Book review: Kyle J. Gardner,The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border 1846–1962

This book by the American historian Kyle Gardner offers as he notes, ‘a new approach to the global history of frontiers’ and how colonial practices and ideas helped to shape postcolonial borders. India is no exception to this rule.

‘The Frontier Complex’ (the term, as Gardner defines it, connotes a mix of the emotionally charged ideas about frontier-making that co-exist with the determining of borderlines) focuses mainly on the region of Ladakh and its frontiers—now unsettled borders—with Xinjiang and Tibet. Gardner notes that this was a region that ‘long resisted’ the definition of lines of separation, ‘starting points’, which is how we see the term ‘boundary’—a sine qua non for territory—today. The story he recounts, based on an extensive study of the archives in Ladakhi, Urdu and English, straddles multi-layered narratives that have transformed themselves into present-day struggles for sovereign control of territory between India and China.

The north-western Himalaya, of which Ladakh is a part, is an understudied frontier that is often submerged in adventurist histories of the Great Game. Yet, when we commence the study of this space, we realize that historical sources are very often incomplete, and as Gardner has said in a recent interview on the book, ‘solutions may not be found in history’. The physical and human landscapes involved must be understood—that here is a region—a once-vibrant borderland, despite the harshness of terrain—of crossroads whose past was people-centred. Today, Ladakh (literally, the ‘land of passes’) is a marginalized, objectified territory, its past as a busy entrepot of trade, cultural, religious and spiritual activity between India, Central Asia, particularly Turkestan, Afghanistan and Tibet, shrouded in the fog of history. Today, only the militarization of Ladakh occupies the spotlight and the ‘frontiers of the mind’ (as Bérénice Guyot-Réchard puts it) circumvent a more inclusive outlook on the nature of borderlands and their needs and priorities.

The 19th-century history of the region was witness also to the birth of geopolitics, that marriage of geography and politics to serve the needs of empires and their expansion. It was a period that saw the founding of border-making principles by the British, aided by the ‘mindscape of colonialism’ (Ashis Nandy), of borders stamped with the imprimatur of officialdom and ‘masculine adventure’, maps and gazetteers, and such defining principles as the ‘watershed’ (the ‘ideal border-making object’ or, conversely, the ‘gordian knot’ in boundary definition), thus making the north-western Himalaya a ‘crucial, early example of the imperial frontier laboratory’ (p. 20).

One feature of the borderlands of Ladakh is that neither India nor China effectively occupied (fully) the territories claimed by their imperial forbears, and as a result their moves to assert these claims post-mid-20th century, have engendered conflict and continuing tensions, where securing such claims become objects of existential importance. Experience has shown both countries that border-making is a complex task, fraught with contradictions, ‘both geographical and political’. What was inherited particularly by India was an imperial legacy of boundary definition, a complex of practices and ideas ‘about territory, borders and security, magnified by the preponderance of a nation-state for which its citizens were willing to die’ (p. 24).

In 1947, at the time of independence, the British left India with maps of Ladakh’s international boundary with China, that were ‘borderless’, claiming to be precise, but actually a ‘formal representation of territorial ignorance’ as Gardner terms it. The watershed or water-parting principle was difficult, for instance, to apply on the high desert of the Aksai Chin plateau. The ‘would-be’ borderline (p. 218) was in this area still considered ‘absolutely indefinite’, shown by a ‘yellow wash’ of colour which ‘fades away imperceptibly to the north’. The British were content with this ambiguity, but this vagueness in definition was not acceptable to the modern Indian nation-state which could ill-afford that level of ambiguity in representing the country’s geo-body. Details of momentous decisions taken by India post-independence to show this boundary as firm and definite, and not open to question, are now in the public domain. The Chinese knew even less of this expanse of territory, proceeding on the basis of steadily, and stealthily advancing occupation in the 1950s rather than historical evidence or principle, in effecting possession.

It is interesting how tools of connectivity, like roads (the Hindustan-Tibet Road was conceived as a free and unobstructed road to Central Asia and Tibet, for instance) in the border regions, far from linking peoples across borders have become defence and security-enhancers, enabling troop mobility first and foremost, keeping out the foreigner and the transgressor. The Aksai Chin highway built by China across this remote plateau within territory claimed by India is an instance of a communication artery that excludes rather than facilitates human contact, connoting a barrier rather than a passage. Ladakh’s intrinsic identity as that entrepot on the cross-roads of Inner Asia has been buried in the welter of geopolitics. This realization is harboured in a Ladakhi consciousness that does not want links with the Kashmir problem and is sensitive to the manner in which ‘Ladakh is treated’ (p. 239). Kushak Bakula whose eminence and stature made him a powerful spokesman for his people, wrote to Prime Minister Nehru in 1951 how if Ladakh could not merge automatically with India in the event of a plebiscite in Kashmir that saw the valley secede, ‘our people will seek political union with Tibet which in spite of our political connection with Jammu and Kashmir State for nearly the last 120 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’ (p. 240).

Gardner’s conclusion is that borderlines in the Himalaya remain ‘porous and overlapping’ (p. 240) with both India and China as ‘shadow states’ (Guyot-Réchard) vying for the approval of their peoples. Thomas Holdich, the imperial geographer, saw the Himalaya as ‘the finest natural combination of boundary and barrier’ but today these mountains are fractured spaces. The border is the frontline, the razor’s edge on which, to use George Curzon’s phrase, are suspended questions of war and peace between nations such as India and China—both states contending today to impose their own lines of control of these spaces. This ‘frontier complex’, and the questions it raises, all stemming from recent history, both colonial and modern, makes Gardner’s well-researched and in-depth study of the subject, a first of its kind in decades, deserving our serious attention, especially as tensions mount between India and China across this forbidding and desolate landscape.