12th Highlander Lecture sheds light on NE’s colonial divisions

December 11, 2024 4 Views No Comment

Morung Express News
Kohima | December 11

Stating that of the many partitions that this part of the world has experienced in the last hundred years, 1937 is seldom remembered or recognized in popular memory as a partition, Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard of Kings College, London, posed on Monday evening if this is an important juncture in the collective memory from the Naga perspective.

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Delivering the 12th Annual Highlander Lecture on “Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937-1948” at The Heritage Conference Hall, Kohima on December 9, she remarked that the 1st of April, 1937 is actually the year where “Burma divorced India” while quoting the newspapers of the time.

In other words, she said, “it is the year where, on paper, the boundary that separates Naga areas today came into being, and with the creation of Burma as a separate colony of the British Empire, as opposed to a province of British India, the year that a demarcation within a colony, within the colony of India, became an intra-imperial demarcation within the British Empire.”

Underscoring that 1937 is a really important forgotten date, she highlighted that “it paved the way for the current division of this part of the world into different nation-states, or would-be nation-states ready to impose their unity by all means possible.”

Citing events, reasons and instances in her talk “to recover the story of this unfinished separation and attempts to resolve it on the eve of India and Burma’s independence in the late 30s and 1940s”, she also commented that “after 1937, the entity that has the biggest imperative to claim its authority over parts of the Naga areas is Burma, which has barely extended any administration in its northwest at that point.”

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And while it created Naga Hills district on its purported side of the border, which infuriated the Assam government, which until then has been comparatively much more present there, she said, “however, the outbreak of World War II shortly after the separation in 1937, means that efforts to arrive at a boundary that would allow both colonial administrations to expand in these hills do not, cannot take place.”

“World War II had a very contradictory impact on this process of state building, of India and Burma-centric state building in these regions”, she stated. Further taking the audience through a series of illustrations and insights surrounding the topic, she also remarked that, “the region we call the Northeast today was created through multiple divisions.” In other words, she stated that it is the representation and manifestation of partition as a continuing process. “And that can also explain, to some extent, the recurring tension we’re witnessing between different Indian states here in the Northeast”, she added.

Earlier, in his introduction, Michael T. Heneise, Co-Founder & former Executive Director of the Highland Institute, highlighted that first Highlander lecture was also held at the Heritage Kohima and was then called “Hutton Lectures.”

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Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is the author of “Shadow States, India, China, and the Himalayas, 1910-62” published by Cambridge University Press, which also won the James Fisher Prize in Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2017, and South Asia Unbound, New International Histories of the Subcontinent, with Leiden University Press. She joined King’s College, London in the year 2016 after a research fellowship at Cambridge and a visiting fellowship at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She also received multiple awards for her work, from the British Association for South Asian Studies Annual Prize and Cambridge University’s Prince Consular Prize, as well as the Sealy Medal, to a British Academy Rising Star Award, and Philip Leverhulme Prize.