THE BRITISH APPROACH TO
BACKWARD TRIBES
It has been suggested with some truth that
colonialism not so much created tribalism which
has been at the back of much contemporary
violence, but made it inevitable as an accident
resulting from bureaucratic imperatives.
Administration required boundaries so that
responsibilities could be defined for both rulers
and the ruled.
Administrators came to the frontier areas of
north-east Burma with its system of traditional
politics in which boundaries were fluid and
political positions and power structures were not
overburdened with literate constitutionalism;
who an individual considered himself to be and
to whom he owed loyalty was circumstantial
rather than following any fixed customary system;
a man could claim descent from either his father
or mother as the occasion demanded and
hypergamous marriages were an ideal commonly
practised.
The British saw tribes as demographic and
social boxes into which everyone could be placed
and these boxes would then have fixed
boundaries which would have legal and fiscal
obligations for those within them. Even up to the
end of British rule, it was always hoped to be able
to organise administratively tribally exclusiv