Return of the Frontier

Abstract

The colony in British India had at one time designed an inner line to distinguish two separate systems of administration for the frontier areas and the nonfrontier areas of colonial Northeast India. Constructing the frontiers as areas of strife and conflict and from which the nonfrontiers always needed to be secured, the British in creating the line made an instrument of policing the frontiers that has not only persisted but transgressed the colonial administrative structure into the postcolonial era. Although it was designed really for the protection of the nonfrontier areas of Assam from the raiding of the hill tribes of the frontier, in implementation the line prohibited non-natives of the frontiers from adopting interest in land or products of land located behind it. Contemporary movements demanding an inner line in three states of Northeast India have gone back to the idea of a line that divides the territory into two nonhomogenous areas, disallowing non-natives within the inner line from an extended involvement in the areas outside of the line, thus, refrontierizing themselves and giving them the peculiar characteristics of the frontier, wanting to lend themselves an exterior identity that is distinct from the identity of the regular nonfrontier territory in India.