Book review: Farhana Ibrahim and Tanuja Kothiyal,eds. 2021. South Asian Borderlands: Mobility,History,Affect

The book through historical and ethnographical explorations, highlights the unique social and political formations of South Asian borderlands. In doing so, it studies these borderlands through broader epistemological themes presented in the book as: negotiated sovereignty, diachrony, mobility and affect.

The theme of negotiated sovereignty is explored through the contested claim to authority in a region. The volume studies this through the pre-colonial and colonial frontiers that were often spaces with ill-defined boundaries. Cartography here as a colonial practice of control had not yet fully emerged. As the chapter on Thar-frontier discusses, this was a region of diffused authority and fuzzy boundaries, largely controlled by local chieftains who, both drew legitimacy through old kinship entitlements and exercised authority by controlling key routes. Plunder and loot (banditry) were often ways of power negotiations with the princely states. Being uncomfortable with these older power sharing arrangements, the empire often nudged the princely states to map, tame and establish a uniform core of concentrated authority. Ascribing criminality to banditry was a step in this direction. The discussion, in another chapter on the colonial frontier between the Bombay province under the Raj and the princely state of Hyderabad under the Nizam, also shows how negotiated authority often made frontiers—spaces of possibilities and resources. The citizens from either side of these frontiers benefited from the fragmented overlapping sovereignty and the multiple juridical claims here. British Raj’s urge to penetrate Hyderabad through extraterritorial illegalities was countered by the access to jurisdictional difference provided by these frontiers to those escaping Raj’s disciplinary apparatus on either side.

This urge of empires to control and bring the periphery into the core comes alive in the chapter discussing the representation of Kashmir in Mughal empire’s literary and political imaginations. Not only was this done through the spatial practices that territorialised the empire’s imperial authority in the distant province of Kashmir but also the literary imaginary of Kashmir jannat nazir, paradisiacal, was deliberately produced in Mughal courts, making Kashmir familiar and known in the core of the empire. The tendency to bring the peripheries closer to the core is further discussed in the chapters on British empire’s direct expansion into central and western Himalayas (Tarai and Kumaun) through railways, roads and creation of new ‘economic nodes’ (p. 174). This not only reconfigured the historic flow of trade and people but also altered connections across trans-Himalayan Asian highland Silk route. The new market centres overshadowed the existing trans-Himalayan trade, leading to reconfiguration of political authority that forcibly packed people in these otherwise connected geographies into disconnected borderlands under an overarching nationalist identity. The book thus argues that in quest for clearly defined and ordered territories, the empires and nation-states constantly looked for natural boundaries that could act as frontiers of separation. But what were taken to be ‘natural frontiers of separation’ were in fact historically connected geographies with deep histories of connections and flows, all of which were reoriented.

Discussions on post-colonial borderlands are carried out through the larger themes: identity, assertion, contested belongings and mobility. The work on Gorkha identity and its sustained assertion in the north-eastern frontier, particularly in Darjeeling hills, interestingly explores the diachronic nature of the border, where, in order to assert the collective group identity of being a Gorkha (with unique historic, linguistic and cultural origins), connections across the border in Nepal are evoked. But a break away from same connections is seen while asserting the demand for the recognition of Scheduled Tribe status as well as a demand for a separate Gorkhaland within the Indian union, thereby hinting at an ambivalent relationship between the community and the border. Another chapter, discussing state building in Arunachal, highlights the changing dynamics between the Tawang Monastery, the local population and the state in Tawang district. It shows how in light of a threat from an aggressive neighbour (China in this case), the state’s desperation to integrate Tawang into its core is responded to by the local religious and cultural elite duly recognising the state (in pursuit of material aid). This emphasises the working nexus between the political and the religious authority, in contrast to the frictional relation between the centre and the periphery that the border studies often highlight.

How a particular religious identity dwelling along the newly emergent border in Kutch in an immediate post-Partition phase becomes a matter of concern, bizarrely seen as a threat to ‘national security’, is explored through the debates on bureaucratic reorganisation in the chapter on Kutch. The shared cross-border kinship ties and exchange among Muslims in the Kutch–Sindh border were looked upon with suspicion, when in fact it were the same shared historic linkages that were a source of peace and stability in the region. Such anxieties regarding identity, nation and belonging, were not a pre-given but emerged parallel to the rise of the post-colonial nation-state with heightened administrative and bureaucratic control in the borderlands.

The chapter on borderland families and cross-border kinship and affinal ties, in Coochbehar, Bengal, throws light on mobility and affect vis-à-vis borders. The desire to maintain relations across the boundary though marriages amidst the shifting border control practices puts the burden on women. In the name of duty and relative intimacies, both in their natal and affinal homes, women take this risk of illegally crossing the border. The mobility is thus gendered often stigmatising those (women) who cross for work and economic issues compared to those who do so for familial ties, thereby providing a fresh lens of taking up new research in the field of borderland studies. This approach of doing borderland studies highlighting gender is also explored in the chapter that reads nation and belongings through Parijat’s writings and poetry, the feminist-Marxist poet who lived a life constantly shuffling across the border between Nepal and India. It talks about creating a more inclusive space for alternative voices in social sciences, for example ‘creative writing’ being explored as one such alternative field of study in this chapter. While exploring the narratives in the discourse on borderlands through ‘self’, the work lays emphasis on the language of affect in fiction, asking to go beyond the hegemonic cartographical and national reading of borders in social sciences.

The book is a valuable contribution to the study of borderlands in South Asia. Its interdisciplinary approach, putting together history and anthropology (ethnography) of borderlands in one volume works, especially while understanding the modern Westphalian state’s desperate need to control peripheries through territorial sovereignty. The practices of control during the pre-colonial and colonial empires inform the modern-day nation-state’s anxiety to tightly hold borderlands and crush any form of ethnic and cultural assertion. Contemporary ongoing studies on borderlands, in their attempt to explore new themes that connect borderlands regionally in South Asia and globally, can gain a lot from the richly explored themes of negotiated sovereignty, identity, belonging, mobility, affect, and changing aspects of border over time, as seen in this volume.