The Chin-Lushai Border: Community, State, Market : Emerging Perspectives

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Keeping the community, state and market at the centre of the larger space discourse on borderland, this book conceptualises different perspectives of space in the borderland in the colonial, post-colonial and the emerging market economy regimes that engaged the community, state, and the market in a triangular contest over such space. The referential point in this book is the Chin- Lushai borderland of Myanmar and India. Spread over six chapters, this book makes a comprehensive analysis of the triangular space contest and makes an overall critique of the emerging space discourse in the said borderland under market economy. Hope, this book will interest the academic community and the policy makers.

Dr. Asok Kumar Ray taught in Government colleges in Manipur and was a Visiting Fellow of OKD Institute of Social Change and Development, Guwahati. He conducted a few major research projects of contemporary relevance on North-East India, authored eight books, co-edited eight books and wrote more than one hundred research papers. His papers on "Voluntary Efforts in Weaker Community Development- An Indian Experience" in 37th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, Stockholm; on 'Globalization in North East India' and on 'Orientation of school teachers of USA in the International Education Conferences, Wisconsin University and his public lecture on 'Look East Policy and North-East India' in the South Asia Studies Centre of the same university received high appreciations. Dr. Ray is presently engaged in a few innovative studies on North-East India.

The region of North-East India as we know of it today has been a unique amalgam of diverse geographical, social, cultural, religious and political space The journey of its history since the colonial days is pretty long. The division of the region into subsequent small state units has been the effect of post- colonial struggles of identity and autonomy of different phases over time Among others the entire region of North-East India is also characterised by its long stretched international boundaries facing different state units such as Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram etc. The border region as a result is again marked by its formal and informal trade and other kinds of transactions which indicate different trends in the development of the history of the region.

Professor Asok Kumar Ray, a noted scholar on North-East India, was entrusted with a project by the Asiatic Society and the present publication is the result of that project. Professor Ray has examined this encapsulated geographical space across different dimensions including its history, policy and economy. He has also highlighted certain emergent issues that require close scrutiny by the scholars of North-East India as well as others concerned with the development of the region.

I hope this valuable publication will be use to the scholars, planners and administrators as well.

The study is based on a rethinking on Chin-Lushai border of Myanmar and India by synthesising the community perspective with the state and the emerging market economy perspectives. Hitherto, the notions of border, boundaries and frontier have obsessed the academic community who have viewed border as a subject of International Relation that laid primary focus on state-to-state relation and state constructed foreign policy devoid of community perspective. There is now a felt need to rethink and factor in community perspective within the larger scope of border studies.

The community perspective warrants an anthropological approach. The colonial rulers understood the importance of an anthropological approach to understand the customs and practices of the Chins. Stevenson wrote the book, "The Economics of the Central Chin Tribes", in the preface of which he wrote that 'the science of anthropology has been revolutionized and its importance to the administrators concerned with the primitive raised to such a degree that most governments insist on their executive officers having some anthropological groundwork in their training. Many go further and employ whole-time anthropologist to provide the background of detailed knowledge of tribal customs without which no administration can deal successfully with the problem of changing world' (Stevenson 1943: vii). There was a strong agenda to isolate them from the mainstream of the colonial state through making boundary, border and frontier. The frontier was always treated as a strategic geographical zone where there were considerable tribal constellations. Moreover, colonial anthropology was engaged in 'savaging' the borderland community space which needed to be conquered and aggrandised. The colonial modernity nurtured the concepts of border and boundary which gave them a reasoned alibi for strategic and economic control of the border space.

It became necessary therefore to deconstruct the extant colonial anothropological notions of border, boundary and frontier and to re- construct those notions from the historical and contemporary community perspective. Factoring in the community perspective in border studies might emancipate the geography of ignorance and bring back the geography of experience to its right place.