Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Kyle Gardner
> > Lhost (she/her): All right! Hello everyone and welcome to our March Conversations on South Asia event here at Dartmouth College. It’s wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues in the audience here, especially as we approach the very end of winter quarter on Dartmouth’s campus. I’m really excited to be hosting today’s conversation featuring Kyle Gardner’s excellent work on the history and indeterminacy of the India-China border.
The book is called The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962. It came out first with the Cambridge University Press in January 2021. It is now available in paperback.
For those of you who are new to the series or don’t know me, I’m Elizabeth Lhost. I’m a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of History at Dartmouth College and one of the organizers for this year’s series. And it’s really a great pleasure to be moderating today’s conversation, which brings together three experts on South Asia who have divergent, yet very comparable, backgrounds in the region.
Before we begin our formal program and discussion, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts this series, sits on the ancestral, unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth, the Department of History, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding for their ongoing support of the series.
I would also like to give a special thanks to Professor Douglas Haynes for all the work that he does on campus to support South Asian programming and the Conversations on South Asia Series. And I would also like to applaud and thank Sri Sathvik Rayala, our Bodas Family Fellow and current Dartmouth undergraduate student, who is doing a lot of work behind the scenes, promoting and publicizing the series. In addition to hanging flyers on campus, sending emails, and managing our Instagram and other social media accounts, he’s always thinking of new ways to promote our programs on campus and to grow our audiences. So thank you, Sathvik, for doing that.
Today’s conversation features three panelists with extensive, distinguished careers in South Asia, history, foreign policy and government. I will introduce all of them now in the order they’ll be speaking and then we’ll get the formal program underway. So to kick things off, Kyle Gardner will provide a brief introduction into his research and his book. Dr. Gardner obtained his PhD in history with distinction from the University of Chicago, where he also served as a lecturer in the Department of History and the Social Sciences Division. In addition to writing the Frontier Complex, Gardner’s scholarship has also appeared in the Historical Journal, Himalaya: The Journal for the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, The Atlantic, The Hindustan Times, and India-China Brief, along with other outlets.
In 2018, he received the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for excellence in teaching at the University of Chicago, and his research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program. Dr. Gardner is currently a non-resident fellow at the Sigor Center for Asian Studies of the George Washington University, a term fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior associate for India and South Asia practice at McLarty Associates in Washington D. C.
Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao will be our first discussant responding to Gardner’s work. Ambassador Rao spent four decades in the Indian Foreign Service, holding several important appointments during her long and distinguished career. I can’t possibly summarize all of her accomplishments in the few minutes I have here today, so I’ll just highlight a few details that I think are particularly relevant for today’s conversation. Specializing in India’s relations with China, Ambassador Rao served in the Ministry of External Affairs: East Asia Division from 1984 to 1992, visited Tibet with the delegation led by then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, spent time at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, where she focused on Asia-, Asia-Pacific affairs. In 2006, she became India’s first woman ambassador to China before serving as India’s Foreign Secretary in 2009, beginning in 2009. In 2011, she became India’s ambassador to the United States. And following her retirement, she has since held several academic appointments and fellowships in the US, including positions at Brown, Columbia and UC San Diego. And recently Ambassador Rao has published The Fractured Himalaya: India-Tibet-China 1949-62. She is also currently affiliated with the Wilson Center, where our third panelist, Michael Kugelman, is based.
Michael Kugelman is the Asia Program Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he oversees the center’s research, programming, and publications on the region. With interest and expertise in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the US, including US foreign relations with the three, with the region, Kugelman maintains an active profile, writing the weekly South Asia brief for Foreign Policy and monthly commentaries for War on The Rocks. His writings regularly appear in the Wall Street Journal‘s think-tank blog, and he has also published commentaries for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN.com, Bloomberg View, The Diplomat, Al Jazeera, and The National Interest. He is regularly interviewed about South Asian affairs by major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, NPR, Voice of America, among others.
He has also produced a number of publications on the region, including the edited volumes Pakistan’s Interminable Energy Crisis: Is There Any Way Out?, Pakistan’s Runaway Urbanization: What Can Be Done, and India’s Contemporary Security Challenges. He holds an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts and a BA in International Studies from the School of International Studies at American University.
So, after Dr. Gardner’s introduction, each of the discussants will provide roughly 10 minutes of reflections of the book, followed by discussion questions and answers from the audience. So please use the Q&A feature through Zoom to submit your questions.
And now, Kyle
> > Gardner: Thanks, Elizabeth! Let me just go ahead and share my screen. Right, well, thank you, can, can everyone see that? Let me, uh, come to presentation mode. Is that clear for everyone? Great, okay, well, thank you for that very kind introduction, Elizabeth and for the invitation to speak to you all today. Thank you all for attending.
Particularly, particularly looking forward to our discussion and so we’ll keep my introductory remarks brief. And, given that this is a [series focused] on South Asia, I will assume the audience has a certain degree of familiarity with the places I reference. But I also know that Ladakh occupies a somewhat peripheral place in the geography of South Asian studies and really even Himalayan studies, especially prior to the unfortunate events of June 2020. So, please chime in with questions or comments if I’m referencing anything that is unclear.
My book provides a history of three interrelated subjects, the first is Ladakh’s encounter with the British Empire. Ladakh is often overlooked in studies of South Asian frontiers, particularly during the colonial period, because it was relatively quiet compared with the turbulent Northwest Frontier where Russian imperial encroachment produced greater concern than Qing or Tibetan encroachment.
The second topic, focus of the book is a history of imperial border making in the Himalaya, a history that reflects a broader transformation of political space and territory. And this is the, certainly the most global dimension of the book, given the proliferation of frontier and border making among imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this is also an ironic aspect in the case of the Himalaya because, while the massive mountain range was long described as an ideal boundary making object by so-called frontier experts, it failed in significant segments to yield a satisfactory or precise border.
And that gets me to the final aspect of the book and the one of greatest contemporary relevance, which is that it provides the colonial backstory to the border dispute between India and China, one of the most divisive issues between the two giant neighbors during the last 73 years.
The goal of the book is to show how the transformation of the historical crossroads of Ladakh into a disputed borderland reflected a broader transformation of political space, one that tied abstract ideas of sovereignty to concrete practices of geography. The British did this, I argue, through a range of border making practices and concepts. This assemblage, this assemblage of practices and concepts is what I call the frontier complex.
So, this is just an overview of, of, of the particular chapters. But each of these practices and concepts is detailed in individual chapters in the book, and these include the development of border making principles, road building and intelligence gathering, the development of standardized forms of official information that reflect what I contend is an emergent geographical episteme. And, above all, the creation of so-called frontier experts who would come to practice and promote a geopolitical view of the world that emphasized the importance of strong scientific frontiers and borders for the, for the survival of the state. Many of these practices and ideas extended past 1947 and can still be seen in India and China’s approaches to border areas.
Now, given that the Sino, that Sino-Indian relations are top of mind today and without going into too much detail, I’ll just highlight a few pertinent aspects of the, from my book that have a bearing on the roots of the border dispute in Ladakh, and I’d be happy to focus on other aspects in the Q&A whether Ladakh’s relationship with Tibet, the intellectual origins of geopolitics, or the important roles played by roads, frontier experts, gazetteers, and even goats.
The book begins with precolonial Ladakh and draws on the Ladakhi sources to examine precolonial understandings of indigenous space and frontiers. It’s worth emphasizing that while Ladakh had long established historical border points, there was no historical sense of a single complete borderline encircling Ladakh. And this reflects the practical reality of a region defined by passes and trade routes, the name Ladakh, after all, literally means land of passes.
And here on this, this map, you can see, and I think if, if you can follow my cursor here, we have a number of, of sites that may be familiar to some who either know Ladakh or, or followed the dispute here, for instance, is Demchok. Over here in Kache or Kashmir, we have the Zoji Pass here. And so, this is a composite historical map that shows at, in some detail, the particular border points that, that we can discuss in the Q&A if, if of interest.
So, while linear borders are ubiquitous today, for much of the Himalaya and, indeed, much of the pre-modern world, there were not clearly defined linear territorial limits, and this, of course, proved unsatisfactory to the British. Soon after the British defeated the Sikh Empire in 1846, the governor general sent out boundary commissioners to survey its newly formed dependency of Jammu and Kashmir, which included Ladakh. The Rajas of Jammu, vassals of the Sikh Empire, had conquered Ladakh in the previous decade. And these commissioners were given instructions to use the limits of watersheds to guide their survey. The water parting line, the line of mountains or high ground that separated water flowing one way from water flowing another, became an ideal object to use for determining a border. Not just because [it] spared the use of artificial objects, such as pillars, but unlike rivers, water partings and mountain ranges generally tended to separate distinct communities, or at least this was the logic used by the frontier experts developing these principles.
The northern limits of the Indus became, by the end of the 19th century, the stated northern boundary of British India, despite the failure to survey and demarcate much of it. The water partying principle, as the theory came to be known, was eventually applied around the world and to many segments of India’s, India’s mountainous periphery reflected with some infamy, by the names of the administrators associated with them, for instance, Durand, the Durand Line in the Northwest or the McMahon Line in the Northeast.
And the principal cause of the failure to apply the water principle of, water parting principle in Ladakh was the complex topography of eastern Ladakh and the western Tibetan plateau. In this region, there’s no single mountain range to provide the guiding line for a would-be border.
Ladakh and the broader and Western Himalayan region is part of a topographical tangle of mountains hundreds of miles wide, and this complex of mountains and high plateaus are a far cry from the linear image of the Himalayas so often depicted on maps.
And the map that resulted from the first boundary commissions to Ladakh did not instill much confidence. The first map to do so, oh sorry that’s a detail of these border points, here’s the Johnson map. The first map to represent a northern and eastern border came from a survey in 1865 carried out by William Johnson, who would later become the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir’s appointed wazir-e-wazarat in Ladakh. The resulting map, published in 1867 and shown here, did not identify water partings nor did it sketch in more than a sort of rough perimeter of mountains. And, as it turned out, not only does the Indus watershed limit not coincide with the ring of mountains that formed the proposed eastern border here, but subsequent surveys and satellite images revealed that much of the sketched ring of mountains here did not even exist, as you can see from this Google satellite image of roughly the same, roughly the same region. Here is Pangong Tso in the bottom left.
Subsequent surveys, official memoranda and unrequited requests to the Qing Empire to agree to a border in eastern Ladakh and the Aksai Chin resulted in a range of conflicting border lines that were depicted on small scale maps, but never com- comprehensively surveyed on the ground. And I’d be happy to discuss comparisons to the McMahon line in the eastern Himalaya during the Q&A.
When India won its independence in 1947, it also inherited maps that were in many cases, literally borderless. Following China’s occupation of Tibet and the signing of the Sino-Indian agreement in 1954, Jawaharlal Nehru ordered India’s external boundary to be shown as definite.
This decision cemented India’s claim to the Aksai Chin, a region, it should be noted, that was never permanently inhabited by anyone. This is a an arid, high-altitude plateau, described in 1888 by one unfortunate Scottish trader weeks before his murder on the Karakoram Pass as a, and I quote, “howling desolate waste.”
So, the last point I should make before I stop is that the book provides what I hope to be a comprehensive prologue to the ongoing border dispute. It does not in any way assume that today’s dispute was predestined because of that imperial legacy. Many excellent histories, including Ambassador Rao’s new book, provide the greater geopolitical and diplomatic context in the years between the birth of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China and the war in 1962.
And I would, I would also emphasize that there’s a, there’s a distinction to be made between the root causes of the border disputes and the causes of the war in 1962. They are of course related in many aspects, but the causes of the 1962 were also involved with different range of variables and dynamics.
My book aims to set the stage for that tragic drama, but it doesn’t seem to explain how or why those actors trust their parts, but I think I’m over my time so I’ll stop right there.
> > Rao: Shall I come on now?
> > Lhost: Yes, thank you Kyle. Ambassador Rao.
> > Rao: Thank you, thank you Kyle, and thank you Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to be a part of this panel discussion today. I’d like to first, congratulate Kyle on an extremely well researched and in-depth study of the subject of the making of frontiers in Ladakh. It’s the first of its kind in decades, and I believe deserves our very serious attention, especially since after the tragic events in Galwan in eastern Ladakh in June of 2020, this whole frontier land, this whole border area has been very sharply in focus. And, and we are talking, today, of a Line of Actual Control in the area where Indian and Chinese troops are in very close confrontation. The military commanders have been having frequent meetings in order to de-escalate and disengage. It had, that has been achieved in a few pockets, but there are other parts of the Line of Actual Control where this disengagement has yet to take place, so tensions run high. And, you know, the, the danger of a conflagration or a conflict, military conflict, remains very, very, very much a tangible possibility.
India and China have a relationship, today, that’s very low on trust, I would say completely absent on trust and mutual understanding. And, in many ways the, efforts made over the last three decades to build a management regime for this relationship that would control tensions along the border and maintain peace and tranquility which, indeed, it had succeeded in achieving, all that structure has, in a sense, dissipated, and we are pretty much at, with a blind slate at the moment, as far as dealing with the issue is concerned.
Now, when you talk with the border in Ladakh, this is where the border dispute between India and China really began in the late 1950s when the Chinese built a road in the area. That the famous Aksai Chin Highway, Highway 219 as its, as its referred to by the Chinese. And over the years, since the discovery of that highway, the Chinese engaged in an eastward expansion of their claim area, which finally amounted to more or less the line at which they are today, which I must say, the last two years, appears to be advancing once again.
So we really don’t know the motives for this. The line has never really been jointly defined by India and China. What the, what we say in India, when we talk about it in Parliament, is that the Chinese are in occupation of about 38,000 square kilometers of India’s territory in the Ladakh region. Now, I found Kyle’s book very fascinating for the reason that, of course, I’m very interested in the subject having dealt with it while in the Foreign Office, and I continue to to read about it and to follow developments in the area.
But his account of how colonial practices and ideas have helped to shape postcolonial borders, I think is extremely relevant and he, and he, he refers to the emotionally charged ideas that especially we in India have about frontier making and about the border lines as they exist today. The Ladakh region, as it were, is, is, is a bit understudied in, in all these, in all these accounts, we have of the frontier. But the human landscape and the physical landscape, both of which Kyle refers to really encompasses a once vibrant borderland, a contact zone between Xinjiang, between Tibet, and between Kashmir and of which Ladakh has been apart, at least in the last 150 to 60 years.
Today, of course, Ladakh, as again Kyle speaks of, is a marginalized kind of territory. It was once a busy meeting point of trade and cultural and religious and spiritual activity between India, Central Asia, particularly Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Tibet. And all that for many of the people of the younger generation remains shrouded in the form of history. Today we have the militarization of Ladakh, which occupies, occupies the spotlight and the frontiers of the mind, as Bérénice Guyot-Réchard puts it.
Now, again, Kyle’s book spoke to me in its definition of the birth of geopolitics, that marriage of geography and politics to serve the needs of empire and its expansion. And the border-making principles that were put in place by the British, particularly the principle of the watershed, continues to define in many senses our own approach in India to frontier-making, to the definition of border lines and the way in which the Indian border claims are defined vis-à-vis the Chinese. The Chinese have a different approach. You know, they would like to add to the concept of the watershed the issue of passes and river valleys, for instance, in the definition of boundary, boundary lines.
Again the, Kyle spoke in his remarks about the indeterminate, indefinite nature of the boundary in this area inherited by, by India in 1947. The British had been content with this ambiguity, but that vagueness was obviously not acceptable to the modern Indian nation state, which could ill afford that level of ambiguity in representing, again, something Kyle calls the country’s geo-body. And the details of the momentous decisions taken by India post-independence to show this boundary as firm and definite and not open to question are all well known to us. But the Chinese knew even less, I believe, of this expansive territory, and they proceeded on the basis of steadily and stealthily advancing occupation in the 1950s rather than historical evidence or principle in effecting possession.
Another aspect that spoke to me was the issue of connectivity and the tools of connectivity. Now, the roads, the Hindustan-Tibet Road, for instance, in the central sector of the boundary, was conceived as a free and unobstructed road to Central Asia and Tibet. But today, roads, far from linking peoples across borders, have become defense and security enhancers, enabling troop ability, first and foremost, and keeping out the foreigner and the transgressor. And I just referred to the Aksai Chin Highway, which is an instance of a communication artery that excludes rather than facilitates human contact, connoting a barrier, rather than a passage, not what roads are essentially meant to be.
And another issue which I thought I should highlight is the whole question of the Ladakhi consciousness, especially when today this talk of restoration, you know, there are lots of rumors and reports about a possible restoration of Article 370, and I wonder how Ladakh is going to react to that.
Ladakhi consciousness really has never wanted links with the Kashmir problem and is sensitive to the manner in which Ladakh is treated, and Kyle refers to it. He talks of Kushok Bakula [Rinpoche], that almost mythical figure, Ladakhi spiritual leader, whose voice was very much heard also in the geopolitical space. His eminence and stature made him a powerful spokesperson for his people, and he wrote the Prime Minister Nehru, Kyle refers to this, in 1951 how if Ladakh could not merge automatically with India in the event of a possible plebiscite in Kashmir, that could see the valley secede: “our people,” and I quote him, “our people will seek political union with Tibet, which, in spite of our political connection with Jammu and Kashmir state for the last hundred and twenty years, has continued to be the great inspirer and controller of our spiritual life and which, whatever our political affiliations, must be looked upon as our eternal and inalienable home.
You know rather weighty words, those. So this, again, illustrates, I think, the complex nature of Ladakh itself. We often focus on the Kashmir issue, but there is this whole, you know, contiguous problem, contiguous quests on the questions raised in terms of where Ladakh stands, what it status is, how it regards its future, and its own identity. So, the border, as Lord Curzon, said, is today, between India and China, is the razor’s, razor’s edge on which life suspended questions of war and peace, especially between nations, such as India and China, because both, both these Asian giants contend today to impose their own lines of control on these spaces and I’ll stop here. Thank you.
> > Lhost: Thank you, Ambassador Rao. Michael.
> > Kugelman: Well, thanks, very much Elizabeth. It’s great to be a part of this discussion, have great respect for Kyle’s scholarship and really honored to be part of this conversation. His book is a terrific contribution to the literature, and I think such a strong validation of that, that evergreen truism that history matters, understanding such a complicated issue as the India-China border crisis, border dispute really requires knowing the history of it. And his book really does a great job of providing that essential historical context, and I should say that Ambassador Rao’s book does as well, for that matter, in similar, albeit in somewhat different ways.
So I am, I have just one question for Kyle, stemming from his book if he cares to, to respond during the discussion before I provide some broader thoughts triggered by the book and Kyle’s comments this afternoon, and it’s a very specific question. So, the book refers briefly, as I recall, to two agreements, two treaties that had been used to help set boundaries for the border, the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846 and a much older, earlier treaty, the Treaty of Tingmosgang for the 17th century. So what is the status of these agreements, today, are they dead, how are they seen by the two governments, how are they seen by local, how are they remembered by local communities in the borderlands? Are they seen as relevant? Just curious if you have any thoughts about how those agreements are perceived today, if you choose to, to, to address that comment, that question.
So, being a, a South Asia regional analyst, someone who tries to keep an eye on all of South Asia, as difficult as that is to do, for obvious reasons I would think, thought I would just zoom out a bit and share some thoughts about the region on the whole that were triggered by by the book. Three three brief comments.
First, this idea of the India-China border being fraught and unsettled in present times because of the inability of colonial regime to properly demarcate the border or simply because of the actions, more generally, of colonial regimes, but this is clearly an idea an ocean that resonates beyond the India-China border and clearly the story of partition, the independence of India and Pakistan, the resulting crisis over Kashmir is really so interwoven with the actions of the British during the final period of the colonial era. And of course it has an incredibly different history from the China-India border, but as equally complex and contested. And it features the same basic reality of a disputed border, deep rooted disagreements over territoriality that have constituted a fundamental constraint to the broader relationship.
And certainly there have been dialogues at times, there’ve been ceasefires meant to manage tensions on the Line of Control. But these have not managed to address some of the core drivers of those tensions on the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan administered Kashmir.
And then there’s the, the Durand Line, which of course separates Pakistan and Afghanistan, and which, so far as I know, no Afghan Government has accepted as legitimate since the emergence of the state of Pakistan. The impact of colonial era on this border can be seen so starkly by effect that the very name of the border is that of a top British colonial official who was involved in negotiations to try to delimit the border between Afghanistan and colonial India. And you know we’ve seen this border heat up in recent months with the Taliban forcefully stopping Pakistani soldiers from building a fence along it, an indication that the Taliban, much like the governments that it has fought as an insurgency, rejects that border.
And this has become a notable tension point in a relationship between Islamabad and Kabul in the Taliban era, which many in Islamabad thought would be a relatively smooth one given the Taliban’s friendly relations and deep ties to, to Pakistan over the years.
I think it’s notable, just from a linguistic standpoint, that the term that is used to describe these fraught borders—line, the Line of Actual Control, Line of Control, Durand Line—it sounds like such a harmless term, such an innocuous term, but in fact it can be code for something so complex and indeed at times explosive.
A second brief observation is that this discussion of colonial Britain’s role in shaping the India-China border, as it is today, think amplifies the lasting legacy that the Raj continues to have in the neighborhood more broadly, India and also Pakistan. And I know that for, for this audience, which features a number of South Asia themed historians, this is no news, it’s nothing new, but I think it’s important to amplify nonetheless that we’re talking about an impact that goes far beyond borders and territorial disputes and extends into the realm of law and society.
And I think the two examples that come to mind, in particular, are the blasphemy law and sedition law. Of course, these are colonial era laws that were retained and, to a degree, toughened by free, postcolonial governments in India and Pakistan in ways that have oftentimes badly undermined rights and freedom. Pakistan’s blasphemy law, of course, was inherited from the British, it is today, it has been for quite some time exploited by religious militants and other hardliners to wrongly accuse religious minorities of offending Islam and this trend is particularly troubling today given that the new radical political parties embracing the blasphemy law as their main platform have emerged and become a part of the Pakistani political mainstream. And in India, that the sedition law, again something inherited from the colonial era, it’s used to target or frequently used to target peaceful critics of state policy.
So the irony here is that deep deeply nationalistic and proud governments on the subcontinent and many of their supporters have weaponized colonial era tools to target dissidents, state critics, and the vulnerable.
Third and final observation, getting back to the issue of borders, is that in, in South Asia, it seems that everywhere, nearly everywhere, borders are fraught and not just borders that came about, uh, as a result of colonial era machinations. It seems that there are relatively few quiet frontiers in the region. Disputes of various intensity are seemingly baked into them all. India and Pakistan both have multiple contested borders. The India-Nepal border has seen trouble in recent years. India-China border disputes in recent years have drawn in Bhutan, as we saw with the Doklam standoff some years ago. Bhutan’s border with China has had some issues. And it’s not just territory that is the cause of these tensions along borders in the region, terrorism, cross-border terrorism, cross-border insurgency, violence, this has been a long standing issue on the India-Pakistan and Afghanistan-Pakistan borders and also on the borders that serve as gateways to other regions, the Pakistan border with Iran, the India border with Myanmar.
Another trigger for border tensions, particularly in more recent years, is migration. We’ve seen this on the India-Bangladesh border with India having built a border fence in Assam to deter illegal immigration from Bangladesh. Afghan refugees coming to Pakistan and to Iran have caused tensions in these countries as well.
And I would argue that a third, particularly significant trigger of tensions along borders in South Asia has been water, and this is going to become even more pronounced. It’s quite striking that many of the region’s transboundary rivers pass through or originate in contested or disputed areas. So the Tibetan plateau, where four key rivers, including the Indus and the Sutlej, they spring to life here, providing water to 1.5 billion people downstream. The Tibetan plateau is controlled by China and abuts the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which, is of course, claimed by China. The rivers of the Indus basin flow through Kashmir. So no wonder that many of the riparian pairings of South Asia, so to speak, reflect troubled relationships in the region. The Indus River flows from India to Pakistan. The Kabul River flows from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Of course, the Brahmaputra flows from China to India.
And, more broadly, many people in, in South Asia depend on water supplies that originate beyond their borders. They are dependent on others. 91% of Bangladesh’s water resources come from beyond its borders, which is remarkable, and that figure is 75% for Pakistan. So two countries totaling nearly 400 million people depend so heavily on water resources that originate elsewhere. And also, aside from the relative success of the Indus Waters Treaty, many of the region’s water, trans-boundary water treaties have not been properly implemented or have been the source of disputes.
The Teesta River Accord between India and Bangladesh has been in draft form for decades. The Ganges River Accord is constrained by a dispute over the Farakka Barrage between India and Bangladesh. And I think the water issue could prove to be an increasingly serious source of border related tensions in the decades ahead. South Asia is one of the world’s most climate change vulnerable countries. Water scarcity is really all but inevitable in many parts of the region. And so, with river water becoming increasingly scarce, the stakes could rise with transboundary water disputes, meaning that the risk of people resorting to the use of violence to address these disputes in the coming decades could go up.
And you know to wrap up the border tensions of South Asia, I think, amplify what I think is one of the most long standing challenges for the region, one that has constrained development and prosperity for many years, and that is a lack of connectivity and integration. Intra-regional trade is rife with potential, but in reality is woefully low. The lack of regional engagement and commerce in South Asia as a product of various factors, bad infrastructure, for one, a lack of effective regional organizations for another. But poor political and diplomatic relations are a big reason too. And these bad relations are in many cases rooted in these long standing border disagreements.
So to go back to Kyle’s book, I think one can argue that one can perhaps draw a line, no pun intended, a meandering line, perhaps, but nonetheless a line, extending from colonial era rooted drivers of territorial disputes to the contemporary struggles of one of the world’s most populous regions to achieve more prosperity and well being. So I’ll end there, thank you.
> > Lhost: Wonderful! Thank you, Michael.
Kyle, would you like to respond to any of those comments and questions while we gather input from the audience? And audience members, please use the Q&A feature to submit your questions.
> > Gardner: Yes, well, I’m happy to. Thank you, both, first and foremost, for those very thoughtful, very, very eloquent comments on, on both my book and the larger context that, that it, that it rests in. Conscious of Elizabeth’s plea to keep my response somewhat succinct, I’ll just touch upon a few of them, and maybe move, move sort of backwards, starting with Michael’s comments first.
I think your point about water is, is, is very well taken and, and in the fact that, that the Tibetan plateau and Himalaya is Asia’s water tower and indirectly feeds nearly, nearly half of the world’s population—47%, if you extend all of those rivers from, from source to sea—as it were—and, and the point about water, lack of water sharing agreements as well is taken. Although it is, although it’s seen its fair share of problems, it is notable that Asia’s one really long-standing successful water sharing agreement is between India and Pakistan and has managed to survive multiple wars.
I don’t think you would in an audience that has several historians and historians of the British Empire, I don’t think anyone would dispute your point, Michael, that, that the legacy of the British Empire, is still very much in play today.
To, to your question about the legacy of the treaties mentioned, so in, in, in fact, there are, there are really sort of three notable historical treaties worth mentioning. The first, the Treaty of Tingmosgang in in 1684, was, was noted, notable in so far as it established, it established a, one of these border points which is represented actually on the map that I showed near Demchok. And it the, the description is, is quite brief. It, it basically marks, it says in the, in the Tibetan Ladakhi that the, the, the sum–the border—rests near the Lha-ri stream, which is near Demchok. So to the point about border points existing in the kind of premodern world, this, this is not a particularly detailed description, but it did establish among many notable long lasting dynamics between Tibet and Ladakh a reciprocal trade and tribute mission that lasted, actually, well, technically, the last trade mission of the lopchak was in 1950, although there were only four, four traders participating at that point, indicative of a long slow decline in the Ladakh-Tibet trade. That is, I would argue, is is somewhat [the] responsibility of of the British and some of the, the practices and restrictions that they, they attempted to enforce, albeit very, very imperfectly.
But that Treaty established this first sort of relationship and vague idea of a border. Subsequently, that was reaffirmed in the Treaty of Chushul in 1842 between the Sikh Empire and the, the Llama guru of Lhasa, aka the Dalai Lama. And that, again, did not provide any more detailed description of the border, except saying that sort of such as it was so will it be.
Then the Treaty of Amritsar, which you referenced, which was the result of the end of the first Anglo-Sikh War, which created the state of Jammu and Kashmir, that in turn kind of created this new state which, which was an assemblage of both Ladakh and the Kashmir valley and Jammu given to the Dogras Rajas of Jammu for effectively siding with the the the British during the war against their, against the Sikh empire.
These were respected, and in fact when and as Ambassador Rao notes in her book, these, one of the assertions that Nehru and others made following independence was that the boundaries, the customary boundaries ought to be respected. And, of course, this then raises a problem of well if the customary boundaries were you know, like the Treaty of Tingmosgang in referencing you know, a specific point, then there really was no detailed, detailed complete borderline and this gets to, to the broader problem of you know, the, the British insistence on a linear mapable borderline in a region that that never had those articulated.
And you know, as ambassador Rao, mentioned in her, in her comments that the Chinese did know even less, and in some sense, it is, this whole undertaking of unilateral border making was destined, in some sense, although historians don’t like to use that term, was destined to produce problems because it takes two sides to make a border, and when you have the British going out and insisting on a, a concept of a border that was distinct from what existed, then you run into trouble too.
I am so glad Ambassador Rao that you raised the, the Kushok Bakula Rinpoche because you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to extend the scope of the book beyond 1947 was because I wanted to emphasize that for Ladakh, there was this, you know, intense period of uncertainty following 1947. And, you know, there were, there were, I mean some very, very strongly worded statements from Bakula Rinpoche or those supporting him, you know, preference to, you know, we would rather, we would rather join Tibet than be thrown into the fiery hell of Pakistan or you know these rhetoric that you know, in part, was, I think, meant to to get Nehru’s attention and the government’s attention.
But, but, it also, I think, reflects the sheer indeterminacy of that, of those early years and, of course, for an audience familiar with South Asian history we don’t need to detail, just the, the upheaval, the integration of princely states, the violence, massive displacement of partition, and so forth. But, but I think one of the, the real reasons that I did want to extend to 1962, even though it, by doing so, it brings in all of these sort of additional geopolitical variables and nationalism was because I really did want to touch upon the you know the, the, the challenge faced by Ladakh and Ladakhis and its leaders and the, the, the final imposition of an actual, effective border only coming with the Line of Actual Control following the the war in ‘62.
Lots more points to respond to and including the, my total agreement with both of you on the points about the lack of connectivity. I think that is, that is absolutely, you know, a, both, both the result of the, the, the problem of borders being enforced and, and used, I think, as really a front line for more aggressive nationalistic states, but also in the practical sense of roads no longer connecting but, but actually being used to to divide people, but I should stop there and see what questions we have.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks Kyle. Your, your, the book, but also some of Michael’s discussions about water and rivers, got me thinking about the boundary markers that separate the state of New Hampshire from the state of Vermont and the boundary markers are located on land, at least some of the ones that are by a trail that I walk along, on the Vermont side of the Connecticut river, but they actually refer to the the line being off the boundary marker. And so, if you go to Google maps, you get just a neat line down the middle of the River, sometimes it’s right on the bank of Vermont showing like who controls the river, whose space that is, and it just seems to bring together a lot of the discussion that you have in a book about the way that representing space also reflects certain ideas about how the space is either owned, occupied, or possessed, or used. Just sort of bringing that home to New England.
However, we have a lot of questions coming in, so I won’t blather on anymore.
Benjamin Hopkins asks if you can say a bit about how your work fits within the burgeoning field of frontier discussions within the framework of British India but also perhaps frontier studies more broadly. And if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe also borderlands studies, if you’d like to engage with those ideas.
> > Gardner: Yeah, thanks! Thanks, Ben and also a plug for Ben’s award winning book, which I’m blanking on the title, but it involves the savage periphery, savage in scare quotes, I think. Why am I blanking on Ben’s book? But it just won the Coomaraswamy Award from the, from the AAS. So, congrats, Ben! The, wait, Ruling the Savage Periphery, there, sorry.
So I would situate, well, A, I think that Ben, this is a somewhat leading question because you are, one of, I would, I would say, one of the leading figures of what has been a real revival, a revitalization of frontier history, particularly in a more comparative context and, and I think the, there are sort of two points that I hope my work sort of addresses. One is in a, in a sort of sense in, it fills a gap, which is not the most inspiring argument to make necessarily for, for one’s research, but I think, in this case, it really does fill in an important absence in the study of colonial South Asian frontiers, precisely because the Ladakh frontier was very much a sort of relatively pacific frontier when compared to some of the more volatile ones in the Northwest frontier, which Ben’s work has focused on, as well as the Northeast where work by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Thomas Simpson, and, and others, has, has really, really opened up new and exciting of avenues of inquiry.
To the question of borderland studies, I think one of the, one of the contentions that I make is that borderland studies can in some sense be a, a vague and imprecise catch all, and I think the, the, the hope that I sort of offer in my book is that if we focus borderlands a little bit more specific, on the specifically, on the, the, the defining object of a borderland, i.e. the border, then we, I think, have a better, a better means of examining those dynamics particular to what we might call borderlands because I think there’s always the, right, with terms like frontier and even borderland, I think there’s, there’s an inevitable risk of replicating the imprecision of the category by, by sort of falling into the kind of polysemic character of these, of these terms. So I hope at least that my work offers maybe one way of, of a maybe slightly more objective approach to borderlands studies and frontiers by looking at exactly how they’re made.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks Kyle! [We have] a question that I think really gets to the first couple of chapters of the book and asks whether you can say a bit more about precolonial understandings of Ladakh and how precolonial sources envision Ladakh as a territory and maybe say a bit about whether there are any continuities between those precolonial imaginaries and what happened to the colonial and the postcolonial period in terms of thinking, thinking about Ladakh as a region.
> > Gardner: Yeah, so one of the things I outline in, in my, in my first chapter is the, the multiple ways in which precolonial Ladakhis conceived of space, that in some sense were not there when- in the imperial vision that the British imposed. And this includes, you know, the really rich and very cosmological dimensions that, that tied- to get- tied Ladakh not just to the greater sort of Tibetan Buddhist world, but also really shaped local conceptions and understandings of space. So, you know, for the British who are primarily looking at mountains, from the perspective of a kind of boundary object, I wanted to emphasize that, that, of course, when people look at a mountain, they see, those who are able to see, see a mountain, but the, the fact that Ladakhis also had very kind of rich cosmological associations with the deities inhabiting mountains and those mountains, and the deities associated with them, being sources of water for, for villages and connecting village level cosmological space.
Also, to the point about you know passes and again emphasizing that you know, Ladakh is literally, the name, defined by its passes, speaks also to you know, a concept of space connecting networks of, of, of trade routes that were very much seasonally dependent. People moved when the snow cleared on the passes, and people were, were frozen in place during, during the winter months.
So I think that, the one of the, one of the things that I, that the book tries to do is really emphasize the, that the competition between different visions of space and how the imperial project was an imposition of a particular kind of political, territorial conception of space that that overlooked a richer and more diverse assortment of of understandings.
> > Lhost: Thanks, Kyle. We have a question from Galen Murton, who asks whether you might be willing to reflect on the other part of the India-China border, so looking eastward, and whether, to what extent do you consider recent Chinese border village development around Doklam to be a repeat performance and part of an ongoing Chinese strategy of making and claiming territory [through] settlement in the building of infrastructure, how is what’s happening in sort of eastern India, along that region, different from what happened in the Aksai Chin in the years leading up to the 1962 war, and maybe and how other, in what other ways is it different from what happened in the, in the Northwest versus the Northeast?
> > Gardner: Well, conscious of the, the time here, I, I probably won’t attempt to address each of those and, in fact, would probably do, do better passing that, that question off to Ambassador Rao here, but since I am, I suppose on the hot seat here, I can, I can take kind of take a bit of a stab at it.
You know, I think the, the Northeast, on the one hand, it has a, there is a clearer sense of a, of a border line. That is to say, not that the Chinese agree with the use of the term but and refer to it as the illegal McMahon Line, but there is a clearer and less varied conception of, of a would be border that, that up until I would say the last decade appeared to be respected by both sides, even if not officially agreed to. And, in part, that’s because it more successfully applies the water parting principle, although there are some noticeable, notable segments where that is not the case in the Northeast.
But recent, and in recent years, with, with some of the things that Galen noted, the appearance of, of Chinese villages, either potentially within claimed, within the claim lines or very close to [them], I think there is a sense that we are now seeing a more, I think the diplomatic term is assertive behavior, on the part of, on the part of the Chinese to, you know, to, to push India on those.
If that becomes the primary zone of contest I, I will just say that I think there are substantially more variables in play in the Northeast than there are in Ladakh and Aksai Chin, uninhabited except for the unfortunate soldiers stationed there. The Northeast, its populace, diverse populations, it also brings into play the politics around the Dalai Lama, particularly in the case of Tawang.
And so, if, and, of course, with water, as Michael noted, with the Brahmaputra moving through there and, and occasional concerns being raised about the possibility of, of the Chinese diversion on the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, that could incorporate it, it could incorporate some of those waters into this great sort of South-North diversion project that, that China has been working on for some years.
So, I think the Northeast is a very, it’s a concerning potential zone of, of conflict and certainly one that I think you should be paying close attention to.
> > Lhost: On that note, I would like to invite everyone to, to thank our discussants and panelists for joining us for this discussion. I would like to invite all of you to join us for our next event which will be on Tuesday, April 12 featuring Jessica Namakkal’s Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, and you can register for that event, using the link that Sathvik just put in the chat.
So, thank you, Kyle, for sharing your work with us, and thank you, Ambassador Rao and Michael [Kugelman] for joining us for this discussion today. We hope to see you all back here next month.
> > Rao: Thank you all very much, thank you.
> > Kugelman: Thanks a lot.
