The Bangla word 'jumia' (often written as 'jhumia', particularly in English discourses), refers to cultivators engaged in a special form of hillside agriculture, while in the Chakma language – spoken by the Chakma people of Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and adjacent areas such as India's Tripura and Mizoram states – the word 'jumma' denotes an ethnic category. Both words derive from 'jum' (also written as 'jhum'), which is a vernacular term found in several related languages like Bangla, Assamese and Chakma, that refers to the aforementioned system of hillside agriculture, commonly known as 'shifting cultivation', which is practiced widely in the CHT, the Northeast of India and beyond. Historically, jum in the CHT was typically oriented towards subsistence, with some local varieties of dry rice as the main crops, which were invariably grown as part of a poly-cropping system that included other products such as vegetables, spices, flowers, cotton and sesame, with the last two items having been the main cash crops in the past. Jum also involved a rotational cycle of keeping used fields fallow, allowing natural regeneration of the land.
In the CHT, the nature, extent and context of jum underwent significant transformation in recent history, particularly since the 1960s. Over approximately the past fifty years, the feasibility and relative economic importance of jum declined quite sharply. However, despite this material decline, or perhaps because of it, jum and the jumia way of life acquired new symbolic significances among former jumias. Most remarkably, jum served as the linguistic and cultural foundation of a newly constructed identity, named Jumma, which emerged in the 1970s as a collective designation for the indigenous ethnic groups ('hill people') of the CHT. The original, literal meaning of the Chakma word 'jumma', like that of the related Bangla 'jumia', designated a jum cultivator. But in practice, Jumma acquired a whole new meaning, with clear political undertones as well as special cultural connotations, regardless of the current agricultural practices of the people it came to designate. Ethnically, its boundaries remained those of the older category of 'hill people', or 'Pahari' in Bangla, which had its roots in British colonial discourse.
Against the backdrop outlined above, this article looks at the multiple layers and dimensions of the relations between jum and Jumma identity in the CHT. First, in broad outline, I trace the course of the political economy of jum in the CHT over the last three centuries, particularly since the region was brought under British colonial rule in the latter half of the 18th century. Second, I examine how the emergence of identities like 'hill people' and Jumma entailed a shift in ethnic boundaries, and how cultural features associated with jum, including food crops and culinary traditions, became markers of Jumma identity. And third, I explore the extent to which the proponents of Jumma identity represent the interests and aspirations of contemporary jum cultivators. I conclude by arguing that re-examining received notions relating to agricultural systems and communities such as jum and jumias, which are usually marginalised in the history of Southasia, is central to reclaiming their past and present.
From Mughal cotton-country to British rule
The East India Company, which took direct control of many parts of Bengal soon after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, started governing Chittagong in 1761. During the preceding period of Mughal rule (1666-1760), the hills bordering the coastal plains of Chittagong came to be known as Kapas Mahal, or 'cotton (growing) area', as noted in various secondary accounts. However, the equation of the present day CHT with the Kapas Mahal, which is now a common tendency, may not be fully accurate: the territory that the British named CHT, with clearly demarcated boundaries as a newly created district, came into existence only in 1860, whereas Kapas Mahal did not necessarily constitute a well-demarcated administrative area and may have included places that are outside the current boundaries of the CHT but within the boundaries of present day Chittagong District. Be that as it may, it is important to note that during or even before the period of Mughal rule in Chittagong, there was no direct rule by any state-level political authority in the adjoining hill tracts, although the kingdoms of Tripura and Arakan, not to mention the Mughals themselves, exerted varying degrees of influence at various times and places of the area that would later become the CHT. During the period of Mughal ascendancy in the region, semi-independent 'tribal' chiefs from the hill tracts paid tribute to Mughal authorities in the form of cotton grown in jum fields in exchange for the right to conduct trade and commerce with Mughal subjects living in the coastal plains. Under the East India Company, by 1791 this arrangement would soon take a more monetised form, thus rendering cotton tributes, and with it probably the name 'Kapas Mahal' as well, things of the past. In any case, it is possible that cotton's importance as a cash crop in the CHT decreased significantly as Bengal's textile industry declined and eventually collapsed under British rule, when newly imposed high tariffs and other barriers made it difficult for Indian textile products to enter the European markets.