Few Indian regions evoke political, economic, and cultural marginalisation as much as North-East India. Solutions to its political instability often assume that, provided the vicious circle of underdevelopment and violence can be broken, the region will eventually build a stable relationship with the Indian nation-state. This understanding in turns rests on a long intellectual genealogy that associates development with the state and the nation. By examining development schemes in the North-East Frontier Agency (today's Arunachal Pradesh) in the 1950-60s, a hitherto scarcely administered region where these were the primary mode of state-building, this paper cautions against the tendency to see the Indian state's developmental ambitions as an instrument of nationbuilding. Instead it argues that, in North-East India at least, state-building and nation-building have not historically gone together, and that developmentalism played an important part in this rupture. On the ground, tribal development did little for NEFA's integration into the Indian nation. In fact, state-building processes resulted in the disintegration of the links that had tied NEFA with its regional hinterland in India. In the process, some of the seeds of tensions plaguing today's Northeast India were planted.
On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.
Between 1942 and 1945, the Patkai mountains of Assam and Manipur became India’s front line against Japan. This article charts the concatenation of political, cultural, and socio-economic transformations that the Second World War caused in a region that colonial authorities had tried to cordon off. The conflict had push-and-pull effects on the Patkai, intensifying direct state penetration yet reviving long-standing transregional ties with Tibet, China, and Southeast Asia. When ‘national’ borders appeared with Burma and India’s independence two years later, the effect was jarring. As such, the war was a watershed in the postcolonial evolution of northeastern India and northwestern Burma.
Since the mid-twentieth century China and India have entertained a difficult relationship, erupting into open war in 1962. Shadow States is the first book to unpack Sino-Indian tensions from the angle of competitive state-building - through a study of their simultaneous attempts to win the approval and support of the Himalayan people. When China and India tried to expand into the Himalayas in the twentieth century, their lack of strong ties to the region and the absence of an easily enforceable border made their proximity threatening - observing China and India's state-making efforts, local inhabitants were in a position to compare and potentially choose between them. Using rich and original archival research, Bérénice Guyot-Réchard shows how India and China became each other's 'shadow states'. Understanding these recent, competing processes of state formation in the Himalayas is fundamental to understanding the roots of tensions in Sino-Indian relations.
In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.
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