Abstract
This collection of 10 essays adds to anthropological studies of borderlands. In the introduction, editor David Gellner remarks that the chapters bring together three bodies of literature that have rarely been addressed together: work on borderlands, ethnographic perspectives on the state and studies following from James C. Scott’s work that engage with those who seek the state versus those who evade it. The essays suggest a ‘new subregion’, that is, ‘Northern South Asia’, encompassing ‘India’s mainly mountainous northern borders that enclose this subregion’ (p. 1).
Many of the chapters address border-crossings as a means to unsettle the idea of the border as a ‘natural’ divide between nation-states. Ethnographies of border crossings on the India–Nepal border addressed by Sondra Hausner and Jeevan R. Sharma or the Indian ‘enclaves’ within Bangladesh described by Jason Cons help to understand the micro-politics of space, belonging and identity at the interstices of the nation-state. As Hausner and Sharma remind us, performances of state power at its borders are not always geared towards the ‘other’ situated across its border, but often seek to contain their own citizens by limiting their trans-border mobility. In their study of Nepali migrants to India, they suggest that ‘if borders are places of significance for both states and land migrants, it is because they are the last place the former can claim any territorial sovereignty over the latter and the first place a national can shake free of the state’s dominion’ (p. 97). Similarly, Vibha Joshi draws attention to a lack of easy identification of insider/outsider when it comes to border identities. As an Indian national, she nevertheless cannot presume ease of access to Nagaland. The policing of state borders is simultaneously directed inwards and out, and this is a shifting relationship. Annu Jalais addresses the longue duree of border crossings and draws attention to the ways in which elite constructions of history have tended to determine the manner in which Partition is remembered in the Bengal borderlands. She seeks to recuperate subaltern histories of the region that often compromise statist narratives of Bengali regional patriotism and identity.
Just as cross-border mobility helps to unsettle notions of territorial fixity, ethnographic perspectives on the state seek to open up the state to critical scrutiny, dislodging it as a monolithic conceptual or territorial apparatus. In many of these essays, the state is a recurrent actor albeit one that remains ethnographically opaque, save for a few notable exceptions. Thus Deepak K. Mishra’s essay on the political economy of Arunachal Pradesh grants the state too much agency to determine the scale and scope of modernisation in the region, while Radhika Gupta’s contribution is a much more nuanced understanding of how borderland people engage with the state on different registers, making it difficult to generalise a relationship of either cooperation or opposition to the state. She makes a critical point that we ought not to reify borderland residents’ relationships with their state borders as always-already in a state of intransigence or opposition. ‘The relationship of borderlanders to the state in Kargil…defies any easy categorization of Kargilis either as manipulated subjects of the state or as those offering a radical stance of resistance’ (p. 69).
Nayanika Mathur draws attention to how the state is often complicit in the naturalisation of borders using political, sensorial and affective technologies that render the border an integral part of the regional imaginary. Just as Kargil is a territorial border that is re-located at the heart of the state in the aftermath of the ‘Kargil War’, Hindu pilgrimage sites on the edge of the border state of Uttarakhand are imagined as central to Hindu nationalist narratives. Thus, ‘Chamoli is imagined simultaneously as central and eternal to the Hindu nation even while it is positioned at its very edge’ (p. 85).
Some essays help to think through borders that are not necessarily political or international state borders at all. In Kargil, there is an additional border between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims that does not map neatly along state, regional or international borders. Annu Jalais discusses boundaries that cleave people across class and religious lines, irrespective of their state borders. Perhaps the strongest reminder that we should not over-determine borderland studies with studies of actual political borders comes from Anastasia Piliavsky’s essay on a traditional ‘thieving’ caste in Rajasthan whose territorial sphere of activity intersects with those of the police stations they are affiliated with. Each police beat functions as a mutually exclusive sphere of authority. Her study is crucial to underscore how ‘aspects of borderlands are as vividly present deep within the territories of national states as on their peripheries’ (p. 41). She concludes with a suggestion that border studies ‘shift analytical weight from the imagined territorial entity of the borderland to the structural phenomenon of the border’ (p. 41).
This is a suggestion that the present volume could have taken more seriously, for the essays, with one notable exception, do indeed demonstrate a preference for the interstices of state authority. In addition, the coinage of ‘Northern South Asia’ further restricts one’s imagination to geopolitical renditions of the region rather than mark a shift from conventional political iterations of the border, something that the volume would no doubt like to do. Further, recent work on borderlands has established that the key question is no longer limited to conceptualising the reach of the state—through either its absence or presence—but is to explore the nature of negotiations and transactions that emerge between states and populations across space and time and indeed to address how the nature of the state itself cannot be understood as static. A more nuanced historicisation of the state itself is missing from many of these essays. Finally, while the Himalayan borderland has been stated as the preferred site for this collection, though it is not clear why that is the case, the absence of research from Pakistan stands out starkly, even as the Bengal delta finds mention. Recent work from across the Line of Control in the Kashmir valley or Gilgit–Baltistan would have added to a collection on Himalayan borderlands. While the Introduction is titled ‘Northern South Asia’s Diverse Borders, from Kachchh to Mizoram’, work on neither area is represented in the review essay or the chapters that follow.