State, peasants and land reclamation

The present work examines the changing notion of wastelands and contested rights over it in Assam in the last 200 years. As the East India Company gradually became aware of this region, they expressed their serious interest in the wastelands. The initial intervention took place with the discovery of tea plants in Assam, and the Company administration began to lease out such lands to the European planters. During the 1830s and 1870s, a significant amount of such lands was transferred to the planters. It was from the 1870s that the newly established provincial forest department began to affirm its right over the forest resources of the province. Though the forest department asserted its sole right over the forested land, the planters also began to reaffirm their distinctive right over it. While these two components of the colonial state struggled for their respective share of the wastelands, the peasant society also articulated their claim over these lands. In the late twentieth century, as the forests came under the increasing control of human intervention and there was agricultural activity, the conflict between the two frontiers of agrarian and forest boundaries became prominent.