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TOUR DIARIES AND ITINERANT GOVERNANCE IN THE EASTERN HIMALAYAS, 1909–1962*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

BÉRÉNICE GUYOT-RÉCHARD
BÉRÉNICE GUYOT-RÉCHARD*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
History Department, King's College London, The Strand, London, wc2r 2ls[email protected]
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Abstract

Between the early twentieth century and the 1960s, the Indian state began to incorporate the easternmost Himalayas. This article illuminates this state-making process by examining its material and communicative culture, embodied in tour diaries. These diaries were not private reflections written during one's spare time but the compulsory output of administrative tours. Often followed by more reflective notes, their perceived insights were used to determine local or general policy changes. Drawing on a literature that sees paperwork as constitutive of bureaucracy, this article argues that tour diaries exemplified and buttressed a certain form of frontier governance, marked by itinerancy and personalization well into independence. In their historical development, their language and materiality, their administrative usage, tour diaries embodied more than anything else the contingent, spatially uneven, and fractured nature of Indian state-making in the Himalayas, revealing the importance of process geographies anchored in paperwork circulation for its sustenance. Transmitted whole or extracted into policy files, diaries tied wandering officers together in a distinctive community of practice, policies, and ideas – preserving the fiction of the frontier state as a coherent whole in uncertain circumstances. As much as through maps, regulations, and routes, the frontier was made through writing.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 1023 - 1046
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I thank the two anonymous reviewers and Sujit Sivasundaram for their advice. My gratitude also goes to Manjeet Baruah and Lipokmar Dzuvichu – who sparked the idea for this article – and to Christoph Bergmann, Tim Chamberlain, Mark Condos, Derek Elliott, Lisa Elliott, Vincent Hiribarren, Aditya Kiran Kakati, Elisabeth Leake, and Emma Martin for their feedback and suggestions. Finally, I acknowledge the support of the Gates Cambridge Trust and Cambridge University (through Emmanuel College, the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme, the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund, and the Smut Memorial Fund) in funding the research for this article.

References

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