Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India

Abstract

What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from deliberate attempts by British administrators to ensure that knowledge did not easily traverse time and space. These "men on the spot" sought to make many of their activities opaque to outsiders, including their institutional superiors. Focusing on David Scott, the leading colonial official during and immediately after the British annexation of Assam, this chapter proposes that conventional models for understanding modern colonial state-building and knowledge production do not fit this region. It argues that governing and comprehending the early colonial north-east emerged as much from creative engagements with myopia and amnesia as from clear-sighted and accumulative "state simplifications".