History
This region has no dynasty, no capital and no king list, and the honest thing to say is that the absence is the history. Authority here was never concentrated: it sat in the dolung kebang, the council of elders of a single village, meeting in the dormitory around a hearth, with no hereditary office and nobody holding a right to decide that could be inherited. That means the periodisation has to be built out of other people's records. The ancient period has none at all — no inscription, coin or dated monument has been recovered here, and what stands in its place is oral genealogy and the shape of the language, both of which are tradition rather than chronology. The medieval period is defined not by a local state but by the terms this stateless country negotiated with the Ahom kingdom on the plain below, from the thirteenth century onward. And the modern period does not begin in 1857 or in 1947 but in 1873, with the Inner Line Regulation — a line drawn across the foothills that put this country outside ordinary administration and kept it there until independence. What followed the line was not government but four armed expeditions.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
AncientBefore c. 1200 — no dated record
Nothing in this period can be dated, and it is better to say so than to borrow a chronology from the plain. No inscription, coin, stone monument or written record has been recovered from the Siang country, and the copperplate grants of Kamarupa, a few days downstream, refer to hill communities only in general terms. What exists instead is two other kinds of evidence. The first is oral: genealogies recited at ritual, tracing descent through Abotani, and migration accounts describing movement southward and downward along the river. These are tradition, they are internally consistent, and they carry no dates. The second is linguistic: Adi, Galo, Tagin and Apatani belong to the Tani branch, and so does Mising, spoken on the Brahmaputra sandbars below the hills — the hill and the floodplain are one speech community separated by gradient rather than by any event that could be given a year.
Medievalc. 1228 – 1826
From the thirteenth century there is a state on the plain below, and for the first time this country appears in somebody's records — as the other party to a negotiation. The Ahom kingdom did not conquer these hills and does not appear to have tried for long. What it did instead was buy quiet, through the arrangement known as posa: annual payments to hill communities in cloth, salt, cattle and rice, together with grants of khat land in the foothills, in return for peace on the frontier and for the trade continuing. Trade ran downhill in ginger, chillies, dyes, wax and hides and uphill in salt, iron, cloth and beads, and the hill side of it was organised by village rather than by any central authority, which is precisely why the plains state had to make its terms village by village. The upper gorge went a different way: from about the seventeenth century Tibetan-speaking Memba and Khamba households settled around Tuting as part of the settlement of Pemako, bringing monasteries and a resident religious authority — a form of organisation that exists nowhere else in this region.
Modern1826 – 1947
The colonial state never administered this country. It drew a line around it. The Inner Line Regulation of 1873 fixed a boundary across the foothills beyond which British subjects could not pass without a permit, which left the hills outside ordinary law and revenue while the government continued to claim them for external purposes. In place of administration there was a sequence of punitive expeditions, each following a killing, a refusal or a dispute over porterage and supply, and each remembered on the Adi side by its own name — Bitbor Mimak in 1858, Bongal Mimak in 1859, Nijom Mimak in 1894 and Poju Mimak in 1911. The last was much the largest. On 31 March 1911 Noel Williamson, the Assistant Political Officer at Sadiya, and Dr J. D. Gregorson were killed on a journey up the Siang, and between October 1911 and April 1912 a substantial force moved upriver, burning villages and meeting organised resistance, most famously at the cliff of Kekar Monying. The expedition's lasting product was not administration but survey: the mapping done under its cover fed directly into the boundary alignment agreed at the Simla conference in 1914.
Rulers and commanders
The dolung kebang Village council Administrator In continuous use; documented from the nineteenth century
The actual unit of authority in this region, and the reason there is no king list. Elders sit around the hearth in the dormitory and hear land, marriage, theft, inheritance and boundary disputes, arguing to a common position rather than voting, and citing precedent as a court would. Where evidence is insufficient, oath and ordeal are used. Nobody inherits the right to decide, and no office in it can be passed to a son.
Dynasty: Not dynastic — no hereditary office exists in this system. Seat: The moshup or dere, the village dormitory
The banggo kebang Council of a cluster of villages Administrator In continuous use
The second tier. When a dispute crosses a village boundary it passes automatically to the banggo, the council of a compact group of villages, which hears it on the same principles. The three-tier arrangement was completed with an apex council for the whole community in 1948.
Dynasty: Not dynastic. Seat: Convened as required within the cluster
The bulyang Council of lineage representatives Administrator In continuous use
The Apatani equivalent on the Ziro plateau, and further evidence that the pattern is regional rather than particular to one community. Representatives of the clans and lineages decide together and there is no chief. The valley's permanent irrigated rice terraces, cut and maintained without plough or draught animal, are held and worked under decisions taken this way.
Dynasty: Not dynastic. Seat: The Apatani villages of the Ziro plateau
The gam, or gaonbura Village spokesman recognised by the administration Administrator From the 1870s
The one hereditary-looking office in the region, and it was invented by the colonial state rather than found here. Needing a single person to summon, pay and hold responsible in villages that had no single person of that kind, the administration appointed spokesmen, issued them a red blanket and a brass badge, and treated them as headmen. The kebang continued to decide; the gam carried the message.
Dynasty: An office created from outside. Seat: Every village in contact with the plains administration
The gonpa of the upper gorge Monastic authority Administrator c. 17th century onward
Above Tuting the political form changes completely. Memba and Khamba households, speaking a Tibetic language, are organised around monasteries with a resident religious authority rather than around a council of elders. The change happens within a day's travel along one river, and it is the sharpest institutional boundary anywhere in the region.
Dynasty: Nyingma establishments of Pemako. Seat: Tuting and the villages above it
Noel Williamson Assistant Political Officer, Sadiya Administrator died 31 March 1911
The whole apparatus of colonial authority in this country was one political officer at Sadiya with a small escort, travelling upriver on tours that had no legal standing inside the Inner Line. His killing at Komsing in March 1911 is what brought an army into the gorge for the first and only time, and what turned an unadministered tract into a surveyed one.
Dynasty: British frontier administration. Seat: Sadiya
Matmur Jamoh Village leader Rebel active 1911
Named in the record as responsible for the killing of Noel Williamson at Komsing on 31 March 1911, after an earlier confrontation between the two. He surrendered when British forces moved against his family, was tried, and was sentenced to life imprisonment and transported to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. He is the only individual from this region whose name the colonial record preserves at length, and it preserves it because he was prosecuted.
Dynasty: Not dynastic. Seat: Yagrung village, near Pasighat