An Endangered History: Indigeneity, Religion, and Politics on the Borders of India, Burma, and Bangladesh

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An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. c. 1798-1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism. animism, and Christianity: speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or slash-and-burn agriculture.

This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as botany, natural history, gender. enumerative statistics, and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map, and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics. race, and nation.

Angma Dey Jhala is an associate professor of history at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Her work focusses on modern South Asian history and religion, with particular emphasis on politics, gender, material culture, law, and indigeneity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Her monographs include Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India (2008) and Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India (2011). She has also edited Peacock in the Desert (2018) as well as published articles in leading journals of South Asian studies.

In the winter of 1771, an English gentleman farmer, on a brief jaunt away from his family, found a bedraggled orphan boy on the streets of Liverpool and brought him home to the dark, howling moors of Yorkshire. The boy appeared to have no discernible race; he was described at various points as a gypsy, an Indian lascar, son of a Chinese emperor, an African slave, and an American/Spanish castaway. It is possible that he was abandoned on the Liverpool docks, after arriving on an East Indiaman from India, China, Malaya, or Dutch Batavia, or a slave ship from Africa or the Americas, as the port city, along with London and Bristol, was part of the teeming British slave trade.2 In his adopted home, the boy found solace in the strange and ungovernable beauty of the moors, delighting in their open spaces, running wild and undisciplined under the wide skies. His close connection to the land, coupled with his indefinable race, ethnicity and 'gibberish' language, rendered him uncivilized, irrational, and inhuman to the English country folk he met. He was a 'universal "other" of no known origin, dangerous and violent.3 Between liminal worlds-occident and orient, metropole and colony, white and black, civilized and savage-the young man represented the foreignness of groups on the margins of colonial society and the porous, liminal frontiers of the Empire. This young man was Heathcliff, the protagonist of Emily Bronte's classic novel, Withering Heights.

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 to mixed reviews, but it would go on to become a significant work of nineteenth-century British literature, and one that tellingly examined ideas of Victorian sexuality, identity, and class. But it is also a work that expressed British views not just of non-European others in general, but specifically those groups that could not easily be categorized through language, race, religion, or geography. Heathcliff falls between various regional/ ethnic identities: Eastern European or Irish (gypsy), South Asian (India), East Asian (China), American (North or South), and African. Many of the adjectives used to describe the young Heathcliff were not just applied to non-Europeans as a whole, but often specifically to indigenous groups on liminal border frontiers of the Empire-areas which could not be easily contained by territorial, geographic, or political boundaries, or, for that matter, by a narrow sets of physical characteristics, social customs, or religious practices. The descriptions of Heathcliff's naive primitivity and childlike, unwavering devotion, his cunning and cruel harshness, and his love for the untamed heath were often used to describe autochthone groups-whether Native Americans, Australian aborigines, or South Asian hill tribes-in larger narratives of imperial encounter and (mis)adventure around the colonized world.

**Contents and Sample Pages**