Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 310 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$89.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8223-5542-7; US$24.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-5556-4.
India’s anxiety with its border regions has received much attention in the media, and scholars of international relations and political scientists have been engaged with them in ways that do not consider their inhabitants as central. The dominant state response to the border regions of Northern South Asia is that they are to be secured, mainly as a preserve of security agencies. What this has also meant is that research has been difficult to conduct in these regions spanning over 10,000 kilometres, where India borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Further, while the field of borderland studies has gained traction elsewhere, the relatively new border regions of South Asia have neither been studied as much nor understood in depth. This insightful collection of essays attempts to fill that gap and provide a detailed understanding of the nuances and dynamics of life in South Asia’s borderlands.
The book, which is organized to move from the west to east, takes readers through the northern parts of the South Asian international borders even as, collectively, the chapters largely engage with three bodies of literature: new writings that focus on how ordinary people interact with, engage with and experience the state in South Asia; recent work on the dynamic relationship between upland and lowland peoples (see James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed); and, work on borderlands.
Throughout the book, the borderlands of Northern South Asia are variously depicted as “a place of interaction, meeting, struggle, exchange, belonging, and transition, sometimes despite vigorous attempts at state interdiction” (269). However, these broad themes manifest themselves in hugely different ways, where cultural practices and even difference in geographies (such as shifting enclaves) determine the manner in which people across the border have come to interact with each other, with the state on both sides and with the different “nodes of control” (chapter 8).
The chapters reveal multiple agencies that control life in the border regions and these range from local officials (chapter 1), nongovernmental organizations (chapter 4), the army (chapters 6 and 7) to insurgent groups (chapter 7), which in turn interact with the state. Often, people living in the borderlands face the brunt of the distrust (on both sides) that is pervasive in the regions. Sometimes, systems that have been put in place to safeguard people at the border region actually achieve the opposite. Hausner and Sharma’s (chapter 4) account of the India-Nepal border reveals a couple facing difficulty and suspicion in crossing the border together, due to lack of documents. The porous borders present easy access to the other side as much as they allow for personal humiliations and difficulties on a daily basis.
The narratives also depict the border regions as places that straddle the zone between neglect and control by their states and the governments which rule them. While border regions in Northern South Asia share traits of underdevelopment, arguably due to neglect, the developmental discourse uneasily intertwines with security concerns. India’s frosty relationship with its neighbours provides the canvass that determines the scale of deployment of security forces and the intensity with which they exercise control, with political situations playing out in faraway capitals often determining if and when borders are to be opened.
For some of the people who inhabit the borderland regions, who were not consulted at the time of the creation of these borders, there is a seeming resignation and acceptance of authority that is exercised from far away. But for others, this authority is contested (in the case of Nagaland) while some of them find themselves in a situation where they need to prove allegiance and loyalty (Kargil). The fate that such public policy decisions have brought on the people at the borderlands is depicted through struggles for claims to “national belonging and citizenship” (chapters 2 and 9) as well as “struggles over local and national narratives of the past” (chapters 9 and 10).
Yet, the book starts with a proposition of a new sub region: Northern South Asia. Despite the common themes of anxiety, tension, interaction, hope as well as apprehension in the border regions, there are differences in historical particulars and peculiarities that underpin each region. Then there are different agents of state, “nodes of control,” geography and terrain, and economic imperatives. Furthermore, the regions’ relations with the state vary vastly. While the organization of the book from west towards the east provides a flow to indicate continuity and change, the evidence presented as a whole in the book is one of difference, diversity and complexity. The book makes a solid contribution to the understanding of the borderlands and lays the ground for further work to allow for the imagining of a new sub region. While the task is made easier for future scholarship on the complexity of the proposed sub region, the challenge will be to find discourses and narratives that bring together these complexities.
Laldinkima Sailo
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 727-729