Himalayan Borderland Research Articles

Black-necked crane as border object: interspecies politics in Himalayan borderlands

ABSTRACT Legacies of imperial frontier-making, ongoing border conflicts between nuclear armed nations, changing livelihoods, and the impact of anthropogenic climate change have created complicated claims on Himalayan borderland areas in the name of conservation, security, ethnic identity and development. Combining historical research with ethnography, this article traces the role of the Black-necked crane (grus nigricollis) in the formation of mid-nineteenth century imperial frontiers in the Himalayas and, subsequently, its present-day position in the political ecology of two Himalayan regions along the Sino-India border – Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. We introduce the concept of ‘border object’ and demonstrate how it can serve as a useful concept to understand how non-humans become participants in changing configurations of territoriality, biopolitics and science, which underpin both a past imperial frontier and present-day border regimes.

Beyond the Himalayan Borderlands : Indian textile production and trade with central Asia during Mughals

Beyond the Himalayan Borderlands : Indian textile production and trade with central Asia during Mughals

Between Narratives of Solidarity and Othering in Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Local Resistance to Tibetan Refugee Rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh

ABSTRACT Tibetan refugee rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh, India, has become a site of contention, with strident local identity narratives agitating against refugee presence in this Himalayan borderland state. This paper maps the processes of state-making, citizenship and identity that produce a collision between encompassing notions of citizenship/identity and territorialized discourses of belonging premised on ethnicity in the West Kameng and Tawang districts of Arunachal. This is a multi-factoral analysis of how pressures of land commoditization and competition for economic opportunity interact with religious solidarities and social histories of migration to produce simultaneous narratives of belonging and othering between the dominant local Monpa Buddhist community and the exiled Tibetans in Monyul in the Indo-Tibetan borderland. The post-colonial state’s failure to dismantle the ethnicity-based colonial spatial order in the Himalayan region has created a crisis of exclusionary ethnopolitics that is inherently hostile to refugees.

Critical Annotations on Historical Documents: Methodological Possibilities for International Relations Research

This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’, I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

Find the river: Discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire

AbstractDespite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions ofwhereandwhatit was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making, territorialization, and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal

Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total area of Nepal and over eighty percent of its Himalayan region. National parks—which are governed by top-down policies enforced through militarized infrastructures—have become a crucial avenue and site for the Nepali state to expand its authority and territorialize its peripheral spaces. But such state-forming effects of the park are obscured by the stated goals of biodiversity conservation which are often implemented through participatory conservation policies that claim to promote local participation and development. Through a case study of Shey Phoksundo National Park and the contested governance of caterpillar fungus in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, this paper examines the role of participatory conservation in state-making, territorialization, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Himalayan borderlands. After a brief background on the relationship between Dolpopa and the Nepali state, I introduce state-making, territorialization, and dispossession as corollary processes that define the experiences of conservation for Dolpopa. I conceptualize state-making and territorialization as intertwined state efforts and strategies to systematize local spatial practices and reorder socio-natural relations in ways that justify state authority and establish state territory in Dolpopa spaces. I approach dispossession as an ongoing, relational process of domination and removal, particularly of Dolpopa's ability to access and govern their collective land including caterpillar fungus. In so doing, I neither reify the state as a monolith nor assume dispossession to be totalizing. Rather, I show how “the state” is constituted in moments by a range of actors, institutions, and processes; as well as how Dolpopa contest dispossession by asserting their claims to collective land both within and beyond state structures.

Redrawing boundaries of belonging among Indian Himalayan Buddhists

ABSTRACT As the world speculates about a post-Dalai Lama scenario, what is the response among India’s borderland Buddhists? In this paper, I show that there is a growing need among Tibetan Buddhist people of the Indian Himalayan borderlands to forge a cultural unity that is Buddhist but removed from Tibet. With the decline of Tibet as a spiritual and cultural centre for Tibetan Buddhism, Himalayan Buddhist communities of India are strategically cohering around new identities and spaces that are firmly rooted in India. Given an impending future, when Buddhists around the world, and particularly in Asia, will no longer be able to depend on the figure of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama for guidance, there are concerted efforts underfoot to unite the Himalayan Buddhists of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and other border regions of India under a common platform. In this regard, research organizations, cultural associations, and educational institutions are assuming a key role. While many scholarly works have studied the role of associations and institutional spaces in the formation of a transnational identity for Indian Buddhists, this paper focuses on the transregional networks forged through cultural and educational institutions in the Himalayan border regions of India, focusing on the Delhi-based Himalayan Buddhist Cultural Association (HBCA) and other new organizations working for an Indian Himalayan Buddhist unity. I draw on my ethnographic work in Monyul, a Tibetan Buddhist cultural region in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast India, to show how the Buddhist Monpas of Monyul are drawn into the pan-regional networks of Indian Himalayan Buddhism.

State power and trans-border people in China’s Himalayan borderlands: a study of the Taman people in Kyirong valley, Tibet Autonomous Region

In China’s Himalayan borderlands, Taman people are officially categorized as a subgroup (ren) of the Tibetan ethnic group (minzu). They are typically discriminated against and marginalized by neighboring Tibetans. Taman people are located at a juncture of critical social and political questions regarding issues such as social hierarchy, state power, and the nation-state’s borders. In this article, I examine how the Taman people react to and interact with state power, focusing on grassroots village organization, economic activities, and government policies at the ground level. In doing so, I draw on ethnicity as an analytical lens and argue that the control of local society does not merely intrude from the outside as a result of “mechanical” state power. Local society also actively transforms and produces governable subjects from within, through interactions with the state.

Next-gen precarity: gender and informal labor in the Eastern Himalaya

In the eastern Himalayan region of Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, young women migrate from within and outside the area to work in the expanding retail and service sector. This sector demands very little from them in terms of education, technical skills or financial literacy; the emphasis being on their youth, and supposed socio-cultural and gendered attributes of docility, flexibility and manageability. Simultaneously, technological and infrastructural advancements combined with the influx of cheap fakes of international brands have made borderlands prominent sites of low-end globalization. The informal sector thrives on the back of this rapidly expanding market, the unceasing supply of cheap, flexible and docile labor and the invisibility of laboring bodies and their inherent precarity. However, the informal sector and the attributes that it seeks also create room to maneuver, and negotiate precarity. Focusing on this newly formed but rapidly growing precariat in the eastern Himalayan borderland, and using qualitative data, this paper illustrates (a) how capitalism, through consumption, can create precarious lives and livelihoods (b) the emerging contradictions (empowerment, exploitation) in social and gendered relations as a result of informal employment and (c) the transformation of borderlands into new sites of low-end globalization.

Challenging infrastructural orthodoxies: Political and economic geographies of a Himalayan road

National and international development narratives frame Nepal’s Karnali region as synonymous with remoteness and food insecurity. These narratives often position food insecurity as a direct outcome of geographical remoteness associated with the lack of motorable road. Road building is thus presented as the solution to food insecurity. I challenge this orthodox narrative using the concept of “infrastructural orthodoxies”. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on infrastructures and critical human geography scholarship on vulnerability, I argue that rather than resolving food insecurity, road increases vulnerability. This occurs in at least two ways: 1) through the proletarianization of wage workers and petty contractors in the road building market, and 2) through increasing dependence on cash and distant markets for the production and reproduction of local social lives. However, I neither suggest road building as inherently negative nor limit my discussion to the normative evaluation of the success or failure of road. Instead, I ask: what is it that these road projects are actually doing? This question helps turn our attention to the multivalent effects of road and illustrate why the orthodoxy is problematic. I thus present two unintended effects of road that exceed and are obscured by the orthodoxy: 1) road as key sites of electoral politics, and 2) road as vectors of new economic and labor geographies in the Himalayan borderlands. This paper contributes to the knowledge on the relationship between road and food (in)security, and to the interdisciplinary literature that view infrastructures as contingent and always in the process of becoming.

Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland: Rajput identity during the early colonial encounter, by Arik Moran

Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland: Rajput identity during the early colonial encounter, by Arik Moran

Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands

Sikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry's hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country's "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim's Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management officials, I center my analysis on their encounters with disasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefix to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region's “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based understanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India's “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context.

From the edges of borders: reflections on water diplomacy in South Asia

Abstract This paper examines the pitfalls of macro-narrative on water diplomacy in South Asia which remains hostage to a strategic-geo-political construct. Building on critical approaches to water diplomacy, it presents the concept of ‘water communities’, which inhabit the borderlands of South Asia. Such an approach is not only useful in rooting water diplomacy in the concept of water communities but can also add a layered scalar understanding to water diplomacy through a ‘water plus’ approach. Apart from documented stories on cooperation, personal interviews 1 were conducted for highlighting the micro-narratives from the Himalayan borderlands of Bhutan, India and Nepal.

Facing the fence: The production and performance of a Himalayan border in global contexts

This paper analyzes the spatial operations of power in a Himalayan borderland between Nepal and China to argue that border regimes are made, maintained, and performed as territorial processes of control over distinct socio-cultural identities and political economic practices. I make this argument by writing a boundary biography (Megoran, 2006, 2012) about a fence, bringing both history and ethnography to bear on border studies. Specifically, this biography analyzes the Nepal-China border at Mustang-Tibet in two distinct dimensions: 1) the physical (or external) location of the border as a marker of state territory between Nepal and China; and 2) the social and cultural (or internal) location of the border for borderland populations of Tibetan ethnicity. In correspondence to Salter’s (2011) formal, practical, and popular registers of bordering, I use ethnography, readings of diplomatic history, and policy analysis to examine social-political transformations at the Nepal-China border through three specific changes over time. These key moments reflect important state interventions which together shape how the Mustang-Tibet border is experienced in Himalayan borderland lives today. In so doing, this biography shows how borders materialize, dematerialize, and rematerialize and how local populations' identities and geographic imaginaries are influenced and oriented by the border (Sahlins, 1989). By demonstrating how border lives are often shaped and maintained with and across the border rather than against the border itself, this study presents emerging research on Asian borderlands to rethink classic concepts on bordering developed in European and wider global contexts.

Book Review: Markus Viehbeck, Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’.

Book Review: Markus Viehbeck, Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’.

Patterns of Modernity in Transnational Perspective

Patterns of Modernity in Transnational Perspective Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert This issue explores the transnational networks and cultural forces shaping key components of modern women's politics and subjectivity at the end of the long nineteenth century and in 1970s America. It opens with two complementary studies about advocacy of women's sexual freedom and identity. The next two articles address expanding opportunities for women through missionary education and nursing training. The final two are on women's political activism and mobilization in ideological struggles. We also have a new component in our book review section, an essay which compares three digital humanities' collections on the history of women's suffrage in the global context. Broadcasting individual women's sexual desire was a decisively brazen act in the later nineteenth-century Anglophone world—and in East Asia as well. In time, it became an attribute of modern women's identity and a central component of "erotic romantic love." The first two articles explore the cultural politics that surrounded the advocacy of heterosexual intimacy through the life work of two notorious public women whose careers tangentially overlapped. Their self-crafted prominence demonstrates a changing landscape for gender norms in predominantly urban bohemian neighborhoods. Richly sourced and engagingly written, Hilary Hallett's article examines the British author Elinor Glyn, who took her "sex novel" Three Weeks (1907) on tour throughout America in the first decade of the twentieth century. Hallett argues for an "alternative feminist historiography" found in "women's performances" by popular but lesser-known authors. Their celebrity status and cultural glamour "not only challenged orthodoxy" but "shaped popular knowledge," Hallett writes. The author makes a strong case that Glyn capitalized on inherent ambivalences in scandalous talk both to challenge and deny new ideas about respectable married women's sexuality. In this way, she pushed discussion in the mainstream culture to deal more "frankly" and openly with such topics as eroticism, dating, premarital sex, and romantic love. Before the 1920s, Glyn helped make women's heterosexual satisfaction "a subject for mass culture." She was indeed "a mother to the modern girl." Perhaps unsurprisingly, America's "Queen of the Anarchists," Emma Goldman, was a fan of Glyn, calling Glyn's fictional heroine's rejection of monogamy "magnificent," according to Hallett. The importance of sexual liberation to human liberation in "anarchist communist" philosophy takes center stage in the next article on Emma Goldman by Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu. Emma Goldman, of course, is well known in women's history as a tireless [End Page 7] proponent of free love, birth control, and free speech. But Hsu makes new contributions to this literature by addressing the underlying logic of Goldman's philosophy, what Hsu calls her "sexual political reasoning." Goldman integrated European sexology into anarchist thinking to lay bare the political implications of liberated intimacies. Hsu carefully parses the differences between reformers and radicals in the Progressive Era, comparing anarchist thought to progressive feminists' gender assumptions and to those advocating birth control (with its slippage into eugenics). Like Glyn, Goldman also crafted her public persona. She, too, took her message on tour, seeking out new supporters for her philosophy of life, notably the young urban intellectuals, and capitalizing on a "tide of . . . iconoclastic bohemianism." And, through the translation and circulation of her magazine Mother Earth, this commitment to individualism as a "powerful defiance of traditional gender norms" accounted for Goldman's popularity in China and Japan. There was a downside to all this success, however: it diluted the essential socioeconomic and anti-authoritarian messages of anarchism. The next two articles, temporally extending into the first half of the twentieth century, explore other aspects of modern women's increasingly shared life experiences: expanding educational and professional opportunities. But each option was mediated by countervailing cultural and political forces that complicated the workings of the modern. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa takes us to several educational institutions in the Himalayan borderlands of British India accessible to elite women of Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Reflecting the growing importance of this area for global commerce, trade long had served as a transnational linkage between the different cultures, polities, and languages of the area. Elite families used the new...

Making Mountain Places into State Spaces: Infrastructure, Consumption, and Territorial Practice in a Himalayan Borderland

This article looks at a trans-Himalayan borderland to see how new road development projects affect social and sovereign relationships across mountain landscapes between Chinese Tibet and Mustang, Nepal. Research asked about local experiences with new forms of motorized transport and popular consumption of Chinese-manufactured commodities to understand what factors led the Nepali state to undertake new bureaucratic projects in a historically peripheral space. Employing a dialectic framework of mobility and containment, a materialist-territorial analysis reveals how transborder infrastructure development affects trade relations and consumption practices in the Nepal–China borderlands and, in turn, how these dynamics condition state-making processes at social and geopolitical levels. Following the cross-scalar trajectory of one rural road project from local grassroots initiative to national development program to international transportation network, I argue that the economic interests of a place-based project with regional cultural connections set in motion an expanding presence of Nepali state apparatuses in a trans-Himalayan borderland space.

Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands

The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people's response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, controversial hydropower projects, and an indigenous antidam protest, I show how people's relationship with a sacred, animate landscape is not easily translatable into the clear goals of environmental politics. Antidam activists and environmentalists link growing ecological precarity in Sikkim to state-led hydropower construction, but for many lay indigenous people, these earthquakes raise deeper cultural anxieties. I demonstrate how these anxieties are grounded in a longer history of the contested relationship between marginalized peoples and hegemonic state and nonstate powers, a relationship that continues in the fraught relationship of the Himalayan margins to the Indian state. I argue that critical engagements with indigenous environmentalism must be in dialogue with diverse interpretations and registers of loss and erasure. In this I follow recent calls to decolonize the Anthropocene that demand that we move beyond a politics of urgency to examine the slow, historical processes of erasure under colonialism and imperialism. I highlight these narratives to argue for a more holistic approach to the uneven impacts of climate change on mountainous environments and their inhabitants.

Global Encounters, Local Places: Connected Histories of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the Himalayas—An Introduction

Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.

Engaging the State: Ethnic Patronage and Cultural Politics in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland

In the eastern Himalayan borderland, state-led initiatives have led to the transformation of pre-existing patronage networks and placed ethnic identity at the core of regional politics. Based on ethnographic research in Sikkim, the paper illustrates the prolific rise of affirmative action politics and its relationship with ethnic identity, which has altered the social, political and religious landscape of Sikkim. The paper introduces a new approach to understanding borderlands as dynamic political spaces and contributes to a nuanced understanding of emerging forms of political agency and interaction on the peripheries of regional South Asia.