Yandaboo Treaty is now Largely Forgotten but is Pivotal in NE Modern History

February 24 was an important date for the Northeast, but it passed virtually unnoticed. On this day, Treaty of Yandaboo, 1826, completed 200 years. This treaty formally ended a dark era of occupation of the region, in particular the Ahom (Assam) and Manipur kingdoms by Ava (Burma) then under King Bagyidaw, the seventh of 11 kings of the Konbaung Dynasty.

The treaty is epochal not only for ending this brutal occupation, but also for changing the course of history of the region. It marked the start of the British takeover of the region, and beyond it, Burma.

The treaty was signed at Yandaboo not far from Ava, the then capital of Burma (today’s Mandalay), between the British and Burmese, after the Burmese were defeated in the first of three Anglo-Burmese Wars. Among others, the term of this treaty was for Burma to cede Assam and Manipur which they had occupied for over seven years, a period remembered as Chahi Taret Khuntakpa (seven years of devastation) in Manipur, and as Manar Upadrab (days of darkness) in Assam.

Assam was thereafter annexed and merged with British Bengal province, while Manipur and other principalities such as Tripura, were left as its protectorate Princely States.

Burma was annexed in three phases into British India. After the Treaty of Yandaboo, British took over Burmese territories adjacent to Bengal, namely Arakan and Tenasserim. After the Second War, 1852, Lower Burma, including Rangoon were annexed, and after Third War 1885, the British annexed the whole of Burma.

Of the three, in the words of scholar Alastair Lamb, only the first was a real war. The second and third were excuses to annex territories.

That the Treaty of Yandaboo is today relegated to the margins of historical memory vindicates the argument that history is the interpretation of the past from the standpoint of present – often unconsciously but at other times deliberate and motivated. Hence the once glorious Mughals of school text books are now pushed to the margins, or else villainised.

Reminiscent in this is also the famous line from Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations.

Yandaboo is a game changing historical pivot, because many legacies of the British administration in the Northeast still live on, some doing good and others remain as thorns causing frictions amongst communities.

After annexing Assam in 1826, the British introduced two distinct administrative regions – the directly administered revenue plains, and the ‘wild’ mountains which were claimed but left unadministered, except for occasional punitive expeditions.

In Assam the British actually drew an ‘Inner Line’ along the base of surrounding mountains by the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation 1873. The ‘unadministered’ areas beyond this line latter became the ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas. This administrative strategy was also extended to Burma after is annexation in 1885.

While it is convenient to interpret this segregation as colonial divide and rule, the truth is more complex. In precolonial times too this strategy was also very much in practice, as the ‘Posa’ system of Ahom kings bear evidence.

The British found this Ahom administrative strategy useful and adopted it. The ‘Inner Line’ they drew, as Bodhisattva Kar shows in his essay When was the Postcolonial, was not just a line in territorial terms, but also a line in time. It was a line that divided premodern from modern, and ‘no law’ from ‘law’.

The reality was, it is in the valleys where agricultural surpluses led to state formation, centralising their bureaucracies under one authority, therefore easier to standardise one law. In the mountains, the numerous villages were each tiny kingdoms, often at war with each other. An agreement with one would not hold in the next village a few hundred meters away, prompting the approach of leaving them in the ‘unadministered’ or ‘excluded’ areas bracket.

India inherited this administrative cartography in the Northeast. Much of the frictions the region faces today are on account of different land laws and administrative mechanisms for its hills and plains, adopted to tackle the same problem.

Two centuries after Yandaboo, and as the socio-economic playfields levelled out, efforts must be to evolve suitable, consensual reforms to bring the region out of this time warp to integrate with the modern.

This article was first published in The Telegraph. The original can be read HERE

PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author