SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Locating the 'Exceptional': Land Question in Colonial Sylhet

Colonial intervention in Sylhet entailed the production of certain key categories in terms of which the ‘agrarian’ was mapped, and these categories inscribed the notion of peripherality to the region. To the early colonizer, Sylhet was the wild, unexplored and unmapped frontier of Company territory. As agrarian expansion in and around Sylhet gave the district a checkered land map where permanent and temporary settlements and swidden agriculture coexisted and intersected, the district was increasingly ascribed the tag of ‘exception’ in relation to the officially described ‘proper’ parts of Bengal. Specifically focusing on the question of property rights, this paper attempts to explicate how the colonial tropes of legality and rights became entangled and reconfigured in the process of negotiating with Sylhet’s putative exceptionalism. To elucidate this, I would deal with the question of proprietorship in the ilam lands (lands regarded as excess to permanent settlement) and jhum lands (the unsurveyed hills of southern Sylhet). The controversies regarding the ilam and the jhum lands exemplify how the notion of property rights was flexibly altered both in the ‘surveyed and settled’ and in the ‘yet unsurveyed and unsettled’ lands. Throughout the paper my aim would be to tease out how certain categories carrying the implication of ‘uncertainty’ provided space for such maneuver and lent certain degree of flexibility to governance.