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This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic geographicity led to the creation of sites set apart as 'Nepal', 'colonial Assam', 'Burma' and so on. Hitherto pastoralist but Bon-Buddhist monastic subjects were separated from their 'brothers' in monastic subjecthood. Such physical separation was reinforced by historical writing as well. In the twentieth century, colonially educated native scribes embraced both geographical and epistemic projects enthusiastically. Bhuyan, the foremost practitioner of this mode of history writing, thus failed to recognise the Buddhist and Bon Tantric cohabitants of the Brahmaputra river valley. In order to establish what was known of these people before Bhuyan's time of writing, this essay has been organised in three parts. The first contains a short discussion of monastic governmentality and subjecthood. A second provides a truncated narrative of events that brought Mughal armies in the seventeenth century to the same terrain. The third surveys moments from the Company and British military accounts of 1794–1928 to explain the modern postcolonial Indian historian's aporia towards Buddhist and Bon Tantric populations living alongside Muslim and Hindu groups in the Brahmaputra valley and plains.

AbstractThis article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.