Border and Belonging

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to study border making between India and Burma with a particular focus on the Manipur–Chin Hills border. It seeks to address the question of ‘citizenship’ in Manipur through a critical examination of ‘frontier posts’, and monuments such as ‘memorial stones’ of the colonial period, and the demarcation of the Manipur–Chin Hills boundary in 1894. It argues that the question of citizenship, which continues to haunt hills–valley relations in Manipur, especially in the south today, cannot be fully defined without understanding the power, influence and territorial extent of the kingdom of Manipur vis-à-vis the Sukte chiefdom in the northern Chin Hills before modern cartography came into application. Moreover, it is important to take into consideration the inclusion or exclusion of populations by the Boundary Commission and surveyors before one is tempted to blindly tag them as ‘outsider’, ‘foreigner’ or ‘migrant’ in their own land, which, in fact, is nothing short of misunderstanding the processes of border making, if not political expediency.