BOOK REVIEW 89 Look at the very opening subsection of the book under the title, 'British Conquest of North-east India': It was since the acquisition of the Diwani of Bengal that the East India Company came into direct contact with the medieval kingdoms of Jaintia, Cacher and Assam as well as the tribal communities of their adjoining hills. These sparsely-populated territories did not yet have enough economic worth or surplus revenue-yielding potentiality to attract the attention of British annexationists. They had therefore been left undisturbed, until the Burmese invasion (1817-24) of Assam and the Cachar plains brought an end to this policy of indifference. In November 1823 David Scott, the magistrate of Rangpur and Civil Commissioner for the district of Goalpara and Garo Hills (formed in 1822), was also appointed Agent to the Governor-General on the Northeast Frontier of Bengal. 'We have not come (here) to quench our thirst for the conquest of your kingdom', proclaimed a manifesto published in Bengali on behalf of the interventionist British-Indian troops, 'but to destroy our enemies, interested as we are to protect ourselves'. The Burmese were finally forced to surrender their claim over Assam under the Treaty of Yandabo, 1926. During the following decade and a half, the kingdoms of Jaintia, Cachar and Assam, along with their dependencies, and all the petty, independent tribal states of the Khasi Hills were annexed. Further annexation of the remaining hills was subsequently completed step by step in the face of stiff tribal resistance. The North Cachar Hills were organised into a separate administrative unit, after their subjugation was completed by 1854. A part of the Naga Hills was annexed in 1866, the country of the Lhota Nagas, in 1875; of the Angami Nagas, in 1978-80; and of the AD Nagas, in 1889. The Garo Hills, long under loose political control, was made a separate district in 1869; but the Garos could not be brought under control during the years 1971-89, but the formation of the Lushai Hills district took place only in 1898. The boundaries of the British power in north-east India were in fact always moving, always in a flux, right up to its last days in India. Nevertheless, the British province, that came to be known as Assam, took shape more or less by 1873. The Raj appeared on the scene in the guise of saviours of the people suffering from a situation of chaos, lawlessness and oppression that had persisted since the 1770s, starting with the Moamaria Civil War and culminating in the Burmese occupation of the Assam plains (1817-24). But it soon dawned on the people that the Raj had come to stay. Its purpose was to turn Assam into an agricultural estate of tea-drinking Britons and to transform local traditional institutions in such manner as to suit the colonial pattern of exploitation. People found out from experience that the new