The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1842–1962 by Kyle J. Gardner

Abstract

Gardner gives us a comprehensive account, at once compelling and authoritative, of what he calls the “frontier complex” along the high Himalayas from its early exploration to the 1962 war between India and China. An initial introductory chapter examines the meanings of frontiers, borders, and borderlands in the context of contemporary theories of space and place. He then proceeds to an account of the precolonial history of Ladakh. This high desolate plateau, Gardner insists, was no “geographic periphery,” but a “religious, political and commercial nexus” sustained by trade (above all in pashmina wool, used in fine shawls) between Central Asia, Tibet, and India (28, 59). The territory possessed no marked borders, only “border points” where kingdoms met and taxes were levied.Tension emerged between two visions of a border for Ladakh as the British began exploring into the Himalayas from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Was it to be a “bounded” territory, with a boundary devised to exclude hostile neighbors from advancing into India? Or were the existing “open” borders to be expanded by developing roads and communication? Boundaries of course, as Gardner describes in a fascinating chapter, require surveys, which are meant to produce maps. But in this remote, arid region, the normal “scientific” trigonometric practices of the Survey of India proved impractical. Hence the British devised what they called the “water-parting principle” whereby the edge of a watershed—in this case that of the Indus River—was used to establish a border (81). But the origins of the Indus lay high on the slopes of unmarked and unclimbed ridges, while the local streams themselves, as one official put it, were of a “tortuous, shifting, and erratic character” (71). As a result, even up until 1947, maps of India included no northwestern borders at all. The “cartographical thinking” that imbued maps with authority had failed (62, 88).Control required communications. In 1850 the British began construction of the Hindustan-Tibet Road, followed in 1870 by the Treaty Road negotiated with the Kashmir maharaja to expand access to Central Asian markets. As acknowledgement of British supremacy, the Kashmir maharaja was obliged to submit an annual tribute of one horse and twelve “shawl” goats. (Alas, taken from their lofty habitat, the goats invariably died.) In any case, by the century’s end British interests had shifted from trade to security. Roads initially meant to facilitate movement had, especially with the growth of Russian encroachment, been transformed into “tools for restricting potentially dangerous ‘trans-frontier’ people” (131). In this new climate of “invasion anxieties,” Boundary Commissions flourished, and adventurers like the “frontier hero” Francis Younghusband set out to “open” Tibet. Still, throughout, “a motley assortment of nomads, traders, and goats” remained as “symbols of the limits of imperial state legibility” (178, 179).The concluding chapter takes the reader into the Independence era. In a time of nationalism, nations required boundaries. A geography integrated into the “geobody” of the nation also demanded, in an era of geopolitical rivalries, “a strong and scientific borderline” (229). This left Ladakh in a paradoxical position as both central to emerging national rivalries and yet as an increasingly isolated and ambiguously defined territory. The outcome was Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1955 drawing of a definite, but undemarcated, boundary line, and the consequent Chinese advance across the Aksai Chin plateau. The 1962 war produced the Actual Line of Control, a border, as Gardner points out, based on no particular geographic principle, but nevertheless one central to the Indian nation, even “something to die for” (253).This impressive volume will engage the interest not only of scholars of South Asia but also of geographers, political scientists, and environmental historians who seek to understand the interplay of geography, geopolitics, and the making of states.