Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia

319 Pages·2013·3.59 MB·English

BORDERLAND LIVES IN NORTHERN SOUTH ASIA

BORDERLAND LIVES
I N N O R T H E R N S O U T H A S I A
Edited by David N. Gellner
With an afterword by Willem van Schendel
Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Minion and Franklin Gothic by Copperline Book Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Borderland lives in northern South Asia / edited by David N. Gellner ;
with an afterword by Willem van Schendel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5542-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5556-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. South Asia — Boundaries — History. 2. South Asia — Politics
and government. 3. South Asia — Relations. 4. South Asia —
Social conditions. i. Gellner, David N. ii. Schendel, Willem van
ds341.b67 2013
306.20954 — dc23
2013029328
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction | David N. Gellner
Northern South Asia’s Diverse Borders,
from Kachchh to Mizoram 1
One | Anastasia Piliavsky
Borders without Borderlands:
On the Social Reproduction of
State Demarcation in Rajasthan 24
Two | Radhika Gupta
Allegiance and Alienation:
Border Dynamics in Kargil 47
Three | Nayanika Mathur
Naturalizing the Himalaya-as-Border
in Uttarakhand 72
Four | Sondra L. Hausner | Jeevan R. Sharma
On the Way to India:
Nepali Rituals of Border Crossing 94
Five | Rosalind Evans
The Perils of Being a Borderland People:
On the Lhotshampas of Bhutan 117
Six | Deepak K. Mishra
Developing the Border:
The State and the Political Economy of
Development in Arunachal Pradesh 141
Seven | Vibha Joshi
The Micropolitics of Borders:
The Issue of Greater Nagaland (or Nagalim) 163
Eight | Nicholas Farrelly
Nodes of Control in a South(east)
Asian Borderland 194
Nine | Jason Cons
Histories of Belonging(s):
Narrating Territory, Possession, and Dispossession
at the India-Bangladesh Border 214
Ten | Annu Jalais
Geographies and Identities:
Subaltern Partition Stories along Bengal’s
Southern Frontier 245
Afterword | Willem van Schendel
Making the Most of ‘Sensitive’ Borders 266
Contributors 273
Bibliography 277
Index 303
PREFACE
The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the British Asso-
ciation of South Asian Studies (basas) annual conference in Edinburgh on
31 March 2009. This could not have happened without the support of the Brit-
ish Academy through a grant from its Area Panel for South Asia; I am grateful
for its support and encouragement of young ‘peridoctoral’ scholars. I would
also like to thank basas for helping us to invite Willem van Schendel to come
as the panel discussant and the British Embassy Kathmandu, which enabled
the journalist Prashant Jha’s participation. Their comments and presentations
greatly enriched our discussions.
Chapters 5 and 10 have appeared previously and are republished with permis-
sion (from Contemporary South Asia, Taylor and Francis, and Modern Asian
Studies, Cambridge University Press, respectively). The maps were drawn (ex-
cept where otherwise attributed) by Bill Nelson.
In this volume double quotation marks are used to indicate a citation from
an identifiable source, whether written or oral (even when pseudonyms have
been used). Single quotation marks are used for everything else (talking about
words, scare quotes, etc.). We have also adopted the convention that when
discussing the state as an idea or a nation-state the word ‘state’ remains uncap-
italized, but when mentioning the various States of the Indian Union (Uttar
Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, etc.), it is capitalized.

INTRODUCTION | DAVID N. GELLNER
Northern South Asia’s Diverse Borders,
from Kachchh to Mizoram
The human being is the connecting creature who must always separate
and cannot connect without separating. . . . And the human being is
likewise the bordering creature who has no border.
— Simmel, “Bridge and Door” ([1909] 1994: 10)
This book proposes a new subregion: Northern South Asia.1 The locations of
the book’s detailed case studies are strung out along India’s mainly mountain-
ous northern borders that enclose this subregion. The authors address three
bodies of literature that have rarely been brought into conjunction before:
(1) new writings, largely (but not only) by anthropologists, that focus on how
ordinary people interact with, engage with, and experience the state in South
Asia (e.g., Fuller and Bénéï 2001); (2) recent work invigorated by a renewed
awareness of the dynamic relationship between upland and lowland peoples
or, as James C. Scott (2009) would have it, between people of the state and
people fleeing the state; and (3) work on borderlands, a topic that is old enough
to have spawned a whole subdiscipline in North America and to a lesser extent
in Europe, but which, as a focus of sustained academic investigation, is new
for South Asianists. Thus we are fortunate to have Willem van Schendel as the
author of the afterword to this volume, as he has done more than anyone to
demonstrate the fruitfulness of the academic study of borders in South Asia.
His publications are used and debated at numerous places in the pages that
follow.