Ethnography and law
The archive of colonial violence, Garo Hills circa 1830–70
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8960925 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sanghamitra Misra (0000-0002-4430-9291, University of Delhi, Delhi), Sanghamitra M Misra (0000-0001-5192-5095, University of Delhi, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 453-479 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00194646251385682 |
| OpenAlex | W4415871634 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
In the winter of 1848, a military expedition for the collection of revenue arrears from the village of Ripugiri in the Garo Hills region in northeastern India ended with the burning of all the houses and granaries of the village, emptied and deserted by its inhabitants in the wake of the colonial army’s advance. This article resurrects this otherwise forgotten site of colonial violence by situating it within processes of territorialisation of British sovereignty, the constitution of jurisdictional boundaries and the concomitant erasure of native orders of sovereignty. Its various sections are braided by an analysis of the mutual constitution of sovereignty and law in the early nineteenth-century Garo Hills and eastern India more generally, as well their embedding in a military violence that spooled from the rationale of the colonial political economy. A year after the event, the officer leading the expedition recounted the burning of Ripugiri in an essay published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The tensions between the two registers, between fragments of conversations in the colonial administration in the immediate aftermath of the event and a text assembled at leisure and lent coherence by distance in time offer an opportunity to study anthropology and history, in their moments of explicit melding with imperial conquest
Chiefdom · Colonialism · Constitution · Ethnography · Officer · Politics · Power (physics · Sovereignty · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · South Asian Studies and Conflicts
Alibis of Empire
The Jurisprudence of Emergency
Rebellion and Ethnogenesis in Colonial North-Eastern Bengal
From the Door of His Tent
Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991
Ruling the Savage Periphery
The Customs of Conquest
The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception
Settler Sovereignty
Art. VIII.— Notes on the Locality and Population of the Tribes dwelling between the Brahmaputra and Ningthi Rivers
Madmen' of Mymensingh
The concept of tribe with special reference to India
Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty
Neither Settler nor Native
The Apotheosis of Captain Cook
Beyond Norm and Exception
"Photographic "types
Neel-darpan
Fanaticism' and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |