Authors: Shiladitya Das, Dr. Pradeep Kumar Kesharwani
Abstract: This conceptual paper examines how Kamrup was remade under British rule as a frontier district within the wider political economy of colonial Assam. Rather than treating colonial change as a simple story of modernization, the paper argues that Kamrup was transformed through an uneven set of linked processes: revenue extraction, market reorganization, administrative restructuring, urban growth around Gauhati, the formation of a new educated middle class, and the selective spread of print, schooling, and gendered reform. The district was neither a passive recipient of colonial policy nor an untouched cultural zone. It became a strategic space where imperial interests, local elites, peasant society, and vernacular cultural forms interacted in unstable ways. By bringing together district gazetteers, works on colonial Assam's economy, frontier studies, and scholarship on print culture and social reform, the paper shows that colonial Kamrup was produced through both integration and differentiation. It was integrated into imperial circuits of administration and exchange, yet internally divided by new hierarchies of class, gender, language, and space. The paper contributes to subregional histories of northeastern India by showing why the district scale remains essential for understanding the social and cultural textures of colonial rule.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19046602
