This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

中文翻译：

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农民、殖民主义和主权：印度东部的加罗叛乱

本文研究了加罗社区历史上的两个地震十年，在殖民记录中被标记为英国统治在印度东部和东北部遇到的最暴力和最孤立的人之一。通过对印度东部和东北部地区政治经济核心要素的殖民重新排序进行调查的紧密结合的历史叙述，它将把注意力集中在反叛的加罗农民的形象和加罗的引人注目的展示上1807 年至 1820 年之间的反抗。仔细阅读丰富的殖民档案，文章将背离现存的史学来描述 19 世纪早期的殖民国家以及它与“部落”/“农民”的关系在印度东部和东北部。对原始暴力观念的批判以及殖民现代性条件下“部落”的产生将占据文章的后半部分。在这里，它将争辩说，加洛斯人在孟加拉和阿萨姆邦低地进行的众多且明显不同的猎头、袭击、掠夺和焚烧行为实际上是殖民地这一地区一系列持续农民叛乱中的第一次集结。印度——一个社区在英国统治下丧失其主权自我的历史意识的有力体现。