Community Land and Customary Rights: A Select Analysis from the Hills of Northeast India

Abstract

The concept of land as property is a ‘strange phenomenon to many tribal societies in the world’. Understanding and analysing the changes related to such an institution is always a challenging task. In other words, land ownership patterns among the tribal societies have been largely communal (although there were degrees of variation regarding the role of chief, ownership and management of their respective land) with few exceptions of individual ownership, mainly among limited number of tribes who practised terrace cultivation. But whatever may have been the ownership pattern among them, property in land had a dual connotation e.g. while on the one hand, devolution of property has been from the community to the individual, the devolution itself was subject to the control of community, on the other. So individual right was subsumed within the community right as ‘no person or group can have property in anything except as it is acknowledged by the relevant community’ and thus in this sense ‘property was never private’. This paper will deal with the changes and dispossession that have been brought about in the communal land structure despite the presence of customary laws as well as focus on the role played by both institutional and non-institutional factors in influencing the process in the hill areas of Northeast India.