1 Reconigured frontier: British policy towards the Chin-Lushai Hills, 1881-1898 Pum Khan Pau * Abstract The paper analyses three British policies toward the Chin- Lushai Hills in the late nineteenth century. Though initially the British considered these hill tracts only as a source of trouble and therefore followed a non-interventionist approach, it was after the fall of Upper Burma that they began to see its strategic importance and therefore changed their perspective. This paper examines three colonial policies all of which in one way or the other dealt with the Zo people who predominantly lived in the Chin-Lushai hill tracts. It argues that the common thread that passes through the three policies was an attempt to establish colonial rule in the frontier based on ‘administrative convenience’ at the expense of the interest of the local population. The paper also argues that colonial and postcolonial borders not only fragmented the indigenous Zo population into different nation-states, but also changed the contour of their history. Keywords: colonialism, Zo, frontier, policy, amalgamation T owards the end of the nineteenth century British policy towards the Indo-Burma frontier witnessed a marked shift from non-intervention to intervention, which was a clear departure from the conventional method they had been following since the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26). What prompted such a change in colonial frontier policy was the annexation of Upper Burma in the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885-86) that inally led to ISSN. 0972 - 8406 The NEHU Journal, Vol XVI, No. 1, January - June 2018, pp. 1-17 * Pum Khan Pau, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. Email: puapau@gmail.com