ICS Seminar Series

This paper explores British colonial cartographies in India’s northeastern frontiers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I situate the first printed map of the Garo Hills (now located in India) and the construction of the Rowmari-Tura road (now divided between Bangladesh and India), in the gaps of British archives and present-day village conversations. By tracing the road’s contemporary material presence in Bangladesh to its early emergence in the form of a map in India’s northeastern frontiers, I show how colonial endeavors re-ordered marshlands and hills as distinct political spheres. Infrastructures of control—surveys and maps, road repair and disrepair— transformed notions of territory, bodies and cosmologies to inscribe race. Furthermore, nature’s fury—forest fires, haze and earthquakes—intersected with political forces to pull people apart. I suggest that an ethnographic reading of old roads and maps that continue to connect regions, which states still govern as unruly terrains, foreground the changing terms of contemporary violence along the India-Bangladesh borderlands.