Reeju Ray , Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 224, £88.00 Hardback (ISBN 9780192887085).
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Reeju Ray'sPlacing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the relationship between law and colonial rule, particularly as it operated in, and constituted borderlands.It is about the region that is referred to as the "North-East" of India and is set, for the most part, in the nineteenth century.Across seven deeply researched and eloquently written chapters, Ray shows us how colonialism thrives under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty.It examines how geographical, anecdotal, and scientific knowledge is produced under conditions of colonial rule, the terms of negotiation between colonial and indigenous rule, the possibilities, and the perils of law as/and custom.In the process, it offers important reflections on the kind of histories marginalized by the imposition of jurisdictional boundaries.Placing the Frontier deserves a wide readership among law and society scholars, particularly scholars of law and colonialism and scholars of South Asia.As the title suggests, this is a book about placemaking-and the role that law plays in this process.It is about the Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia hills and about Sylhet, Assam, and Bengal in India.It is also about frontiers and frontier-making in the Himalayan borderlands and the subcontinent generally.The narrative begins in the late eighteenth century and ends with South Asia's partitions in 1947 and 1971-the creation of India and Pakistan and the liberation of Bangladesh, respectively-and traces the historical subjectivities of borderland dwellers.Placemaking is a topic that legal historians, legal geographers, and scholars of law and society have long engaged with.In the introduction and Chapter 1, Ray joins this vibrant conversation, suggesting that frontiers are not static places but are constituted and reconstituted under conditions of colonial rule.Jurisdiction is the key conceptual category here.It is through jurisdiction-the who, what, and where of the authority to speak the law-that we might see law's constitutive power.Contributing to this conversation, Ray shows us,
Source: Law and History Review
Author: Kalyani Ramnath
Institution: Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7125694278
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: