This book is about the entanglements between colonial law, space, and place in regions defined as frontiers in British India. This book shows that colonial law was central to the spatial transformation of the Himalayan borderland region into a frontier space. The frontier was not a geographical site at the periphery of colonial territory. The frontier was produced as a particular type of political-legal space and was integral to the imperial project. The book will follow law’s movement- it’s ebb and flow- into such spaces through practices of border making, jurisdiction, and colonial knowledge. Over the course of the nineteenth century colonial law manifested in the frontier as simultaneously ambiguous or absent, paternalistic or utilitarian, and pervasively violent. The book carefully unravels the mechanisms of colonial law in geographical ordering of the frontier and the concomitant identification of inhabitants as “tribal”. Law assumed the task of defining both people and the region using tropes of primitivism. The two broad legal definitions, that of British and non-British territory, incorporated other legal categories such as frontier, tribal, settlers, agricultural land, waste land, cultivator subject among others. These categories emerged in legal discourse to serve colonial commercial and defensive concerns in the frontier. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects while they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The book examines the nature of this legal limbo that in turn placed both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions to the imperial project.

The book is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature of this legal limbo that produced both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions but equally as integral to the imperial project. Through a study of place-making by indigenous inhabitants of the frontier, it further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day.