An eventful politics of difference and its afterlife: Chittagong frontier, Bengal, c. 1657–1757

This essay seeks to illuminate the ‘biography’ of an early modern frontier in Chittagong, Bengal. It unravels the political rise and cultural reification of the frontier by revisiting, through multiple perspectives and successive stages, the final years in the life of a Mughal prince, Muhammad Sultan Shah Shuja‘ (1616–60?). I suggest that the language of a state frontier emerged from an ‘eventful’ conjuncture: a war of succession that caused Prince Shuja‘ to take flight through Chittagong to the Mrauk-U Kingdom in Arakan, northern Burma. Born of these events, it is argued that the genealogy of the Chittagong frontier shored up a deep history of difference between Bengal and Arakan. Beginning with some reflections from the colonial epoch, the essay then moves back for a consideration of seventeenth-century Chittagong. From 1660, as the state discourse of the frontier first took form, I follow the category to 1666, when the Mughal military annexed the city. The next section moves forward again to illustrate how the twin memory of the prince and the frontier were recalled in later, chiefly eighteenth-century traditions in Bengal. Ultimately, the essay contributes to a growing discussion on the political ideology of frontiers in early modern India. Likewise, it reorients the question of the impact of Indo-Persian on vernacular traditions by observing that such entanglements inspired both ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘othering’ in South and Southeast Asia.