Empire and Border-Crossings

In the dying years of British India and the first flush of postcolonial Indian statehood, a clear continuity of laws and policy can be read, especially in relation to the registration of aliens. The small-scale strife of the Great Game at these Himalayan borders in the town of Kalimpong was coming to a close even as the registration of Chinese nationals continued under a cloud of suspicion over a period of twenty years at the Foreigners Registration Office. The spectre of spies, the reflux of the Great Game, the Tibet Question and eventually the 1962 Sino-Indian War haunt the distinction between ‘Japanese’, ‘Tibetan’ and ‘Chinese’ nationals and largely remain fuzzy. It is the anxious state's process of separating the ‘Chinese’ from their ‘Japanese’ and then ‘Tibetan’ (also subdivided as Amdowas, Khampas, half-castes, and so on) counterparts that led the charge to register ‘Chinese nationals’ under the British Indian registration of foreigners acts. Marking differences was a way of categorising and classifying in these registration processes such that boundaries could be constructed for the body political and the body social. The nervous nation's and the disciplinary state's rationale for capturing and interning dangerous ‘Chinese’ later is a part of this narrative.