Nature may exist outside society, but natural resources are social phenomena, composed of social investments that give nature social life.¹  Modernity has so invested nature with national identity that national maps now often appear to contain nature the way a Petrie Dish contains amoeba.² But national maps do not describe nature’s social geography; they rather represent modern territorialism impressing itself on nature; and territorialism is not the only social force invested in nature: mobility is equally important. Focusing more attention on mobility’s investment in nature is critical as globalisation increases the power of mobility over natural elements, which begin their social life in national territory but may not stay there for long. Using only national maps to imagine geographies of natural resource environments blinds analysis in one eye.

To imagine better maps, we need to put geography in motion, to keep temporal as well as spatial dimensions in view. When we do, we see that natural resources live in social geographies defined simultaneously by mobility and territorialism. Natural things become natural resources in any one place only because social assets that make nature productive move in time and space. Globalisation expands the geographical scale of an old fact of life for natural resources, which begin their social life in places where people make territorial claims to nature, but live mostly in the realm of mobility, where all the social resources that combine to make nature productive move from hand to hand, place to place, and from one social identity to another.

Intersections of territorialism and mobility have shaped natural resource environments in south Asia since prehistoric times, and their conflicting cultural attachments animate old village communities and agrarian regions as well as modern cities and national states.³ The basic source of their conflict is this: people who live inside each enclosed territory enjoy proprietary authority over resources in that territory, which they invest to accumulate resources inside their own territory, while mobile folk move resources from one territory to another, to combine with local assets and to carry the proceeds away, back into the realm of mobility.

Over the centuries, transactions between mobile and territorial interests have expanded product chains and social wealth, but have also typically pitted mobile and territorial claims to resources against one another, as in classically fraught relations between nomads and farmers, between shifting and sedentary cultivators, and between merchants and artisans. A more complex but critical example of creative tension appears in histories of nationalism and globalisation: that is, in fraught interactions between mobile folk who bring separate territories under expansive, encompassing territorial authority, and local territorial folk who covet assets that move across wide spaces but also fight to maintain their own territorial order so they can put assets from the wider world to work on their own ground.

Combining productive powers and reconciling conflicting interests of territorialism and mobility became the specialty of elites who produced most historical records, who typically live in central territorial sites, spread their influence across networks of mobility, enrich themselves at intersections of territorialism and mobility, and endeavour to accommodate conflicting claims to resources with various combinations of coercion, adjudication, patronage, and persuasion. The geographical reach and provenance of resource elites has changed countless times, over centuries, and thus, their territorial domains have acquired many shifting, mobile geographies. In this light, we can say that in the long span of history, mobility has had the upper hand, overall, in transactions with territorialism.

From Mauryan times onward, mobile folk have repeatedly reshaped natural resource environments in southern Asia. In the second millennium of the Common Era, the spatial scale of mobility increased, as Turks, Afghans, Mongols, and Persians reshaped territories across Asia, as Europeans reshaped territories across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and as mobile folk in south Asia reshaped territories across the subcontinent. By the 18th century, mobility made the fixing of boundaries in India quite imaginary, for as much as half the population may have then comprised mobile artisans and workers, peasants colonising new land, itinerant merchants, nomads, pilgrims, shifting cultivators, hunters, migratory service workers and literati, herders, transporters, soldiers, people fleeing war, drought, and flood, and camp followers supplying troops on the move. All this mobility entailed widespread conflict and a huge expansion of commercial activity, commodity production, and global interconnections.

In the 19th century, territorialism began its long march to modern dominance, and in south Asia, it marched with and against the British Empire.⁴ National state boundaries only covered the globe after 1950, however, and only then did all the histories of all peoples in the world, for all times, begin to appear inside our cookie-cutter world of national geography.

The force of mobility did not decline in the world of national maps, however. Declining transport costs, bigger populations, and increasing spatial inequality rather expanded its scale of operation. National boundaries now represent legal and cultural norms, but they do not contain mobility; they rather constitute modern instruments of power over mobility. Today, the new complexity of old tensions between mobility and territorialism appears most poignantly inside national territories, where people strive simultaneously to enforce the closure of their own territories, to control nature inside their own boundaries, to exclude and subdue aliens, to move in and out of territories, to bring in and take out resources, to move and settle in resource-rich places, to change and mix territorial identities, and to expand claims to resources in mobile territories like those defined by metropolitan regions, multinational corporations, and the US military.

To imagine more realistic geographies of natural resource environments than national maps provide, we can begin by abandoning the idea that territorialism could ever contain mobility. Territorial wealth and national development depend on mobility that territorialism cannot control, and mobility is always at work transforming territory in ways that territorialism does not comprehend. Thus it makes sense to locate studies of natural resource environments at geographical intersections of mobility and territorialism.

Locating Sylhet

Within a hundred mile radius of the city of Sylhet, in north-east Bangladesh, many territorial transformations have occurred over the centuries, in expansive geographies of mobility where people and resources have travelled widely and also combined locally in the social process of investing in nature. Sylhet city inhabits a mound of land in the floodplain of the Surma River.⁵ The city’s immediate surroundings are as densely populated as any part of Bangladesh, but overall, the Sylhet region is much less densely populated than Bangladesh, at about 70 per cent the national figure,⁶ because it includes thinly populated mountains and lowlands that flood deeply and extensively for half of every year.

Sylhet inhabits nature-on-the-move. Tectonic shifts continue to lift the highlands and depress the deepest-flooding ‘haor’ basins.⁷ Natural gas moves underground in tectonic folds.⁸ Thumping earthquakes periodically destabilise water’s established pathways.⁹ The Surma and the Kushiara define the Sylhet lowlands but are but the biggest of many moveable rivers descending from the mountains of Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, and Assam.¹⁰ Forty miles upstream from Sylhet town, the Surma and Kushiara split from the Barak. A hundred miles downstream, the Surma and Kushiara meander, split, and recombine before joining the Meghna, which then joins the Brahmaputra, whose main course shifted in the 1780s to send its confluence with the Meghna a hundred miles south.¹¹

All the lands around Sylhet were originally covered with dense jungle, broken only by rivers. Amidst massive annual flooding and the highest rainfall in south Asia, lowland societies have navigated this overflowing geography at strategic elevated sites, where inundated fields meet habitable land hacked out forests, above the flood.¹² Nature’s topography is thus a natural resource of enduring significance. Sylhet’s town site typifies the lowlands by being partly natural and partly constructed. Eighteenth century District Records indicate that embankments that protected Sylhet town and farms around it were built, rebuilt, strengthened, and lengthened repeatedly to prevent the land washing away.¹³

Sanctity marks many old sites of social investments on the land around Sylhet.¹⁴ Upriver in Cachar, a cult site for Kapilasram (or Siddheswar) retains the memory of an ancient river goddess who was eventually overshadowed by Siva. Such overlays occurred as migratory settlers transformed local territory, in the case of Kapilasram, as Bengali brahmans established Siva’s local authority.¹⁵ In the Dimasa language of people in Cachar, ‘Dimasa’ means ‘sons of the river’,¹⁶ and Khasi people in nearby hills worship many river gods, among whom, goddess Kupli reigns supreme.¹⁷ Kapileswar perhaps came to life at an old Kupli cult site, where a social stratification of cult practices emerged as high caste settlers worshiped Siva, while other locals venerated the site but not Siva.¹⁸

Kapilasram seems to encode the incorporation of an old Khasi locality by immigrant Siva-worshiping Bengalis. This cultural change would have been part of a very long, complex set of transformations. Like many other groups now called ‘tribes’, Khasis once occupied many sites in the lowlands, ¹⁹ in their case, up the Ganga basin into Bihar and down to the old Ganga delta. Khasis settled there as specialists in shifting rice cultivation. Ancient Khasis pioneered rice farming in Vietnam’s Red River delta, and when conquered by Vietnamese, moved up the Red River, to Yunnan, China, and across northern Burma, into Assam and the Ganga basin. As Gangetic agrarian societies expanded their territorial domains eastward, from Mauryan times, people like the Khasis enriched Hindu cultures, but Gangetic territorialism also rested on the expansion of permanent farmland that forced all the Munda language speakers, including Khasis, to submit, assimilate, or move.²⁰

Over the centuries, lowland territorialism compelled and informed tribal territorialism in the uplands. In 1600, Koch, Khasi, Garo, and others still occupied many places in the lowlands, but facing unprecedented pressure to submit to the Mughals, most retreated to the mountains.²¹ After 1600 and again after 1800, the accelerated expansion of sedentary agriculture drove shifting cultivators out of the plains;²² it also increased violence between contending interests on the land, confined tribal societies to the hills, and produced new political forms in the mountains. All these connected trends continue today.²³

Siva’s overshadowing of the river goddess in Cachar represents one local moment in the advance of lowland territorialism, which produced Bengali societies on moving eastern frontiers of Gangetic cultures, by pushing permanent farms into places inhabited by shifting cultivators, who lived in the highlands and lowlands, who moved freely among forest and field, mountains and plains, and who hunted and fished without settling down permanently anywhere.²⁴ Though mobile lifestyles remained well adapted to the environment’s watery uncertainty, animist cults and non-Aryan practices, including matrilineal kinship, marked shifting cultivators as primitive aliens for the Hindu, Muslim, and European lowlanders who invested in nature inside expansive territories of sedentary agriculture, urbanism, state revenue, and permanent territorial authority.

Sylhet town (Srihatta) became a major centre of lowland territorialism after the 10th century CE. Before then, copper plate inscriptions indicate that land around the Kushiara was more densely populated, because Kamarupa kings had granted large tracts of land to immigrant brahmans and their supporting castes, to make this region part of Assam (Khanda Kamarupa).²⁵ In the 13th century, Afghans conquered Sena rajas, inducing more Hindus to move east into Sylhet, ²⁶ and Sylhet town’s site on the Surma became a fortified centre for local rajas. In the 14th century, the town received the sanctity of Shah Jalal, who arrived from Turkestan with 300 ‘darvish’, conquered local rajas, and introduced Islam. Ibn Batuta met Shah Jalal, in 1346, and described his commanding stature, ascetic celibacy, yogic discipline, and miraculous deeds. The first Arabic inscription to mention Shah Jalal, dated 1506, comes from a ‘blessed building’ that perhaps housed Sufis visiting his tomb, which soon became a pilgrimage site. ²⁷ Shah Jalal’s spirit still pervades Sylhet, where some say it makes the land the richest in Bangladesh.²⁸

Ibn Batuta boated down the Meghna, in 1345, and saw “water wheels, gardens and villages such as those along the banks of the Nile in Egypt”. He wrote that, “For 15 days we sailed down the river passing through villages and orchards as though we were going through a mart”.²⁹ He did not describe market towns, as he did routinely elsewhere.³⁰ Thus, 14th century Sylhet seems to have no big market towns, but its saint from Turkestan and visitor from Morocco show it did have wide connections, and mobility changed the land in centuries to come.

Mughals brought unprecedented force.³¹ Sylhet became a Mughal frontier town on river highways to the lands of unconquered opponents, Khasis, Dimasas, Ahoms, and others. When Mughals conquered Orissa and Bengal, Afghans fled up the Meghna and became powerful around Sylhet. A Mughal fleet sailed to Sylhet, and in 1612, Mughals conquered Afghans, but highland peoples, including Khasis, Garos, Ahoms, and Dimasas, did not succumb.³²

Conquest invested nature with cultural politics. Afghans escaped Mughals into forested hills and haor depressions, where high caste Hindus had escaped Afghans, three centuries earlier.₃₃ Myriad escape routes made most land around Sylhet impossible to conquer, until 1830, when the British finally succeeded. Until then, highbrow lowlanders considered Sylhet a wild frontier, and rulers supported settlers who would use the weight of demography to civilise the land. A seventh century inscription described Sylhet as ‘outside the pale of human habitation, where there is no distinction between natural and artificial; infested by wild animals and poisonous reptiles, and covered with forest out-growths’.³⁴ Kamarupa kings gave tracts of forest to brahmans to civilise. A millennium later, Mughals gave forests to Muslims and Hindus. In the 18th century, Nawabi Faujdars and forest grants brought Sylhet firmly into the ambit of Bengali Muslim culture.³⁵ Meanwhile, Rajas in Cachar and Jaintia embraced Hinduism and patronised Brahmans who expanded mixed Hindu-tribal polities and mixed tribe-and-caste societies around the Barak valley. In Cachar, Hindu rituals elevated Bodo rulers over Dimasa subjects and enabled high caste Bengalis to mix among tribal masters, neighbours, and servants, in the manner of oil on water.3⁶

Natural Economy

Over the centuries, local territories of natural resource utilisation diversified along a topographical continuum running from the highest highlands, where shifting ‘jhum’ cultivation prevailed, to the lowest lowlands, where farmers grew ‘boro’ rice, planted in December-January, when fields dry out enough to plant, and harvested before the floods arrived in May-July. In 1800, forest still covered much of the land, roughly in proportion to altitude. Permanent agriculture expanded and contracted, in fits and starts; and expansion only gained a firm upper hand in the 19th century.³⁷ Farmers facing recurring flood calamities routinely abandoned old farm sites, allowing forest to return as they colonised new land. The 1780s brought the worst floods in memory, which destroyed farm investments in the years when the Tista River shifted its course, joined the Brahmaputra, and changed its course as well.³⁸ The 1790s brought floods and earthquakes that demolished the lowest farmland behind the 18th century market town of Ajmiriganj, spawning endemic malaria, which stymied new colonisation until 1900.³⁹

Nature’s topography defined economic geography. In the late 18th century, farming communities in the lowland floodplains grew almost nothing but ‘boro’ rice, which they consumed with locally abundant fish. There were no large market centres, let alone major cities, by the standards of lower Bengal, no weavers exporting cloth, and no locally resident rich merchants, let alone portfolio-capitalists.40 ‘Hundis’ were so hard to find that early Company Collectors had to ship revenues on armed boats to Dhaka.41 No European Company ever made a major commercial investment in the Surma basin. Yet markets thrived, as supply and demand met in countless small transactions with little input from urban commercial networks.42 Rulers received taxation only in cash. Specialists in fishing, horticulture, hunting, mining, trade, transportation, crafts, finance, and administration all bought rice in local lowland markets that thrived amidst the flood-induced uncertainty of local rice output. In 1790, Sylhet District had over 600 named market places (hat, ganj, and bazaar).⁴³ Long-distance commodity chains passed through them, up and down the Meghna, to and from Dhaka, Narayanganj, and Bakarganj (near Barisal), and up and down the Barak valley, to and from Manipur, Assam, and Burma.⁴⁴ As the number of market centres increased in Bengal generally,⁴⁵ Sylhet town became a more active regional market, to which the Manipur and Tripura rajahs built a new jungle road from Manipur, in the 1790s.⁴⁶

Many commodities in the lowlands carried Khasi social identities. Khasi merchants brought goods from Assam through mountain river ports at Pandua and Jaintia.⁴⁷ Khasis sold mountain ‘jhum’ rice in Jaintia. In high valleys and on low slopes, Khasis grew areca nut, betel, turmeric, and fruits to sell in the plains, along with wax, ivory, and cloth. Mountain Khasis also specialised in iron mining and smelting, and they would denude whole forest tracts to stoke their blow-bag iron furnaces, with cowhide bellows, before moving on to exploit new fuel wood sites. Khasi iron,⁴⁸ steel, and metal tools travelled lowland rivers routes, along with their gold, silver, other metals, and ornaments.⁴⁹ Khasi mountain quarries behind Sunamganj provided the finest quality limestone.

Elephants and ivory also travelled down the mountains,⁵⁰ as salt and rice moved up.⁵¹ Aloe wood and China-root appear as Sylhet products in the Ain-i-Akbari.⁵² Timber, sandalwood, cane, ivory, rubber, cotton, and silk came from Cachar and Manipur.⁵³ Cotton came from Tripura.⁵⁴ Sylhet’s first resident Collector, Robert Lindsay, dramatised the commercial value of the mountains by buying limestone and burnt lime to sell in Dhaka, Calcutta, and elsewhere. He even once had built four sea-going ships on mountain tops, using local forest timber; and then had the ships filled with mountain products and to sail on the flood to Bakarganj, where his agents sold forest products and bought rice to sell in Madras.⁵⁵

These ships perhaps returned to Calcutta or Chittagong with cowry shells, Sylhet’s only coin.⁵⁶ Each part of 18th century Bengal had its own monetary identity, acquired in mobile geographies of commodity exchange. In 1787, for example, most coins in Rangpur were French Arcot Rupees, minted in Pondichery, and Narainy Rupees, minted by rajas in Cooch Behar; while in nearby Mymensingh, English Arcot Rupees prevailed; because Rangpur did heavy trade with Cooch Behar and Chandranagore, while Mymensingh sold its rice in Calcutta. Specific coins also attached to individual commodities, as in Dinajpur, where merchants used Sonaut Rupees to buy rice and other grains, while they used French and English Arcots to buy ghee and oil, and used only French Arcots to buy hemp and gunny. Locally dominant metal coins came from far away, most of all, from Arcot and Pondicherry,⁵⁷ and cowries came from the Maldives.

Sylhet depended entirely on cowries, tiny shells from the Maldives⁵⁸ that served as the cheapest coin all around the Indian Ocean and in south-east Asia, and Africa.⁵⁹ Bengal was a major cowry market, and there was virtually no metal coin to be found in Sylhet in the late 18th century, when people imported almost nothing from downstream, except the cowries that merchants brought from the Maldives, stored in Dhaka and Calcutta, and carried to Sylhet in boats that returned with rice and upland products.⁶⁰

The only political force at work shaping Sylhet cowry country was a negative one: that is, the weakness of regional states. English observers believed that cowries reigned in Sylhet because the people could only afford the cheapest coin. But because barter trades flourished alongside cowry exchange, it can be said that cowries also functioned to bridge the gap between barter and commerce in local markets. Cowry country had a south-western borderland, around Habiganj,⁶¹ where silver rupees circulated, indicating that cowry country coincided with the spatial dispersion of markets connecting hills and plains around Sylhet. The repeated depiction of Sylhet as a ‘mountain region’, from the 14th century onward,⁶² also reinforces the idea that mountains and lowlands comprised a diverse yet coherent economic space of mobility where cowries articulated a distinctive market territory around 18th century Sylhet.⁶³

Expansive Territorialism

In 1765, Sylhet – till then a ‘faujdari’ (military district) of Bengal Nawabs ⁶⁴ – became a frontier district of Bengal Presidency. Despite its large area and population, Sylhet was poor revenue territory.⁶⁵ In 1783, the Dinajpur zamindar spent more on religious events than Sylhet district paid revenue.⁶⁶ In 1785, the Rajshahi zamindar’s monthly tax (‘kist’) exceeded Sylhet’s annual tax assessment (‘jamma’). ⁶⁷ Yet the Company increased Sylhet taxation as much as possible. The Nawab’s regime had collected 3,50,000 kahans of cowries in Sylhet, all spent locally, mostly on the army, which remained the standard until 1776, when Sylhet’s ‘jamma’ rose to 8,00,101 kahans. By 1783, it had risen to 9,36,000 kahans.⁶⁸ State tax demands thus tripled in eight years after 1775, a much higher increase than in Bengal Presidency as a whole.⁶⁹

But revenue collections stagnated below 70 per cent of jamma until 1788, when they began a steep climb, approaching 100 per cent by 1790.⁷⁰ This increase came with expansion of Company authority over farms that became tax-paying private property. In 1784, “upwards of 4,000 independent proprietors of the soil” paid land taxes;⁷¹ in 1795, 26,000;⁷² and in 1798, 27,000.⁷³ In 1785, remittances to Calcutta began a steady climb,⁷⁴ and in the 1790s, with the addition of the region around Habiganj, Sylhet district began to look like a money-maker for the Raj, though a small one compared to other Bengal districts.⁷⁵

In Sylhet (as in Chittagong⁷⁶), Company revenue came from small village landlords, not big zamindars, merchant magnates, or big ‘jotedar’ tenants who dominate the agrarian history of Bengal.⁷⁷ Even the smallest Sylheti landowners rarely tilled their land, but rather employed tenants and labourers. To secure assets against calamity, locally dominant families held land in several places and combined various sources of income, including commerce, which made them central figures in local markets and revenue operations. For tenants and labourers, mobility remained an always-open option. Most tenants were ‘paikasht’ or non-resident tenants, who received no occupancy rights but did receive agricultural and subsistence inputs from landowners who needed to attract them to clear and cultivate land.⁷⁸ Landless workers also lived mobile lives. Some would have come from tribal societies that moved among hills and plains and merged with lowland societies at the lowest ranks. Seasonal migrant workers often came from far away to bring in the harvest and return home with boatloads of rice.⁷⁹

In 1798, a statistically average Sylhet village would have held a tiny population of about 70 people and four landed estates (‘taluks’), each estate representing one extended family, it dependents and servants.⁸⁰ Local farming territory expanded in compact areas scattered across the land, as dominant families spread their influence and vied for land and labour. Many such families held the title of Chaudhuri, which Mughals used to denote sub-zamindari authority and which spread among Sylhet gentry to become a family name. ⁸¹ Mughal governors anointed few if any major zamindars, one of whom an early Collector called the ‘only true zamindar’ in the Sylhet District, because he had received a Mughal jaghir for protecting Mughal territory against Khasi incursions.⁸²

Unconquered Mughal opponents still exercised power in Sylhet in the early Company decades. Khasis ruled the northern mountains, Jaintia Khasi rajas held land in the north and east, Cachar rajas held the Barak Valley, and Tripura rajas ruled southern uplands. The Mughals had kept them all at bay with arms and land grants, but the main source of Mughal strength locally seems to have been several thousand local landed patriarchs who acquired the title of Chaudhuri as they bowed to the Mughals.

By 1778, when the first English Collector arrived and the District Records begin, the titular name, Chaudhuri, was a purely local asset in Sylhet, where local patriarchs expanded their reach as rulers in the hills also extended their powers in the plains. Like Mughals and Nawabs, the English lacked power in the mountains and focused their attention on the lowlands, from which they eventually extended lowland power farther into uplands than any predecessor. Here as elsewhere in British India, the 19th century conquest of mountains by lowland territorialism became a topographical signature of modernity.

The Company’s early steps set the modern trajectory, by separating Company lowlands from the highlands. Collectors settled borders with Cachar, Jaintia, Tripura by transacting with established Rajas,⁸³ who had long experience with lowland rulers. Khasis in northern mountains posed a more difficult problem, because they had never submitted to Mughal or Nawabi authority and their people still scattered across the land north of the Surma,⁸⁴ while some distant relatives – frontier settlers below the mountains, called Bengali Khasis – emerged from alliances between Khasis and Bengalis and defied the authority of Company and Khasi rulers alike.⁸⁵

Agrarian lowlanders and Khasi peoples conceived territorialism quite differently. For the Company, as for the Mughals, territory was land; but for Khasis, territory was Khasi people. As the English sought to fix boundaries of state territory, Khasi territory moved and scattered with Khasi settlements. Khasi rulers in the hills presumed authority over Khasi communities living in territory where the Company claimed exclusive authority over all the land and inhabitants. These conflicting visions of territory produced serious conflict in the 1780s.

In 1789, following many skirmishes, mountain Khasis and Bengali Khasis attacked Company settlements, and the Collector summoned troops to push Khasis into the hills.⁸⁶ This accomplished, in 1790, he declared an absolute boundary at the base of the hills and prohibited Khasis from owning land in the plains, to vitiate future claims by Khasi rulers to Company land. Hill trades hence came under strict regulation. A modern border came into being, which would eventually separate Indian Meghalaya from Bangladeshi Sylhet.⁸⁷

Khasi hills thus acquired an official ethnic identity, as hill Khasis became official aliens in the plains. By 1797, Bengali farmers paying Company revenue had colonised land formerly held by Bengali Khasis,⁸⁸ whose land the Company expropriated and who faded from history with the separation of Bengali and Khasi ethnic territories. This same border also confirmed Khasi authority, however, in what eventually became Meghalaya, as Cachar, Jaintia, and Tripura remained open frontiers for lowland settlers, who swarmed into the frontiers after 1800, while few lowlanders ever settled in Khasi mountains.

In the 19th century, Sylhet territorialism also moved into its southern mountain frontiers, behind Maulvi Bazar and Habiganj, where English-owned tea estates took the land of forest peoples. These mountains and their inhabitants fanned out into plains east of the Meghna, and extended across Tripura, Manipur, Chittagong and Burma. Mountain societies remained mobile, as their land fell to the steady influx of lowland colonisers. Ethnic conflict over land ensued, along with complex cultural mixing and tense ambiguities of political authority.⁸⁹ Like Khasis in the north, Tripuri people in the south continued to live, settle, work, and move across the uplands and lowlands, as they became official aliens in the plains; but unlike the Meghalaya mountains, Tripura frontiers in southern Sylhet remained open for lowland territorial expansion, like Cachar and Jaintia.

The uphill march of lowland territorialism accelerated after 1800, 1880 and 1947.⁹⁰ More and more Hindus, Muslims, and Christians made mountains their private property. Hill peoples became minorities in the hills.⁹¹ After 1947, mobility among peoples variously invested in mountain resources fell into but also afoul of territorial strictures imposed by national states. As a result, we have, on the one hand, this placid imagery from the ‘Visit Bangladesh’ website:⁹²

Nestled in the picturesque Surma Valley amidst scenic tea plantations and lush green tropical forests, Sylhet is a prime attraction for all tourists visiting Bangladesh. Lying between the Khasia and the Jaintia hills on the north, and the Tripura hills on the south, Sylhet breaks the monotony of the flatness of this land by a multitude of terraced tea gardens, rolling countryside and exotic flora and fauna. Here the thick tropical forests abound with many species of wild life, scented orange groves and luxuriant pineapple plantations spread their aroma around the typical hearth and homes of the Manipuri Tribal maidens famous for their dance.

Notes

[I presented an earlier version of this paper at the SSRC Conference on ‘Resources: Conceptions and Contestations’ Kathmandu, January 3-12, 2003. For this work, I depended on sabbatical research funding from the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and University of Pennsylvania. For research assistance, I thank Brooke Newborn and Richard Mo. For essential material, I owe special thanks to Sirajul Islam, M Mufakkarul Islam, and the staff at the Bangladesh National Archives, particularly its director, Sharif Uddin Ahmed. For ideas, I thank Bela Malik, Thomas Mathew, Taj I Hashmi, Manzurul Mannan, Samia Huq, and Jukhruf Binth Junaid. For useful comments and stimulating papers, I thank participants at the SSRC conference, particularly Amita Baviskar, Bina Agarwal, Michael Watts, Tania Li, and Anna Tsing. For help with all aspects of this work, I thank Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi.]

 1 See essays in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.
 2 For example, Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1992.
 3 For broad view of the Asian context, see David Ludden, ‘Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming) November 2003. For a long-term comparative view of regional formations in South Asia, see David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. For case studies, see David Ludden, ‘Spectres of Agrarian Territory in South India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39, April-September 2 and 3, 2002, 233-58.
 4 Dirk H A Kolff, ‘The End of an Ancien Regime: Colonial War in India, 1798-1818’ in Imperialism and War: Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa, edited by J A de Moor and H L Wesseling, E J Brill, Leiden, 1989, pp 22-49.
 5 See Sayeed-ur-Rahman, ‘River Surma’ in Sylhet: History and Heritage, edited by Sharif Uddin Ahmed, Bangladesh Itihas Samiti, Dhaka, 1999, pp 91-101.
 6 Haroun er Rashid, Geography of Bangladesh, The University Press Dhaka, 1991, pp 431-32.
 7 Md Shamsul Alam, et al, ‘Sylhet and its Evolving Geographical Environment’ in Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 73-83.
 8 Nasser Ejazul Huq, ‘Mineral Resources of Sylhet’ in Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 421-29.
 9 Haroun er Rashid, Geography, pp 24. River action also depresses the haor. Sirajul Islam, Villages in the Haor Basin of Bangladesh. (Studies in Socio-Cultural Change in Rural Villages in Bangladesh, No 4.) Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo, 1985, pp 1-4.
10 Dilip K Chakrabarti, Ancient Bangladesh: A Study of the Archaeological Sources with an Update on Bangladesh Archaeology, 1990-2000, The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2001, pp 17-21. K Bagchi, The Ganges Delta (Calcutta, 1944). C Strickland, Deltaic Formation with Special Reference to the Hydraulic Processes of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra (Calcutta, 1940).
11 Haroun er Rashid, Geography of Bangladesh, pp 55.
12 In the 1784 Gomati floods, vegetation could be seen only on the highest banks of tanks and ‘upon the boarder of the hills’. Comilla District Records, edited by Sirajul Islam, The Institute of Liberation Bangabandhu and Bangladesh Studies, Dhaka, 2000, p 98.
13 Bangladesh National Archives. Sylhet District Records, volume 293, pp 145-46, December 12, 1784. (Reference format hereafter SDR293.145-6:12Dec84). SDR293.155:8Apr85 reports expense of Rs 2,000 for renewing banks of the rivers ‘Surma, Coosearah, and Munnoo’, saying, ‘These banks have received no repairs for these last 15 years and were totally swept away in different places for the extent of many miles’. Similar events occurred along the Gomati, where river embankments built around 1710 broke in 1783. Comilla District Records, pp 62, 94-95, 97-99. The Sylhet District Records, edited by Walter K Firminger, Assam Secretariat Printing Office, Shillong, 1917, contains reprints of many SDR texts.
14 On the sanctification of sites for investment, see David Ludden, An Agrarian History, pp 66-76 and Peasant History in South India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985; Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990, pp 15-41.
15 Hamlet Bareh, ‘Khasi-Jaintia State Formation’ in edited by Surajit Sinha, Tribal Polities and State Systems in Pre-Colonial Eastern and Northeastern India, KP Bagchi, Calcutta, 1987, pp 261-306.
16 J B Bhattacharjee, ‘Dimasa State Formation in Cachar’ in Sinha, Tribal Polities and State Systems, p 177.
17 The Kupli (or Kapili) River drains Manipur, running north into the Brahmaputra. See B Pakem, ‘State Formation in Pre-colonial Jaintia’ in Sinha, Tribal Polities and State Systems, facing p 244.
18 Sujit Choudhury, Folklore and History: A Study of Hindu Folkcults of the Barak Valley of Northeast India, KK Publishers, New Delhi, nd (1985?), pp 31-46.
19 For similarities around Chittagong, see Raja Devasish Roy, ‘Land Rights, Land Use and Indigenous Peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ in edited by Philip Gain, Bangladesh: Land, Forest, and Forest People, Society for Environment and Human Development, Dhaka, 1995, pp 55-56; and Francis Hamilton Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798), edited by Willem van Schendel, University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1992.
20 Bareh, ‘Khasi-Jaintia State Formation’, pp 263ff.
21 Islam, Haor Basin, pp 6-9.
22 Ludden, Agrarian History, pp 133-40.
23 Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, ‘Tribal Society in Transition: Eastern India 1757-1920’ in India’s Colonial Encounter: Essays in Memory of Eric Stokes, edited by Mushirul Hasan and Narayani Gupta, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993, pp 65-120 and V Raghavaiah, ‘Tribal Revolts in Chronological Order: 1778 to 1991’ in edited by A R Desai, Peasant Struggles in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp 23-27.
24 Lowland fishing tribes included Kaivartas. Richard M Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p 258, n 78, citing K N Gupta, ‘On Some Castes and Caste- Origins in Sylhet’, Indian Historical Quarterly, 7, 1931, pp 725-26ff.
25 See especially Abu Imam, ‘Ancient Sylhet: History and Tradition’ in Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 173-202; also Chakrabarti, Ancient Bangladesh, pp 158-59. Kamalakanta Gupta, Copper-Plates of Sylhet, Lipika Enterprises, Sylhet, 1967.
26 Islam, Villages in the Haor Basin, p 9.
27 Abdul Karim, Corpus of the Arabic and Persian Inscriptions of Bengal, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Dhaka, 1992, 8, 58, 270-73, and Social History of the Muslims of Bengal, Chittagong: Baitush Sharif Islamic Research Institute, 1985, pp 129-33. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, pp 73-77. Abdul Karim, ‘Advent of Islam in Sylhet and Hazrat Shah Jalal (R)’, and Dewan Nurul Anward Hussain Choudhury, ‘Hazrat Shal Jalal (R) and His Life – A Source Study’ in Sylhet History and Heritage, pp 129-72. 28 Katy Gardner, Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, pp 75-76.
29 Eaton, The Rise of Islam, p 258.
30 Market places had thrived a thousand years earlier at the confluence of Meghna and the old Brahmaputra, in Wari-Bateswar and Bhairav Bazar, north-east of Dhaka, where archaeological data suggest trade with Gangetic and Indian Ocean ports. Chakrabarti, Ancient Bangladesh, pp 62-66.
31 Abdul Karim, ‘Suba Bangla: Government and Politics’ in History of Bangladesh, 1704-1971, Volume 1, Political History, edited by Sirajul Islam, Asiatic Society of Bengal, second edition, Dhaka, 1997, p 35.
32 Bararistan-I-Ghaybi (A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, by Mir, Nathan) translated by M I Borah, Government of Assam, Gauhati, 1936, pp 110-11, 158-66, 171-33ff.
33 Islam, Villages in the Haor Basin, p 8.
34 Puspa Niyogi, Brahman Settlements in Different Subdivisions of Ancient Bengal, RK Maitra, Calcutta, 1967, p 258
42 Quoted in Eaton, Rise of Islam, p 258.
35 Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp 259-65.
36 J B Bhattacharjee, ‘Dimasa State Formation’, pp 177-211.
37 Areas completely out of cultivation in 1800 and substantially under cultivation by 1900 covered most of Chittagong and Noakhali, all the Sunderbans, most of the Barind, and all the Haor basin. See Sirajul Islam, ‘Economic History in Perspective’ in History of Bangladesh, II, p 19. For similar ups and downs in Dinajpur, see Montgomery Martin, The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India (comprising the Districts of Behar, Shahabad, Bhagulpoor, Goruckpoor, Dinajepoor, Puraniya, Ronggopoor, and Assam) Reprinted Cosmo Publications, Delhi, 1976, p 815.
38 M Ataharul Islam, ‘Population and Environment’, History of Bangladesh II, p 706.
39 Islam, Villages in the Haor Basin, pp 6-21.
40 By contrast, in 1789, for example, the collector at Murshidabad borrowed Rs 41,192 from seven Indian bankers to make good his revenue payment to Calcutta. K M Mohsin, ‘Mughal Banking System’ in History of Bangladesh, II, p 217.
41 SDR294.112:15Nov85. Comilla District Records, p 71.
42 On the urban-centred commercialism, see Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialisation in Rural Bengal, c 1760-1800, Manohar Publishers, Delhi, 2000; also Rajat Datta, ‘Merchants and peasants: A Study of the Structure of Local Trade in Grain in Late 18th Century Bengal’ in edited by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Merchants, Markets, and the State in Early Modern India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990, pp 146-51.
43 Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market, p 208.
44 James Rennell describes the natural basis of this trading environment: ‘The Kingdom of Bengal, particularly its Eastern Tract, is naturally the most convenient for trade within itself of any country in the world; for its rivers divide into just a number of branches that the people have the convenience of water carriage to and from every principal places [sic]’. ‘An Unpublished letter of Mr Rennell’, Bengal Past and Present, September 1933, quoted in Sushil Chaudhuri, ‘General Economic Conditions’, History of Bangladesh, p 36.
45 Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market, p 207.
46 Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798), p 135-37.
47 SDR293.126-129: 24Sept84. SDR297.48:29May88. SDR297.54.12 May 88. SDR300.56-7:2Sept90. Robert Lindsay, ‘Anecdotes of an Indian life’, circa 1823. See Lives of the Lindsays; or, A Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres by Lord Lindsay [his brother], second edition, John Murray, London, 1858, III, pp 174-5ff.
48 SDR312.141:7April00: Loads of iron ore in ‘immense quantity…is extracted and brought down by [Khasis] for sale and compose a principal article of their traffic with the natives in Sylhet’.
49 Bareh, ‘Khasi-Jaintia State Formation’, pp 264-67. SDR297.48:29May88. SDR297.54.12May88.
50 Lindsay reported that, ‘at least five hundred elephants were caught annually’, in the decade he lived in Sylhet (1778-1788). ‘Anecdotes’, p 190. Lindsay describes ‘khedah’ hunting techniques in ‘Anecdotes’, pp 190-97. Elephants suffered about 50 per cent mortality in captivity. SDR291.24-5:15Oct78 reports that of 217 elephants caught that year, only 112 survived. SDR291.18Jul78 reports that 106 elephants died of 221 caught in the months from Kartik to Baishak. Abul Fazl Allami, Ain-i-Akbari. Translated by H Blochman, Low Price Publications, Delhi, 1927, I, p 295, describes hunting elephants in khedah.
51 SDR291.8-9:2Dec77. SDR291.18Jul78.
52 Irfan Habib, Atlas of Mughal India: Political and Economic Maps with Notes, Bibliography and Index, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1982, Map, 11B.
53 Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal, pp 137. Bhattacharjee, ‘Dimasa State Formation’, pp 186, 194.
54 Comilla District Records, pp 49-52.
55 SDR292.57: 29 Mar 83
56 SDR295.108: 30 Oct 87: ‘ …there are not 500 Rupees in circulation throughout the district and the few that make their appearance are bad Arcots …’ SDR297.44: 17 May 88: ‘ …there is not above 6 or 700 Rupees to be found in Sylhet and these are bad Arcots … no copper coins of any Species passes through the District. The Revenues are paid in Cowries and all mercantile transactions are carried on through the same currency’.
57 Debendra Bijoy Mitra, Monetary System in the Bengal Presidency, 1735-1835, KP Bagchi, Calcutta, 1991, pp 70-90.
58 See Clarence Maloney, People of the Maldive Islands, Orient Longman, Bombay, 1980, pp 112, 126, 137, 417.
59 Frank Perlin, Monetary, Administrative, and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900, Ashgate, Brookfield VT, 1993, pp 152-163, 270. Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986. Robert S Wicks, Money, Markets and Trade in Early Southeast Asia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1992, pp 28-72.
60 SDR293.126-131: 24 Sept 84.
61 SDR300.106: 30 Dec 90. SDR301.64: 29 July 91. SRD301.82. 11 Oct 91.
62 Abul Fazl treats Sylhet only as a mountain region. Ain-I-Akbari, I, p 136-7: ‘In the Sarkar of Sylhet there are nine ranges of hills. It furnished many eunuchs’. He goes on to list only mountain products of Sylhet: Suntarah, orange, China Root, Aloe-wood, Bhangraj, and tamed birds.
63 The financial integration of this territory into the political economy of Bengal Presidency involved Company efforts to convert Sylhet cowry revenues into Sicca Rupees, which necessitated large cowry exports to Dhaka and Calcutta until the 1790s. These efforts began when collector Lindsay took the entire Sylhet cowry revenue into his own hands to finance commercial ventures that made him rich and reduced Sylhet cowry exports somewhat in the 1780s. SDR293.126-131: 24 Sept 84. ‘Anecdotes’, pp 176-80, 198.
64 The Fifth Report From the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company (Dated July 28, 1812), edited with notes and introduction by Walter K Firminger, R Cambray, Calcutta, 1917 [Reprinted Augustus M Kelley, New York, 1969], Volume I, pp cxii.
65 1783 area and revenue figures for Bengal districts are in Fifth Report, II, 403. 1822 area and population figures are in Census of India, 1961, Report on the Population Estimates of India, Government of India, Delhi, 1962, pp 71, ‘Statement of the extent and Population of British India, Bengal Presidency: Lower Provinces’.
66 Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market, pp 171.
67 A B M Mahmood, The Revenue Administration of Northern Bengal, 1765-1793, Pakistan National Institute of Public Administration, Dacca, 1970, pp 28.
68 SDR295.122-30:(nd) Nov 87. SDR299.34: 5 Nov 89.
69 SDR294.53: 31 May 84. SDR293: 24 Sept 84. SDR293.156: 1 May 85. SDR295.122-30(nd) Nov 1787. Index values for Bengal Presidency jamma are 100 in 1767, 137 in 1776, and 164 in 1784. Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market, pp 334. Revenue demand on Rajshahi Zamindari increased only 18 per cent from 1765 to 1784. Mahmood, The Revenue Administration of Northern Bengal, pp 28, 32, 34, 42.
70 SDR293.156: 1 May 85. SDR306.21-5: 19 Aug 94.
71 SDR293.99-100: 4 Apr 84. SDR294.143: 27 Jun 86 says the number is 5,000.
72 SDR306.126-7: 8 Sept 95.
73 SDR294.143: 27 Jun 86 and SDR309.51-5: 12 May 98.
74 SDR304.9: 20 Apr 93.
75 The first available district budget, in 1794, shows a total annual expense of Rs 1,31,144, and a total jamma of Rs 2,90,554, leaving a balance of Rs 1,59,410, which at current exchange rate, translates into 8,36,900 Kahans, more than the Sylhet jamma in 1776, now available for remission. SDR306.21-5: 19 Aug 94.
76 A M Serajud-din, ‘The Revenue Administration of Chittagong, from 1761 to 1785’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London, 1964.
77 See Ratna Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, 1760-1850, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1979; Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market. Shinkichi Taniguchi, ‘The Peasantry of Northern Bengal in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Local Agrarian Society in Colonial India: Japanese Perspectives, edited by Peter Robb, Kaoru Sugihara, and Haruka Yanagisawa, Manohar, Delhi, 1997.
78 Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market, pp 93-99.
79 Migrant workers still travel today by boat to harvest Sylhet haors and return home with loads of boro rice. Islam, Villages of the Haor Basin, pp 31-2.
80 Collectors often asserted the typically Sylhet landholding represented a single joint family. SDR297.126: 5 Sept 88. SDR300.141-44: 24 Oct 91. Statistical averages are calculated from data on population in 1789 and 1808 in M M Rahman, ‘Population of Sylhet’, pp 115, 117; and on villages in SDR300.141-44: 24 Oct 91; and taluks (estates) SDR309.51-5: 12 May 98.
81 In Mughal sanad texts from Chittagong, shaikh and chaudhuri were the most common titular names. Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp 249.
82 SDR299.72-4: 15 Jan 90.
83 All these borders were fuzzy in practice: ‘…the lands of the Rajahs of Chachar and Jointah are blended with those of this District; indeed, the Rajah of Jointah possesses lands adjacent to the town of Sylhet’. SDR308.150: 22 Feb 98. For Tripura, see Comilla District Records, pp 1-30.
84 B Pakem, ‘State Formation in Pre-colonial Jaintia’, facing p 244, also pp 261-306.
85 SDR297.164: 18 Dec 88. SDR298.7: 20 Dec 88.
86 The Collector, John Willes, saw a foreign French hand in machinations leading up to this climactic confrontation. SDR 297.48: 29 Mar 88.
87 35th Battallion sepoys arrived in Sylhet on April 17 and 13 June 1789 [SDR298.98: 17 April 89 and SDR298.116-18: 13 Jun 89] and left in November 1791 [SDR305.55: 6 Jan 94]. Most warfare ended in February 1790 [SDR299.80: 21 Jan 99 and SDR299.104: 5 Mar 90]. Correspondence on the Khasi wars occupies much of SDR volumes 85, 298 and 299.
88 SDR308.27-8: 15 Sept 97.
89 East Pakistan District Gazetteers, Sylhet, Pakistan Government Press, Dhaka, 1970, pp 328-31.
90 Ludden, Agrarian History, pp 130-40.
91 Raja Devasish Ray, ‘Land Rights, Land Use and Indigenous Peoples’.
92 http://www.betelco.com/bd/sylhet/sylhet.html
93 Daily Star, July 25 and August 5, 2002, omits mention of the eco-park, which appears in Human Rights in Bangladesh, 2000, edited by Hameeda Hossain. Dhaka: Ain o Shalish Kendro, 2001, pp 147.
94 As I write, the Daily Star reports (May 8, 2003) that Tripura rebels yesterday killed 21 Bengalis on the Tripura borders of Comilla district, Bangladesh, where ‘tribal militants charge that Bangalee settlers have changed the demographic makeup of Tripura, turning the indigenous population into a minority’.
95 Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Movement and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826-1947, Manohar, Delhi, 1977.
96 M M Rahman, ‘Population of Sylhet’, pp 105-7.
97 In 1931, Brahmans comprised 3 per cent of the census population in Madras Presidency and 5 per cent in Bombay Presidency. Census of India, 1931. General Tables XVII, ‘Race. Tribe, or Caste’. In the Tinnevelly District of Madras Presidency – about the same size as Sylhet and 98 per cent Hindu – Brahmans were 3.5 per cent of the 1881 population. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989, p 25.
 98 For biography, see Atful Hye Shiby, ‘Moulvi Abdul Karim and His Contributions to Muslim Education in Bengal’, Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 517-33.
 99 Paresh Chandra Mandal, ‘Sanskrit Language and Literature in Sylhet’, in Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 542-60.
100 M M Rahman, ‘Population of Sylhet’, p 115.
101 M M Rahman, ‘Population of Sylhet’, p 108. For 1931 census maps, see Historical Atlas of South Asia, edited by Joseph E Schwartzberg, Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1992, pp 93-4.
102 M Ataharul Islam, ‘Population and Environment’, p 706.
103 Sujit Chaudhuri, ‘A ‘god-sent opportunity’, Seminar, online edition, http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/510/510%20sujit%20chaudhuri.htm.
104 K Z Islam, ‘The Sylhet Award’, http://www.bangla.net/holiday/inret.html. In 1947, Ratabari, Patherkandi, Badarpur and half of Karimganj thana left the former Karimganj sub-division of Sylhet to join the Cachar District of Assam; and in 1983, they became the Karimganj District. In 1951, the North Cachar sub-division of Cachar District joined the new district of United Mikir and North Cachar Hills. In 1989, Hailakandi sub-division of Cachar became a separate district. See East Pakistan District Gazetteers, Sylhet, Pakistan Government Press, Dhaka, 1970.
105 Bangladesh Population Census, 1991. Community Series, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Dhaka, 1996. Community volumes for Zilas Sylhet, Habiganj, Sunamganj, and Maulvi Bazar.
106 Islam, Haor Basin, pp 16, citing Sushanta Krishna Dass, ‘Immigration and Demographic Transformation of Assam, 1891-1980’, Economic and Political Weekly, May 10, 1980, pp 852.
107 Md Mahbubar Rahman, ‘Population of Sylhet’, p 108.
108 Abu Imam, ‘Ancient Sylhet’, pp 186ff.
109 Abul Kalam Manzur Morshed, ‘Sylhet Dialect’, in Sylhet: History and Heritage, pp 533-51.
110 See http://sylheti.org.uk and http://www.sylhetcity.net.
111 For Sylheti marriage advertisements, see http://www.sylhetcity.net. Here are two examples: ‘Bride wanted for a Muslim male. He has a good job, business and lives in his own house. Bride should be attractive, educated and religious. Must be from a Sylheti Sunni family background’. ‘A bride required for an attractive Sylheti Muslim male. Groom is post graduate from Bangladesh. Elder brother is willing to pay for the return fare and other necessary expense’.
112 Islam, Haor Basin, p 26.
113 See for instance, Daily Star, August 20, 2002, front page story: “Two Bangladeshis were kidnapped and shot dead by Indian Khasia (tribesmen) aided by the BSF near Bichhakandi border under Gowainghat upzila Sunday night…. [when] two Bangladeshis …were returning home after working in the Bichhakandi stone quarry near the border…”
114 Sirajul Islam argues this point strongly for rural east Bengal as a whole in Rent and Raiyat: Society and Economy of Eastern Bengal, 1859-1928, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 1989, pp 10-11.
115 Kamal Siddiqui, ‘Land Reforms Since 1950’, History of Bangladesh, II, pp 708-722.
116 Famine Inquiry Commission. Final Report, Government Press, Madras, 1945, reprinted Usha Press, Delhi, 1985, p 32, citing its Report on Bengal, p 156.
117 A H Ahmed Kamal, ‘The Decline of the Muslim League and the Ascendancy of the Bureaucracy in East Pakistan’, unpublished dissertation, Australian National University, 1988.
118 On local connections that make development projects work, see Amita Baviskar, ‘The Dream Machine: The Model Development Project and The Remaking of the State’, in Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource, Oxford University Press, Delhi, (forthcoming).
119 Ludden, Agrarian History, pp 140-5, 190-216.
120 Sirajul Islam, Haor Basin.
121 One early Sylheti overseas migrant, Syedullah, described his travels and displayed his cooking skill when he arrived at former Collector Lindsay’s home in Scotland, some time before 1825. Lindsay, ‘Anecdotes’, pp 215-17.
122 Katy Gardner, Global Migrants, Local Lives.
123 See http://sylheti.org.uk.
124 Dina Siddiqi, ‘Of Consent and Contradiction: A Report on the Law and Practice of Forced Marriages in Bangladesh’. Unpublished paper, Ain o Shalish Kendro, Dhaka, 2002.
125 Most others concern family disputes and ‘deviant behaviour’. Hossain Zillur Rahman and S Aminul Islam, Local Governance and Community Capacities: Search for New Frontiers, University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2002, p 146.
126 Hameeda Hossain and Dina Siddiqi, personal communication. For more on fatwas, see Dina M Siddiqi, ‘Taslima Nasreen and Others: The contest Over Gender in Bangladesh’, in Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity, edited by Herbet L Bodman and Nayereh Tohibi, Lynne Reiner, London, 1998, pp 205-229.
127 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984.