As children, we all studied ‘history’ in school. Initially we studied national ‘history’, and later on as we moved up the intellectual ladder we studied international ‘history’. When we weren’t studying the glories and achievements, and the development of our particular nations, we were studying ‘ancient history’. Things were made to appear quite cut-and-dry. At first there were savage, nomadic, foraging tribal humans; then there were competing kingdoms, big and small, under various rulers; finally, as we grew to be more ‘civilized’ we naturally evolved into groups of nation-states. And though we are not now living happily ever after this is still the ‘end of history’, that in the liberal, parliamentary democracy ‘we’ have achieved the highest political development humanly possible.

Apart from the numerous exceptions that we can find to this neat historical chronicling everywhere in the world, especially if we study the non-European  geopolitical area since the immediately pre-colonial era, there are plenty of dissenting voices even within the academia against this linear, unproblematic version of political evolution. There is nothing ‘natural’ about the evolution of the nation-state; nor is it a spontaneous choice of the subject population. The area designated as Zomia in Southeast Asia is a powerful case in point.

Zomia, just to be clear, is not a country, it’s not a kingdom. The term, which originates from the vernacular languages spoken in the area, means remote highlanders. It also refers to the geographical territory that these highlanders call their home. The territory we are talking about is an enormous massif of roughly 2.5 million square kilometres, including the east of India, Burma, chunks of China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. James C Scott, whose book The Art of Not Being Governed which he calls ‘An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia’, presents a scarcely historicized account of this region.

In traditional, mainstream histories, we commonly read how the settlement of a community on a river basin and the agricultural cultivation of the land were the beginning more or less of a ‘civilization’ proper – beginning in fact of ‘culture’. These terms are used to imply a hierarchical social structure, of courts, palaces and kingdoms. Cities were automatically the only or the greatest foci of ‘culture’. People, they said, naturally gravitated towards these centres because of the wealth, security and the exuberance they offered. All these facts are not in dispute. What is disputed, however, is the partial and smoky nature of these facts. Left out in these accounts is the fact that many communities chose NOT to be part of these kingdoms because of various reasons – taxes, slavery, conscription, war, bonded labour and so on (more or less the same reasons ,under changed labels, that cause mass migrations today).

Kingdoms were forcibly populated by less than holy methods. Marauding armies conducted regular sweeping exercises to capture people from fringe communities, villages and other remote areas, not only for slaves but also to populate the centres of kingdoms. Many rulers even resorted to providing special incentives, tax concessions etc to get the populations to stay, and to cultivate wet-rice (in the case of Southeast Asia), because of its high yield per square kilometre. This way they could monitor the crops and claim them through taxes. Traditional school histories also do not reveal the fact that populations fleeing from these budding empires (or nation-states) was quite a common occurrence. Socio-political mobility and instabilities do not sit well with those historians who have a stake in presenting a particular view of history. It must be remembered that most pre-colonial chroniclers were court chroniclers, or were part of the rulers’ coterie. They had to appease their patrons, and project the best possible image of their kingdoms.

So, where does Zomia figure in all this? In post-modern parlance areas like Zomia can be termed the alternative space. Remote, inaccessible areas like high mountain ranges, thick swamps and jungles become the refuge of those peoples who refused to be incorporated into expanding and tyrannical empires. Some of these were formerly independent, land-cultivating people who resisted and lost, others loose-knit but recognizable communities of foragers, hunter-gatherers etc. But historicizing does not simply limit itself to deliberate selection of facts; the discourse also involves the glorification and justification of certain terms like ‘civilization’, ‘culture’, ‘progress’ etc by opposing them to other terms like ‘barbarians’, ‘savage’, ‘ancient’ etc, which were projected as undesirable. Those who could not be controlled were not simply strange – they were somehow less than human. Everything – from their dress to their food habits – were cited as proofs of their backwardness, while these were actually signs of adaptation, and other practices like nomadism may well have been a deliberate attempt to elude capture and assimilation.

This does not mean that there are no populations that were ‘left behind’ – that remained untouched by the civilizing process. It does not mean either that the runaway communities had better, more ‘progressive’ social systems, although their mobile, amorphous lifestyles afforded them many freedoms that populations firmly subjected to a highly centralized, fixed and policed systems could never have had. All that the historical accounts such as the one explained here suggest is that there are truths that are kept well-hidden, and there are stories that are never told. History too is a story: told by someone, to someone, for some reason. There are as many histories as there are historians.

Chetna