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An endangered history : indigeneity, religion, and politics on the borders of India, Burma, and Bangladesh / Angma Dey Jhala

An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, c. 1798-1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, includin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jhala, Angma Dey
Format: Printed Book
Published: New Delhi Oxford 2019
Subjects:
Description
Summary:An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, c. 1798-1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and Christianity; speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or slash-and-burn agriculture. This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as botany, natural history, gender, enumerative statistics, and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map, and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race, and nation.
Physical Description:lxxii, 253 p. illustrations, maps ;
ISBN:9780199493081
0199493081