Suchergebnisse

Arkotong Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Delhi: Navayana, 2022, 336 pp., ₹599.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Peasant insurrection was endemic to the north-eastern borders of Bengal, including the submontane region of Gird Garrow, a characteristic shared with the contiguous Garo Hills. Locating these conditions of insurrection within changes in the order of the regional economy under the Company's rule, the article elucidates the economic rationale of 'primitive violence' and reflects on the processes generated by the state itself in the course of subjugation of the Garo peasants in the region.

AbstractThis article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with 'tribes'/'peasants' in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the 'tribe' under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

Jangkhomang Guite, Against State, Against History: Freedom, Resistance, and Statelessness in Upland Northeast India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 364 pp.

The article is an inquiry into the elision of an image—that of the cotton-producing Garo—in the colonial archive. It situates this inquiry within the pre- and early colonial era where it is still possible to uncover elements of the irrefutable sovereign presence of Garos in eastern India as well as of the regional economic and political system through which the Garo social being makes itself historically visible. Parsing together a narrative of the Garo political order in this period, the article will discuss the ways in which the sovereignty of a people was pivoted around the production and trade in cotton. Rescuing the image of the cotton-producing Garo from the colonial archive is also a retracing of the seamless becoming of the Garo peasant, as adept at working with the hoe as with the plough, into a cotton trader who embarked on long journeys on foot and on boats every cotton season to the lowlands. The article will also probe into the germaneness of the concept of the 'hill/forest tribe' with the sedentary plainsman as its oppositional image and the embedding of ethnicity in circumscribed 'natural' habitats in eastern India by the colonial state.

This article reconstructs the relationship between the colonial state, law, agrarian groups, and non-sedentary communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the border-land area of Goalpara in colonial eastern India, a historically liminal and fluid space defined by the co-existence of sedentary and mobile lifestyles, and by the persistence of fluid notions of sovereignty and territoriality. It looks at the ways in which an entrenched colonial state, through its tropes of colonial modernity (sedenterisation, 'settlement of wastelands', and the extension of colonial legality into aspects of everyday life), irrevocably transformed the social and material life of local groups within a brief period of less than half a century. Complex social relationships and networks between communities were frequently reduced to sharp dichotomous ones, despite the persistence of a multiplicity of overlapping identities (and histories). Further, changes in the region's economy, following the migration of thousands of cultivators from eastern Bengal, were accompanied by the introduction of new concepts of space and shifts in local perceptions of law and other colonial institutions. This provides the context for recording resistance to, and circumvention of, these projects of the colonial state (in particular, its cultural legacies) by the colonised. The article underscores Goalpara's regional identity as a distinct 'borderland identity', and locates all of these processes within the space of borderland histories and their interrogation of dominant categories and imaginations of both colonial and nationalist agendas.

The emergence of an Assamese linguistic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw its proponents drawing from the colonial linguistic project as well as from indigenous cultural reserves to create a political community that threatened to subsume imagin-ings of smaller regions. This article looks at some of the ways in which resistance to the im-position of a standardised vernacular from Goalpara's traditional elite and the newly-emerging urban intelligentsia transformed language into a symbol for these sections, while also becoming associated with other social roles and group identities. It looks at some of the connections between speech, political culture and economy in the region, focusing on the tensions involved in the relocation of the boundaries of language and the construction of linguistic autonomy, frequently in opposition to both colonial and Assamese nationalist imaginations. It locates these attempts at challenging dominant narratives within the context of both the emergence of a vernacular print culture and a public space, and changes in the material context, in Goalpara and Assam. The article argues that language reflected this material context, and hence reiterates the significance of economic forces in determining discursive practices. Equally importantly, it emphasises the relevance of regional history writing, underscored in this article in the formulation of Rajbansi as the language of a 'Pranto' or frontier, for demon-strating larger propositions about the nature of colonial rule.

OBJECTIVES: Complementary and integrative medicine (CIM) therapies show clinical benefits with minimal side effects, yet challenges to effective integration in hospital settings remain. The current study aimed to better understand the process of integration of CIM therapies at a large urban pediatric hospital from the perspectives of providers, parents, and administrators. DESIGN: The study employed an applied medical ethnography. SETTING: The ethnography was conducted before, during, and after an Integrative Medicine Pain Consult Service (IM Pilot) was implemented at a large urban pediatric hospital during the spring of 2017. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Fieldwork interviews, participant observations, and document review captured aspects of the integration of CIM over a 6-month study period. Ethnographic analysis included thematic content analysis. Participants included providers (n=10), administrators (n=5), and parents of patients (n=11). RESULTS: Emergent themes from analysis of the interviews and field notes were organized according to the socio-ecological model. Themes included facilitating factors for CIM pain management at the intrapersonal and community levels (Alignment with Parental Perceptions of Child Needs and Provider Desire to Offer Care, Alignment of CIM with Spiritual Beliefs and Community Norms) and barriers at the interpersonal, organizational, and political levels (Inter-professional Challenges, Lack of Logistics in Place for Referrals and Triaging Patients with Pain, Lack of Remuneration/Insurance Reimbursement for Care). CONCLUSIONS: To address barriers, future efforts to implement integrative pain management programs in pediatric hospital settings may consider testing implementation strategies, including engaging program champions and family advocates, providing education on CIM professions and therapies to hospital staff, and billing for provider time rather than individual CIM therapies.