The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962

Abstract

At a moment when India and China are clashing over their borders once again, this book is a timely examination of the “scientific” practices deployed by the British colonial state in India through the course of the long nineteenth century to bring those borders into existence. In particular, it details the mapping of the region of the northwestern Himalayas, with Ladakh at its center, that led to its transformation from a crossroads of economic, political, and cultural exchange to an imperial frontier to be policed and enforced. The book argues that imperial attempts at mapping the region and demarcating borderlines within it were only partially successful, leaving behind a colonial legacy that the postcolonial states inherited and continue to wrestle with. Not only has this legacy embittered relations between the two neighbors, but perhaps most poignantly, it has rendered the once-prosperous entrepôt of Ladakh into “a fractured and disputed borderland” (3).The most interesting aspect of this book is its discussion of the emergence of the sciences of governance and geopolitics in the context of border-making practices. The colonial state's utilization of the tools provided by the emergent discipline of geography to transform indigenous notions of space into territory that could be physically rendered on a map was preceded and accompanied by numerous attempts to survey and collect information about these spaces. This, in turn, generated a slew of manuals, such as gazetteers, which presented this information about the newly mapped territories in great detail and served as tools to more effectively govern and control them. As intelligence-gathering on the frontiers intensified and more resources were expended on it, so did the desire to regulate the border itself, through road-building and other such activities. These interrelated projects gave rise to geopolitics, a new way of thinking that combined geographical information with territory and security. Knowledge of rivers, mountains, watersheds, and other such natural resources was rendered critical to the formation and maintenance of states, particularly on their frontiers.The irony of this geopolitical project, the book demonstrates, was that it failed in the very laboratory that was crucial to its birth—the northwestern Himalayas—where it was unable to draw a single line through the Aksai Chin that would demarcate a clear border between India and China. This was not from lack of trying, and the story of the repeated attempts to do so forms a large part of the book. The individuals involved in this project—besides the British surveyors, cartographers, adventurers, and spies—were the “trans-frontier men,” as the book refers to them. These men regularly traversed the emergent frontier and included highly skilled Indian pundits who drew on indigenous knowledge to assist in surveying and mapping, as well as Yarkandi and Ladakhi officials, traders, and pony drivers, among others. It is here that the book misses an opportunity to give readers a more textured sense of these individuals themselves, their life histories, and how they navigated the new political landscape while shaping the emergent science of geopolitics.The most significant victim of this project of imperial boundary-making and its postcolonial legacies, the book illustrates well, has been Ladakh, which was a part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir during the colonial period, then became a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in independent India, and since 2019 has been a union territory ruled directly by the Indian central government. While on the one hand it has been caught up in two geostrategic conflicts—the struggle between China and India on their borders as well as the dispute between India and Pakistan over the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir—on the other, it has come to occupy an increasingly ambiguous and marginalized position within the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and India as a whole. As the book demonstrates, ever since Ladakh was territorialized and its territory became central to the imperial frontier and later the border of the nation state, its inhabitants have been rendered into not much more than peripheral actors to be surveilled and controlled in the name of imperial and national security.The Frontier Complex is an engaging account of the confluence of geographical knowledge, definitions of territory, and ideas of security in the creation and maintenance of imperial borders in the nineteenth century, which have had profound implications for the relationships among states into the twenty-first century. It is thus a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the antecedents of these relationships and what continues to drive them at the contemporary moment.