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BORDERING AND FRONTIER-MAKING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH INDIA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2015

THOMAS SIMPSON
THOMAS SIMPSON*
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
*
Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, cb2 1ta[email protected]
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Abstract

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state's power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 513 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Sujit Sivasundaram, Simon Schaffer, and the two anonymous referees, all of whom provided helpful and challenging comments that improved this article significantly.

References

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3 NAI Foreign Political A, Mar. 1876, No. 505: secretary to the chief commissioner of Assam to secretary to the government of India, 17 May 1875, fo. 4.

4 Throughout this article, I use the term ‘border’ to denote a linear boundary, and the term ‘frontier’ to denote a zone. Among the most important of these fairly recent works on colonial frontiers in India are, on the north-west: Marsden, Magnus and Hopkins, Benjamin D., Fragments of the Afghan frontier (London, 2011)Google Scholar; Beattie, Hugh, Imperial frontier: tribe and state in Waziristan (Richmond, 2002)Google Scholar; Tripodi, Christian, Edge of empire: the british political officer and tribal administration on the north-west frontier, 1877–1947 (London, 2011)Google Scholar; Nichols, Robert, Settling the frontier: land, law, and society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500–1900 (Karachi, 2001)Google Scholar. On the north-east: Zou, David Vumlallian and Kumar, M. Satish, ‘Mapping a colonial borderland: objectifying the geo-body of India's northeast’, Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (2011), pp. 141–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Misra, Sanghamitra, Becoming a borderland: the politics of space and identity in colonial northeastern India (New Delhi, 2011)Google Scholar. On general colonial frontiers: Ludden, David, ‘The process of empire: frontiers and borderlands’, in Bang, P. F. and Bayly, C. A., eds., Tributary empires in global history (London, 2011), pp. 132–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 For example, the multi-volume Frontier and overseas expeditions from India (Simla, 1907)Google Scholar; throughout this article, the terms ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal’ are only used to describe groups that contemporary colonial officials considered as such.

9 Hopkins and Marsden have quite rightly emphasized the variously fragmented and unitary nature of the north-western frontier in Fragments of the Afghan frontier.

10 Other aspects of this fraught relationship have been discussed at length. One particularly influential work is Chatterjee, Partha, The nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993)Google Scholar.

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16 The agreement of the border with Afghanistan, the Durand line, took place in 1893, over twenty years after British survey parties had first been sent to the western and northern reaches of Afghanistan to attempt to broker its boundary with Russia (see Hopkins, Benjamin D., ‘The bounds of identity: the Goldsmid mission and the delineation of the Perso-Afghan border in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Global History, 2 (2007), pp. 233–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The border between Tibet and nominal British Indian territory to the north of the Brahmaputra Valley, the McMahon Line, was not agreed until 1914 and, like the Durand line, has been much disputed subsequently (see Lamb, Alastair, The McMahon Line: a study in the relations between India, China and Tibet, 1904 to 1914 (London, 1966)Google Scholar).

17 This is among Sahlins's key claims in Boundaries.

18 Ludden, The process of empire, p. 148.

19 Among the most important works in this field are Elden, Stuart, ‘Land, terrain, territory’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (2010), pp. 799–817CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agnew, John, ‘Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking’, Ethics and Global Politics, 1 (2008), p. 175–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parker, Noel, Vaughan-Williams, Nick et al. , ‘Lines in the sand? Towards an agenda for critical border studies’, Geopolitics, 14 (2009), pp. 582–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berg, E. and van Houtum, H., eds., Routing borders between territories, discourses and practices(Aldershot, 2003)Google Scholar; Wilson, Thomas M. and Donnan, Hastings, eds., Border identities: nation and state at international frontiers (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Agnew, Borders on the mind, p. 183.

21 Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, ‘Nation, state and identity at international borders’, in idem and idem, eds., Border identities, p. 24.

22 Foucault, Michel, ‘The subject and power’, in Faubion, James, ed., Power: essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984, iii (London, 2000)Google Scholar, p. 340.

23 For example, Harley, J. B., The new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography, ed. Laxton, Paul (Baltimore, MD, 2001)Google Scholar.

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26 On the ‘friction’ of terrain in upland areas, see Scott, The art of not being governed.

27 C. A. Bayly's concept of ‘information famines’ at South Asian colonial frontiers is useful in this respect: Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, especially pp. 97–133.

28 For example, Mackenzie, History, p. 21; Frontier and overseas expeditions, iv, pp. 160–1.

29 NAI Foreign Political, 20 Feb. 1834, No. 23: Thomas Campbell Robertson, agent to the governor-general, north-east frontier to secretary to the government of India, 3 Feb. 1834, fos. 4–5,

30 Ibid., fos. 6–7.

31 NAI Foreign External A, Mar. 1885, No. 256: secretary to chief commissioner of Assam to deputy commissioner of Lakhimpur, 4 Dec. 1884.

32 NAI Foreign Political, 20 Feb. 1834, No. 24: secretary to the government of India to Robertson, 20 Feb. 1834.

33 NAI Foreign Political, 15 May 1837, No. 10: Captain Francis Jenkins to secretary to the government of India, 15 May 1837, fo. 11.

34 NAI Foreign Political, 18 Jan. 1850, No. 73: Jenkins to secretary to the government of India, foreign department, 8 Dec. 1849, fo. 9; Bodhisattva Kar correctly emphasizes the shift in the significance and processes of posa under colonial rule: ‘When was the postcolonial?’, pp. 63–9.

35 For more on this aspect of bordering, see Walker, Andrew, The legend of the golden boat: regulation, trade and traders in the borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (Richmond, 1999)Google Scholar.

36 NAI Foreign Political A, Aug. 1872, No. 141: Major W. S. Clarke, deputy commissioner of Luckimpore District, to personal assistant to the commissioner of Assam, 9 May 1872, fos. 1–2.

37 Parker, Vaughan-Williams et al., ‘Lines in the sand?’, p. 586.

38 NAI Foreign Political, 16 May 1838, No. 53: Jenkins to secretary to the government of India, 3 Apr. 1838. Due to restrictions on copying any map of the politically sensitive north-east of India at the National Archives in New Delhi, I was not able to obtain a reproduction of the map.

39 NAI Foreign Political, 18 July 1836, No. 77: Captain J. Matthie, officiating magistrate, Durrung District, to Jenkins, 13 June 1836, fos. 35–6.

40 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of violence’, in Bullock, M. and Jennings, M. W., eds., Selected writings (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar, p. 248.

41 Mackenzie, History, p. 31.

42 Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) Eur. MSS D727/4: Durand to Sir Stuart Bayley, 27 Nov. 1893.

43 Holdich, Thomas H., Political frontiers and boundary making (London, 1916)Google Scholar, p. 208.

44 For example, India Office Records, British Library (IOR)/L/PARL/2/284/9: Agreement signed by Mr R. Udny and Sipah Salar Ghulam Haidar Khan, Joint Commissioners for laying down the Afghan boundary from the Hindu Kush to Nawa Kotal: and confirmed by H. H. The Amir of Afghanistan on the 19th December 1895 (London, 1896), pp. 3–4.

45 Holdich, Thomas H., The Indian borderland, 1880–1900 (London, 1901)Google Scholar, p. 242.

46 Agreement between Amir Abdur Rahman Khan and Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, 12 Nov. 1893, IOR/L/PARL/2/284/8: Correspondence relating to the occupation of Chitral (London, 1896)Google Scholar, p. 30.

47 Khyber Administration Report, 1899–1900 in OIOC Eur MSS F111/315, fo. 77; Holdich, Indian borderland, p. 242; see also Warburton, Robert, Eighteen years in the Khyber, 1879–1898 (London, 1990), pp. 142–3Google Scholar.

48 The quotations and narrative in this paragraph are drawn from NAI Foreign Secret. F, July 1894, Nos. 402–34, Keep-With No. 1.

49 NAI Foreign Secret. F, July 1894, No. 433: government of India to secretary of state, 10 July 1894.

50 NAI Foreign Secret. F, July 1894, No. 431: Minute of Dissent signed by Westland, MacDonnell and Pritchard, 6 July 1894.

51 IOR/V Oct. 369B: Report on the Punjab frontier administration, 1894–1895 (Lahore, 1895), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

52 Holdich, Indian borderland, p. 238.

53 Report on the Punjab frontier administration, 1894–1895, p. 7.

54 Wylly, H. C., From the Black Mountain to Waziristan (London, 1912), pp. 459–66Google Scholar; Howell, Evelyn, Mizh: a monograph on government's relations with the Mahsud Tribe (orig. publ. 1931; 1979), pp. 14–17Google Scholar.

55 Holdich, Indian borderland, pp. 238–9.

56 Ibid., p. 255.

57 See the 1895–6 and 1896–7 versions of the Report on the Punjab frontier administration (Lahore, 1896, 1897), IOR/V Oct. 369B.

58 Holdich, Indian borderland, p. 338.

59 Barton, Sir William, India's north-west frontier (London, 1939), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.

60 The trade in stolen arms was a major concern for the British, and reached a significant scale towards the end of the nineteenth century. See, for example, the report on the traffic in arms on the north-western frontier by the north-western frontier arms Trade Committee, 18 Apr. 1899, OIOC, Eur MSS F111/315, fos. 10–40.

61 Officials forwarding the ‘fanaticism’ explanation included, most notably, Robert Warburton and Harold Deane: Warburton, Eighteen years, pp. 290–8; IOR/L/PARL/2/284/13: ii: Papers regarding British relations with the neighbouring tribes on the north-west frontier of India and the military operations undertaken against them during the year 1897–1898 (London, 1898), pp. 59–60, 63. Subsequent histories endorsing this monocausal explanation include Elliott, J. G., The frontier, 1839–1947: the story of the north-west frontier of India (London, 1968), pp. 157–8, 165–9Google Scholar. However, some other accounts have attributed the rising primarily to the Durand line: for example, Wylly, Black Mountain to Waziristan, pp. 311–12. More recently, Robert Nichols's historical anthropological work disputed the importance of religious millenarianism in the revolt: Nichols, Settling the frontier, p. xxxi.

62 Secretary of state for India (George Hamilton) to viceroy (Lord Elgin), 28 Jan. 1898, IOR/L/PARL/2/284/13, p. 177.

63 See, for example, the letter from the commissioner at Peshawar (Richard Udny) to the amir of Afghanistan, 13 Aug. 1897, in which he demands that the amir renders it impossible for Afghan subjects to repeat their previous ‘deliberate violation of the British Indian frontier’. IOR/L/PARL/2/284/13, p. 75.

64 Secretary to Punjab government to secretary to government of India, 25 Aug. 1897, IOR/L/PARL/2/284/13, p. 102.

65 NAI Foreign Political A, Mar. 1876, No. 505: secretary of the chief commissioner of Assam to secretary to the government of India, 17 May 1875, fos. 2–3.

66 Ibid., fo. 3.

67 Ibid., fo. 3.

68 NAI Foreign Political A, Mar. 1876, No. 506: Graham to Keatinge, 18 Mar. 1875, fo. 4.

69 Ibid., fo. 7.

70 NAI Foreign Political A, Mar. 1876, No. 513: secretary to the chief commissioner of Assam to secretary to the government of India, 8 Dec. 1875.

71 NAI Foreign Political A, Mar. 1876, No. 506: Graham to Keatinge, 18 Mar. 1875, fos. 7–8.

72 Ibid., fo. 6.

73 Ibid., fo. 5.

74 Ibid., fo. 5.

75 Ibid., fo. 5.

76 I have adopted this term from Benton's, LaurenA search for sovereignty: law and geography in European empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar, p. 2.

77 On the initial collision between Nagas and British officials, see Pemberton, R. B., The eastern frontier of India (orig. publ. 1835; New Delhi, 2005)Google Scholar, p. 59; Mackenzie, History, p. 101; NAI Foreign Political, 5 Mar. 1832, No. 70: Captain F. Jenkins to W. Cracroft, acting agent to the governor-general, north-east frontier, 6 Feb. 1832, fo. 1.

78 NAI Foreign Political A, July 1866, No. 16: secretary to the government of Bengal to secretary to the government of India, 27 June 1866, fo. 1.

79 NAI Foreign Political A, Dec. 1866, No. 137: Henry Hopkinson, commissioner of Assam to secretary to the government of Bengal, 14 Sept. 1866, fos. 4–5.

80 NAI Foreign Political A, Apr. 1868, No. 261: Hopkinson to secretary to the government of Bengal, 4 Mar. 1868, fo. 1.

81 On the system of delegates, see NAI Foreign Political A, Dec. 1870, No. 29: A. H. James, assistant commissioner, in charge of Naga Hills, to personal assistant to the commissioner of Assam, 9 Sept. 1870, fos. 1–2.

82 NAI Foreign Political A, July 1874, No. 45: secretary to the government of India to secretary to the government of Bengal, 30 June 1874, fo. 1.

83 NAI Foreign Political A, Dec. 1875, No. 87: Captain John Butler to secretary to the chief commissioner of Assam, 26 June 1875, fos. 1–2.

84 NAI Foreign Political A, Oct. 1878, No. 7–51, government of India notes, fo. 4.

85 Ibid., fo. 8.

86 Julian Jacobs with Alan Macfarlane, Harrison, Sarah, and Herle, Anita, The Nagas: society, culture and the colonial encounter (orig. edn 1990; 2nd edn, London, 2012), pp. 21–2Google Scholar.

87 Reid, Robert, History of the frontier areas bordering on Assam from 1883–1941 (orig. publ. 1942; Delhi, 1983), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

88 Howell, quoted in Reid, History, pp. 132–3.

89 Ibid., pp. 132–3.

90 A similar celebration among colonial officials of the possibilities that border transgressions afforded was evident along the Mekong boundary between French Laos and Siam in the 1890s. See Walker, Andrew, ‘Borders in motion on the Upper-Mekong: Siam and France in the 1890s’, in Goudineau, Yves and Lorrillard, Michel, eds., Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos (Vientiane and Paris, 2008), pp. 183–208Google Scholar.

91 For more on the polity of Kalat, see Swidler, Kalat.

92 For example, Marsden and Hopkins claim that ‘Sandeman's actions ultimately proved, in the words of his assistant R. I. Bruce, the ‘coup de grace’ to the closed border system’: Fragments of the Afghan frontier, p. 56; later in the same chapter, Marsden and Hopkins rightly acknowledge the ‘ad hoc’ and ‘back and forth’ nature of frontier policy in the north-west (p. 63). Christian Tripodi provides a less nuanced account of Sandeman's impact in his formulaic division of colonial frontier policy in the north-west into large blocks: ‘close border’ from 1843 to 1875; ‘forward policy’ from 1875 to the creation of the north-west frontier province in 1901; a modified ‘close border’ policy from 1901 to the early 1920s; a modified ‘forward policy’ from the early 1920s. See Tripodi, Edge of empire, pp. 16–17; on Sandeman specifically, pp. 50–65.

93 NAI Foreign Secret., 27 Nov. 1847, No. 15: R. K. Pringle to Governor-General Hardinge, 8 Oct. 1847, fos. 1–2.

94 On fears of a tribal rebellion during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, see NAI Foreign Secret., 25 June 1858, No. 467. On the continuation of occasional raids into Upper Sind after Jacob's measures of the mid-1840s, see NAI Foreign Political, 17 May 1853, No. 10: commissioner of Sind to secretary to the Bombay government, 10 Apr. 1853, fos. 9–11. On inter-tribal violence, see especially NAI Foreign Political, 14 Jan. 1859, No. 21: commissioner of Sind to governor-general, 15 Oct. 1858, fos. 2–9; Brigadier-General John Jacob, political superintendent, Upper Sind Frontier, to commissioner of Sind, 2 Oct. 1858, fos. 11–25.

95 Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai (MSA), Political, 1838–40, vol. 21: Major-General T. Willshire to Lord Auckland, 14 Nov. 1839, fo. 621; MSA, Political, 1841–2, vol. 74: Treaty between Major Outram and Mir Nusseer Khan, 6 Oct. 1841; see also Swidler, Kalat, p. 563.

96 Thornton, Thomas Henry, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: his life and work on our Indian frontier: a memoir, with selections from his correspondence and official writings (London, 1895), pp. 18–20Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

97 Tucker, A. L. P., Sir Robert G. Sandeman: peaceful conqueror of Baluchistan (New York, NY, 1921)Google Scholar, p. 27.

98 Quoted in Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, p. 30.

99 Sandeman, ‘Memorandum on the rectification of the north-west frontier of India’, in Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, p. 336.

100 Bruce, Richard Isaac, The forward policy and its results, or thirty-five years' work amongst the tribes on our north-western frontier of India (London, 1900), pp. 26–7Google Scholar.

101 Ibid., pp. 28–9.

102 Assam State Archives, Guwahati, pre-1874 files, Assam commissioner No. 686: Captain H. S. Bivar to Colonel H. Hopkinson, 23 Feb. 1862.

103 NAI Foreign Political A, June 1868, No. 83: Sandeman to the commissioner of Derajat, 11 Sept. 1867, fo. 6; Bruce, The forward policy, pp. 36–7.

104 Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, pp. 36–7.

105 For example, NAI Foreign Political A, June 1868, No. 84: secretary to the government of India to secretary to the Punjab government, 9 June 1868, fo. 1.

106 NAI Foreign Political, Oct 1874, No. 173: secretary to the government of India to commissioner of Sind, 9 Oct. 1874, fo. 277.

107 Bruce, The forward policy, pp. 56–9; NAI Foreign Political, Nov. 1875, No. 278: extract from the proceedings of the government of India, foreign department, 16 Oct. 1875, fo. 6.

108 Bruce, The forward policy, pp. 62–6; Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, pp. 76–95.

109 The removal of power to levy duties on goods transiting through the Bolan Pass in 1883 might be seen as the final conclusion of this process. See NAI Foreign A–Political–E, Dec. 1883, Nos. 74–130.

110 Quoted in Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, p. 85.

111 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 7 and passim. I am indebted to Simon Schaffer for suggesting this angle on Thornton's writings.

112 Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, p. 77.

113 Ibid., pp. 35–6.

114 Examples of relatively recent claims that high strategy largely dictated frontier policies include Fred Scholz: ‘It is important to remember that Britain's interest in Baluchistan lay not with its people, but was directed at securing British India's borders. To this end, the tribes of the mountain province were merely the means and tools.’ Nomadism and colonialism: a hundred years of Baluchistan, 1872-1972, trans. Hugh van Skyhawk (orig. publ. 1974; Oxford, 2002), p. 93; and Christian Tripodi: ‘Events on the ground can never be judged in isolation from those higher-level considerations that may have changed over time but remained constant in their potential to affect policy…Grand strategy dictated policy, which in turn dictated method’, Edge of empire, pp. 17–18.

115 Galbraith, John S., ‘The “turbulent frontier” as a factor in British expansion’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 2 (1960), pp. 150–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 Ibid., p. 168.

117 Quoted in Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, p. 295.

118 NAI Foreign Secret., 28 Apr. 1848, No. 20: Jacob to Lieutenant-Colonel Shaw, commanding officer in Upper Sind, 24 Nov. 1847, fos. 1238–9, emphasis in original.

119 Walker, The legend of the golden boat, p. 16. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting the relevance of Walker's work to my argument.

120 Scott, The art of not being governed, pp. 179–90, passim. On the point of tribes and states constituting each other, see, for example Noelle, State and tribe. Scott also argues that tribes and states develop in tandem, but places too much emphasis on the role of opposition in this process, arguing that this co-constitution centres on states having a ‘tribal problem’ and tribes having ‘a perennial “state-problem”’ (The art of not being governed, p. 208).

121 On British Indian mapping, see Edney, Matthew, Mapping an empire: the geographical construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on major irrigation projects, forestry, and general interaction with landscape, see, for example, Ali, Imran, The Punjab under imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton, NJ, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, David, The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape, and science, 1800–1856 (Delhi, 2005)Google Scholar; Guha, Sumit, Environment and ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar, chs. 6–8.

122 Massey, Doreen, For space (London, 2005)Google Scholar, p. 71.

123 Ibid., pp. 111–16.