly opposed the attempts that have been made to extend our researches in that most interesting scene of geographical inquiry (Pemberton 1835:77–78, emphasis added).

18The British Empire’s failure to acquire knowledge in the 1820s and 1830s about the routes to China through Tibet through the hills inhabited by the Abors was closely related to its relative success in realizing another of its avowed aims, reclamation.

THE PROBLEMS OF “RECLAMATION” AND “EXTENSION”

19The desire for reclamation in the form of the relocation of “hill tribes” in the plains seems to have been realized to some degree by the 1820s and 1830s when the British Empire engaged with those they identified as Miris. However, the British Empire reached this stage while simultaneously accruing the displeasure of the Abors.

20William Robinson’s discussion on the Abors and Miris in A Descriptive Account of Asam (1841) throws considerable light on this issue. The aim with which Robinson wrote this text, dedicated to Francis Jenkins, the then Political Agent of the Governor General in the Northeast Frontier, was to satisfy a “great desideratum” owing to Assam’s “daily increasing importance” as “the scene of great commercial advantages to British India” (1841: V). The lengthy discussion on the existence of the tea plant in Assam testifies to the fact that Robinson wrote this text to attract the attention of European capitalists to the area. However, the equally extensive discussion on the “hill tribes” also reveals how the British Empire wanted to project its relationship with them.

21Robinson (1841:356) wrote:

The Abors look upon the Miris as their dependents, and have generally exacted from them a heavy tribute; to escape which, the latter have removed in large numbers into the plains of Asam. The Abor chiefs have constantly demanded that they should all be sent back, but as no compliance has been made to these repeated demands, the Miris have gained confidence in the British authorities and are emigrating in still greater numbers.

22Furthermore, while writing the description of the Abors, Robinson (1841:363) tells us that “the Abors conceived themselves injured by the British government in its refusing to surrender the Miris, who have effected their escape from the authority of the Abors, and sought an asylum in our territories.” Robinson here was alluding to the experiences of the expeditionists who had engaged with the Abors in the 1820s. As their narratives tell us, the Abors had leveraged the knowledge of the routes further into their lands—and, by extension, into Tibet—as an asset to support their demands that the British Empire’s push the Miris into their earlier territories.

23Lieutenant Wilcox’s memoirs, which appeared in Asiatic Researches in 1832, recount his attempt to explore the Abor Hills in January 1826. He reached Shigáru Ghat, opposite present-day Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, but could proceed no further. The chiefs of the Abors from Menbú (Mebo village) and the “Bor-Abors” refused to guide him until the British Government “restored the Mírís to their former places, at the mouth of the Dibong” (Wilcox 1832:342–43). It can be understood that, when it came to reclamation of the Abors, the Empire was walking on thin ice.

24Wilcox further writes that, in 1826, a large group of Mishmis (“hill tribes” who inhabited the Lohit Valley eastward of the Siang Valley) migrated to Sadiya (the easternmost outpost town in Upper Assam), causing significant discontent among the communities of the Abors. There was a proposal to return the Mishmis, which, as they assured, would significantly improve the Abors’ disposition towards the British. However, this proposal was rejected, and the Mishmis settled in Sadiya. Wilcox (1832:394) believed that the presence of the Mishmis in Sadiya might lead the Abors to favor the British to maintain their trade networks, as the Mishmis were the known traders, and the Abors relied on them for exports from Tibet to a great degree. The British protection of the Miris and many Mishmis likely pressured some of the communities of the Abors to be conciliatory towards the British.

25In 1827, the Abors of Membú (Mebo) invited Wilcox to meet them and presented him with a round stone symbolizing their stable and lasting friendship. Wilcox (1832:395) tells us that the presenters told him, “Until that stone crumbles into dust, shall our friendship last, and as firm as its texture, so firm is our present resolution.” However, not all the communities of the Abors shared this sentiment. In a village on the Siku River, the chiefs demanded the return of the Sadiya Mishmis and resisted British advances. Wilcox’s expedition did not achieve significant results as the Abors of this village refused to allow further progress.

26Nevertheless, Wilcox and Lt. Burlton attempted to explore further up the Siang River but faced resistance from the villages of Pasí and Padu. The villagers were concerned about offending their northern neighbors, the Bor-Abor. Despite assurances of non-interference, the British were allowed to proceed only with local guides who both assisted and imposed limits on their journey, preventing them from exploring specific paths and ultimately concluding their journey.

27The chief of the Dúkú clan and some influential men among the Bor-Abors visited Wilcox and Burlton when they returned to their base at Shigáru Ghat. Both of them refused to lead Wilcox to their respective “villages” as the inhabitants had taken offence with the British when the latter’s refused to return the Miris to their former station. However, the “chiefs” told Wilcox (1832:409) that they would try to “exert their influence” and send an invitation from the communities they hailed from.

28By 1827, the British officials were prepared to offset the potential displeasure their possible new friends might elicit among the Abors by acquiescing to their repeated demands with an attempt to return the Miris to their former habitations. Years later, in 1883, Capt. Mitchell (1883:54) wrote in his Report:

The Abors wished them to be settled in the deserted villages at the mouth of the Dihong (Siang) and Silani Mor, as their presence enabled the hillmen to trade readily with the plains without taking long journeys. They also recognized the advantage of being able to trade with the Miris on their terms and having it in their power to ill-treat them if they objected to Abor fancy prices.

29We cannot ascertain if the British government knew they would subject the Miris to this predicament in 1827. However, it can be sufficiently said that they were willing to go against their imperative of “reclamation” to humor the Abors indisposed towards the British and to quell their displeasure. Nevertheless, as Mitchell tells us, this plan had failed when it was proposed in 1827.

31In December 1835, 200 members of a community of Abors, led by a “chief,” came down voluntarily to settle within a territory that fell into the “criminal jurisdiction” of the British Empire. The Empire had to reject the offer from the Abors who had desired to emigrate because, although the “Abor chief” was ready to “give up any of his people guilty of criminal offences,” he “demurred to the introduction of… [the British Empire’s] … police officers for the apprehension of offenders.” Furthermore, he could not agree to be subjected to taxation as “they had never been accustomed to do so.” The officials were apprehensive about settling the Abors close to the people over whom they previously claimed supremacy (Butler 1847:113; Mitchell 1883:56; Mackenzie 1884:35).

32We learn about this event from Major John Butler’s A Descriptive Sketch of Asam (1847). In this text, he explains this southerly movement of the Abors who sought to relocate inside British jurisdiction. According to him, it was because of the scarcity of means of subsistence that Butler (1847:113) sought to replace the Miris who “formerly laboured” for them and had “emigrated to the Upper and Lower Assam.”

33Let us conclude this discussion on the relationship between the British government and those they identified as Abors between the 1820s and 1840s. From 1825 till 1850, the context of the Empire’s engagement with the Abors can be understood in terms of the former’s desire to effect “friendship” with the latter in terms of the materialization of the route to Tibet and China. Furthermore, this “conciliation” was also desired to remove the Abors’ opposition to the movement of other populations into the plains. Through this “conciliation,” the British officials hoped to make it possible to “reclaim” some of the Abors themselves. Thus, we can say that the Empire had made extension difficult in trying to “reclaim” populations in the hills by effecting their migration to the plains. Therefore, enmity with the Abors could not be avoided if both the objectives of “reclamation” and “extension” had to be achieved. The realization of the desire to “reclaim” was at odds with the desire to extend.

34This uncomfortable situation is quite symptomatic of most of the published and unpublished descriptions of the Abors in this period. Robinson expresses clear frustration at not being able to “win over [the] influential men” to “the gaining of any point at issue with the Abors.” He writes, “It is singular to observe in these people all those different shades of extreme rudeness and civilized observance of laws, enacted and allowed by them to be necessary for the good of the community” (Robinson 1841:359).

35However, from the middle of the 19^th century, the desire to extend began to lose steam, although it should not be understood as its complete abandonment. From this point onwards, newer concerns were emergine regarding the proximity of the Abors and Mishmis to Tibet and China. By 1847, not only were the “uncivilized tribes” standing in the way of the empire’s eastward extension from the Siang, but the British Empire was also, “for prudential motives” abstaining from “giving offence to or exciting the jealousy of the Chinese” (Butler 1847:125). However, the “hill tribes” had to be kept within the line of sight! Butler reminds his readers that if the “Thibetans,” whom he understands to be a “branch of the Chinese empire,” established “supremacy” over the “hill tribes in allegiance to the British government,” the empire’s interests would be affected. However, he also depended on the “rude present state of the society” and the “immense, desolate, almost impassable tract” to deter this from happening soon (Butler 1847:120–21). The British Empire’s failure to uniformly influence and reclaim the myriad communities in these areas identified by the British as “hill tribes” was also understood as evidence that any other empire would find it equally, if not more, challenging to win them over.

THE BORDERLAND EMERGING

36As can be imagined from these descriptions, the situation was also tricky for the Abors towards the end of the 1840s. Their erstwhile labor force, which they took among the Miris, had abandoned the status quo, and as a result, some of these Abor communities also wished to emigrate to the plains. It then makes sense that in this period, they took a conciliatory stance towards the British Empire, bartering, albeit cautiously and conservatively, information regarding their geography to restore the hierarchy through which they ordered themselves among the other communities inhabiting these areas. It can also be argued that the Abors, as well as the “Bor-Abors,” were anxious to “reclaim” the “tribes” who had immigrated to the Plains. In fact, “reclaim” is the word used by both David Scott and the Governor General in Council to understand the demands of the Abor communities who desired the return of the Miris, as we saw above. Can we then argue that the British Empire saw itself in competition with the Abors over the Miris?

37As revealed from these narratives, the British Empire understood the “tribes” in the higher elevations seemed to have had an unequal relationship with the communities in the lower ranges. As the empire saw it, the Abors exercised power over the Miris, who are understood as living closer to the foothills. The Abors also prevented the British expeditionists from visiting the habitations of the “Bor-Abors,” citing fear of accruing the latter’s displeasure. As it presented itself to the British expeditionists, this order of differentiation seems to have allowed the locally differentiated communities to resist strangers from beyond. Given that the empire understood this to be an unequal hierarchy, it also explained to them the migrations of the hill populations of the lower ranges down to the plains. For whatever reason, these groups traded the subjection of their supposed former superiors for that of the British Empire. From the empire’s perspective in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seems that by “reclaiming” the people in the lower elevations, a chain reaction had begun whereby the networks of labor and commerce could be removed from the hills and made to accumulate in the plains, leading to the gradual “reclamation” of all the “hill tribes” in this area, owing to their gradual impoverishment due to want of labor.

38If the British Empire could turn these people into subjects, the British officials would not have found it difficult to make their new subjects act as guides through their erstwhile habitations and then to Tibet and China. Moreover, in such a situation, the extension of political control over these areas would not have amounted to a significant challenge.

39According to Mackenzie, in 1884, Capt. Hamilton Vetch, the Political Agent of Upper Assam, “had the most friendly conference” with the Abors of Pasi, Mebo, and “other Padams” in 1847.” To please him, his hosts gave up the captives voluntarily, and negotiations regarding a “trading store” under the protection of the British Empire went underway. Mackenzie later wrote that, at that point, this must have seemed to the Empire a “fair prospect … of ultimate success.” But somehow, “this promising commencement of intercourse was never regularly followed up” (Mackenzie 1884:36).

40More and more of the “hill tribes” of the lower elevations began to emigrate to the plains, and the communities in the plains to whom the British Empire had farmed the right of washing gold in the plains through auction stopped acknowledging the supremacy of the Abors. The tension between the various communities of Abors and the British empire kept escalating till they reached a crescendo, and an era of hostility began in 1848. The empire’s inaction in securing the trade between the Abors and the plains population is seen by Mackenzie as contingent on, if not the causation of, the hostilities between the British Empire and the “Dubha Abors” (Galo), where the former demanded the “restoration” of the “Cachari gold washers.” While this objective was achieved, the offended Abors attacked Vetch’s camp at night. In retaliation, Vetch burnt their village, “a step…” writes Mackenzie, “ … which led to a submission of the offending tribe, but which, however righteous act in itself, tended greatly to disturb the generally harmonious relations…” between the “Assam officials” and the “wild tribes” in this quarter (Mackenzie 1884:36).

• 12 Letter from Captain H. Vetch, Political Agent, Upper Assam to Major Francis Jenkins, Agent Governor (...)

in each cold season, at the same time, to conciliate and cultivate friendly intercourse with the Abors, advantage should be taken of the escort to encourage traders to accompany it for the establishment of an annual market or fair on the banks of the river, and for which the Abors have little at present to offer in exchange, but as they are in considerable number trade might be expected to spring up and eventually find an opening into Lamma Tibet” (emphasis added).12

42As can be seen, the desire to “extend” at a minor expense was still active in the imperial bureaucracy even though the relationship with the Abors was deteriorating at a rapid pace.

THE REJECTION OF RECLAMATION

43The discussions regarding the cultivation of “friendly intercourse” with the Abors in 1851–1852 give us an image of the play of “reclamation” beginning to lose its earlier sheen. Although the Miris were under the British government’s protection, Vetch also saw them as having a convenient refuge in the Abor Hills and [they] are willing tools if not the instigators of the Abors in their extortions.” Anxious to secure their reclamation, he wrote to Jenkins,

• 13 Letter from Captain H. Vetch, Political Agent, Upper Assam to Major Francis Jenkins, Agent Governor (...)

“to show the Meerees (in the north bank) that we treat them as subjects, they should be placed as their brethren (in the south bank) … as regards assessment, which is trifling enough, i.e. one rupee per adult male, for which he is allowed, to cultivate whatever extent of land he pleases.13

45Notwithstanding these designs, the story of the relationship between the Abors and the British Empire from the end of the 1850s is that of a series of hostilities interrupted with moments of “conciliation,” as Mackenzie (1884:37) tells us that the latter could not carry out any of the “conciliatory” measures due to the immediacies of the Second Anglo-Burma War (1852–1853).

50The Abors were seen by the British Government as “far the best disposed of the hill tribes, though the most powerful, and never known to commit an act of unprovoked ravage or outrage on the villages of the plains" in the 1830s, began to be seen as “wild beasts” in the 1860s. (Mackenzie 1884:35) In 1862, following a supposed “aggression” by the Angami Nagas in North Cachar, while suggesting coercion against the tribes, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Hopkinson, wrote,

• 20 Letter from Lieutenant-Colonel H. Hopkinson, Agent to the Governor General and Commissioner of Assa (...)

The circumstances under which the Nagas and the Garrows, or even the Abors live, are not so dissimilar from the conditions under which wild animals exist, … the savage can do whatever the wild animal does … he draws health and vigor from an atmosphere, which is swift, subtle, and deadly poison to all other human beings (emphasis added).20

CONCLUSION

52From the 1860s, the desire for reclamation faded out in terms of policy as military officers and tea planters in the frontier advocated cutting off the hills from the plains for security reasons and had to justify their stance to the higher offices in Fort Williams. Furthermore, Francis Jenkins, the chief proponent of “reclamation,” retired as Chief Commissioner of Assam in 1861. He was replaced by Henry Hopkinson, who we find above likening—objectifying—the Abors (and Nagas and Garos) as “wild beasts.” His appointment can be taken as evidence that direct Crown rule in the Northeast Frontier no longer saw “reclamation” as a viable immediate policy, even if it was still seen as a distant favorable outcome. Ethnological and racial reasons for differentiation were furnished in treatises authored by erstwhile officers of the frontier, such as E. J. Dalton’s well-known Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal.

53However, even though the British Empire had succeeded in objectifying the Abors as “tribes,” therefore justifying the Empire’s desire to displace them from their habitations, the Empire was not able to move the Abors around as objects. As a result, a despotic force such as the British Empire doubled down on their politics of differentiation and went on a career that further reified their presupposed difference between the “hill tribesman” and the “plains-subject” transforming the Siang Valley into a borderland. Further objectifying the Abors as objects of the wild exterior of the plains subjected to civilization under the aegis of the British Empire. As we tried to show, the story of this transformation serves as a painful reminder of the long-standing effects of imperial differentiation, which took many forms, including that of “reclamation.”