Colonial Law and Its Unfolding Paradoxes: Community Formation in Indias North East

Abstract

It is now increasingly being realized that multicultural politics is 'as much about acknowledging working from the multiplicity of our communities in national politics as it is about multiplicity within communities' 1 Communities being internally differentiated along such lines as class, ethnicity, gender and so forth get themselves formed insofar as these internal differences are transcended and each of them is marked by a certain consciousness-of-kind so much so that members within the community become 'equivalent' to each other in a way that they together form a body. While formation is a historical process, a community - Wendy Brown warns us - does not have a 'metaphysical referent2 ' . This paper seeks to find out how colonial law contributed to the formation of communities in India's Northeast. Although colonial law and legal reforms brought into existence a vast repertoire of and a classificatory scheme for the communities in the Northeast, the repertoire was by no means exhausted by it. Correspondingly little attempt has so far been made in the existing literature at reflecting on the role of law in the formation of communities of the region. The existing literature rather views law as a mode of governing the communities that supposedly pre- exist the advent of legal reforms initiated by the colonial authorities. It hardly tells us how law played a role in constituting the communities, in constantly configuring and reconfiguring them, in helping create the vast repertoire of communities that would either be rendered governable in the long run or could successfully be kept outside the colonial rule in a way that eventually benefited the perpetuation of that rule. The paper also cites examples from the post-Independence experiments with law and legal reforms in the region on the assumption that the postcolonial does not mark a paradigmatic break with the colonial in this region