Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the agency of the environment (malaria forests) and agrarian culture (shortage of labour, migration, and the politics of little kingdoms) in the organization of territory along the Anglo-Gorkha frontier in early colonial north India. Historically, dense malarial forests restricted access to this frontier at a time when intense efforts were being made by recalcitrant little kingdoms and landed magnates to extend cultivation. Labour too was in short supply. Consequently a shifting forest-field mosaic of agrarian territory emerged from the uneven interactions between ecology, local power, and labour supply. Together, these environmental and human factores combined to impact the layout, extent, and architecture of administrative divisions along the Anglo-Gorkha frontier causing them to shift, overlap, and break up. Such a scenario of spatial fluidity expressed in the form of patchy, ill-defined administrative divisions persisted when these areas came under the authority of the British East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal). It may be argued that these spatial dynamics, long ignored by historians of this frontier, provided an important set of circumstances that ultimately led to the Anglo-Gorkha war of 1814-1816. This war led to the defeat of Gorkha and the formal demarcation of the present Anglo-Nepal boundary which, it was hoped, would permanently fix the adjoining territories of the two states along this fuzzy frontier.

This paper argues against the idea of modern Nepal as an exceptional island of national unity and independence in a colonial world. It takes inspiration from the work of world historians, especially the work of Jerry H. Bentley, to write connective histories of Nepal that transcend the boundaries of nations, geographical regions, disciplines, and historiographies. The Anglo-Gorkha frontier that separated the territories of the kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company offers a site for such explorations. In the early nineteenth century territorial disputes broke out between the two states, ultimately culminating in the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814–1816. A close study of the frontier and the territorial disputes reveal that they encoded disagreements over the geographical construction of the state. They also reveal a structure of shifting agrarian entitlements that created the fluid and fuzzy administrative divisions that marked the space of these borderlands. The colonial state would ultimately resolve these spatial dilemmas by undertaking surveying and mapmaking projects that would lay out linear boundaries and neatly emboxed territorial divisions to delineate the territories of the two states.

The Tarai has always been considered an integral part of the modern Nepali state. However, the status of this important stretch of territory was open to ambiguity and flux in much of the period prior to the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-1816. A host of petty hill principalities and little kingdoms, further south in Moghlan (the plains of North India below the foothills of the Himalayas) constantly competed to control these lands and their resources. Furthermore, a web of tenurial, taxation, and hierarchical political relationships knitted the lands of the tarai to those of Moghlan. For the rulers of the emerging kingdom of Gorkha, governance of the tarai posed the usual set of dilemmas and possibilities¯disputes with neighboring little kingdoms and problems of revenue administration mediated their efforts to tap the valuable agrarian resources of these lands. Gorkha was also increasingly drawn into a series of disputes with an emerging territorial power in north India¯the East India Company. Company officials increasingly articulated their claims in terms of the establishment of clear territorial boundaries all the while choosing to ignore the web of tenurial, taxation, and political relationships that had traditionally constituted territory in south asia. The Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-1816 resulted in the delineation of the boundaries between Gorkha and the Company state. Nepal's tarai as we know it emerged, it might be argued, out of the historical specificities of that colonial encounter and its aftermath, an encounter that affirmed the geographical credentials of the modern state in south Asia¯occupying a definite portion of the earth's surface, divided into non-overlapping divisions and sub-divisions.

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement