Imperial Insecurity, the British Frontier System and Origins of the Northeast

The Great Game and British Frontier System

In India and Asian Geopolitics (2021), Veteran diplomat Shiv Shankar Menon argues that British India was conceived as a “sub-imperial” power and entrusted with managing Britain’s relations across Asia. Through the Indian Foreign Department, British India shaped relations with the Gulf, Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, particularly within the strategic rivalry known as the “Great Game.”

Central to these geopolitics was an exaggerated fear of Russian expansion toward India’s Northwest frontier. British policymakers believed that Russia’s steady imperial advance would eventually culminate in an invasion of India. This anxiety justified repeated interventions in Afghanistan, guided by the “Forward School” doctrine, which argued that security required pushing British influence beyond India’s borders rather than remaining passive. These interventions proved militarily disastrous, most notably in 1839 and again in 1878.

Britain gradually shifted toward managing insecurity through buffer states and indirect rule. Afghanistan, under the strong and subsidized ruler Abdur Rahman, emerged as a crucial buffer between British and Russian spheres of influence. The logic of frontier management was further formalized in 1893 with the Durand Line, which divided tribal regions into zones of influence loosely linked to Kabul and Lahore (respectively, Afghanistan’s and the British Punjab’s centres of power). Further east along the Indus was the administrative border of British India. The space between the two was governed indirectly. This thinking was later articulated by Lord Curzon in his 1903 Romanes Lecture, Frontiers, at Oxford. Curzon described a three-layered frontier system: the settled administrative core, a surrounding zone of “active protection,” and an outer strategic frontier or buffer zone.

The North-East Frontier

Around the 1860s, the Northeast frontier was understood to encompass the entire hill ranges to the north, east, and south of the Assam Valley, as well as the western slopes of the great mountain system separating Bengal from independent Burma. This frontier included not only tribal-inhabited tracts but also several princely states and independent kingdoms, such as Sikkim (which joined India in 1975), Bhutan, and Nepal. By the 1910s, the North-West style three-tiered frontier policy was extended to the North-East as well.

The Administrative Border of British India

Colonial efforts to establish direct rule—through modern property relations and legal–administrative institutions—were largely confined to territories within the administrative border, namely the settled districts of the frontier province, covering most of present-day Assam and Sylhet. Assam was made a chief commissionership in 1874, and the production of tea, oil, and coal had transformed this region into an enclave of global capitalism by the late nineteenth century. The alienation of so-called “wastelands” to European tea planters disrupted existing social and economic networks, provoking frequent attacks on plantations by dispossessed hill communities. The Inner Line Regulation (under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873) sought to insulate these plantations and consolidate zones of firm colonial control. British subjects (i.e., the people of the British Indian provinces) required an Inner Line Permit to cross administrative borders. 

Frontier of Active Protection: The Political Peripheries

Beyond these indirectly ruled areas lay what Curzon described as the frontier of “active protection.” Although claimed as British territory, these regions were subjected to minimal administration and controlled through occasional military expeditions. This principle of “minimum interference” rested on the belief that extensive regulations were unsuitable for societies organized around chiefs, village councils, and customary authorities. British officials thus sought to preserve indigenous political institutions while exercising indirect control.

This approach found constitutional expression in the Montagu–Chelmsford Report (1917), which recommended that “backward tracts” be excluded from the jurisdiction of the reformed provincial legislatures. In such excluded areas, legislative councils could neither enact laws nor move resolutions. Administration was carried out through regulations issued by the Governor General under section 71 of the Government of India Act, 1915. The Act institutionalized this framework by empowering the Governor General to declare “backward areas.” Accordingly, in January 1921, several hill and frontier regions of Assam—including the Naga Hills, Lushai Hills, Garo Hills, parts of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills, and the Sadiya, Balipara, Lakhimpur Frontier Tracts—were officially designated as “backward tracts.” The last three frontier tracts were placed under some form of administration only in 1914 and were collectively named the North-East Frontier Tract (NEFT). Laws enacted by provincial or central legislatures applied to “backward areas” only at the Governor’s discretion and with such modifications as deemed necessary. However, several pockets, such as “Naga Tribal Area,” remained unadministered.

Map source: Aditya Kiran Kakati (2025)

The Simon Commission (1928) later revisited this constitutional arrangement. Competing views emerged: one opposing exclusion on economic grounds, another favouring partial inclusion for select hill areas, and a third advocating complete exclusion. The Government of Assam strongly supported exclusion, arguing that the hill areas shared little in common with the plains, imposed financial burdens on provincial revenues, and hindered political development in the plains. It further contended that these frontier regions should be administered directly by British officers under the Governor as agents of the Government of India, given their strategic role in frontier defence.

Accepting these arguments, the Simon Commission recommended a two-fold classification: Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas. By 1936, frontier tracts such as the Naga Hills and Lushai Hills were fully excluded, while regions like the Garo, Mikir, and North Cachar Hills were partially excluded. From 1937 to 1947, the Excluded Areas were administered directly by the Governor of Assam through a separate secretariat, underscoring their status as political peripheries within the British frontier system. (In independent India, some of these excluded and partially excluded tribal areas were granted special constitutional protection under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.)

The Quest for Buffer Zones

In his Romanes Lecture at Oxford, Lord Curzon outlined the strategic rationale underpinning the British frontier system in Asia. He emphasized that the Indian Empire was separated from rival European powers by a series of buffer states and protectorates—Russia by Persia, Afghanistan, and the Wakhan Corridor, and France by Siam and the Shan States. Despite periodic diplomatic rapprochements, Curzon noted that the competing powers invested enormous resources to preserve the integrity of these intervening zones, underscoring the centrality of buffer regions to imperial security.

Further, British anxieties intensified after Russia secured China’s consent in 1913 to divide Mongolia into Inner and Outer zones. As Russian influence rapidly expanded into Mongolia, British policymakers feared a similar penetration into Tibet. Yet Britain was unwilling to assume a direct protectorate over Tibet. Facing mounting pressures in Europe, the British were reluctant to extend their military and administrative commitments across another 2,000 miles of difficult frontier and a vast, inhospitable territory. Recognizing Chinese suzerainty over Tibet appeared to be a pragmatic solution to keep Russia at bay without provoking China, with whom Britain had substantial commercial interests. At the same time, Britain was wary of Chinese troops appearing along India’s frontiers, which full Chinese sovereignty might entail. A weak, autonomous, and neutralized Tibet thus best served British strategic interests.

These considerations shaped the Shimla Conference of 1914, convened to formalize Tibet’s de facto autonomy following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1912. Britain sought to institutionalize a zonal division between Inner and Outer Tibet, thus limiting Chinese administrative and military presence. While the plan aligned with Tibetan aspirations and was accepted by Tibet, China refused to ratify the Convention. Nevertheless, the agreement produced the McMahon Line (after Sir Henry McMahon, the British India foreign secretary), which came to define the boundary between India and Tibet/China. (China consolidated its control over Tibet in the early 1950s following the Communist Revolution, bringing Chinese troops up to India’s Himalayan borders. The border issues are still unresolved. Moreover, British fears became real during the Second World War when Japanese forces advanced toward India, culminating in two decisive battles at Kohima and Imphal on the Northeastern frontier.

Concluding Remark

The three-layered British frontier system left a deep and enduring imprint, shaping postcolonial boundaries, security doctrines, and exceptional modes of administration in the Northeast. The frontier that emerged was not simply a territorial line, but a historically constructed space that continues to frame how the region is imagined, securitized, and governed.