Imagining colonial Assam

The Figuring of wastelands in its making

Abstract

Colonial intervention has nuanced our ways of understanding of spaces. One such construct has been that of ‘wastelands’. Land and its management had been a crucial adjunct to the fiscal-military regime of the East India Company. Across South and Southeast Asia the state has viewed unoccupied customary land as ‘idle’ or ‘waste’ land. Classifying wastelands in India is rooted in the colonial land settlement process. The notion was constructed on the western perception of land use attempting to read into propriety rights in the colonised countries. ’Unoccupied lands’ or ‘wastes’ were construed as lands outside the territory ordinarily held by native communities. Land belonging to the common use or those left fallow was not comprehensible, neither was it compatible to their notions of private property.

Crucially linked with the category of wasteland is that of the emanation of private and exclusive rights over property. The term property along with ‘private ownership’ formed the bedrock of 18^th century politics and political imagination. Pre-existing dissonances between the ideal of absolute ownership and customary rights were suppressed by not recognising collective rights.[1]The idea that land was productive only when occupied or improved went hand in hand with legalising land ownership through title. In property theories derived from the European or North-American experience, ‘first possession’ is usually assumed to result in continuous occupation and use of the newly acquired object by those who have claimed first ownership.[2]

To reinforce these categories the colonial legal codes were put in place which transformed forests into two categories: ‘natural forests’ and ‘agricultural land’.[3] Previous codes of land management systems did not differentiate between the two categories. Once local spaces have been transformed through categorisation, they are then policed using techniques of power and discipline that included territorial zoning and mapping, the constitution of institutions of enforcement, and the creation of exemptions, among which are customary[4] According to Sucheta Mazumdar, the brutal process of enclosure in Europe that accompanied the process of the creation of the legal codes impinged upon the both on political theory and legal theory. Through one of the trickiest modes in Western European philosophy she argues they ensured the ‘erasure of personhood of non- European humans’ based on the treatise on property.