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Special issue: The Himalayas from its edges: networks, identities, and place-making

Introduction. The Himalayas from its edges: networks, identities and place-making

Introduction. L’Himalaya depuis ses marges : réseaux, identités et fabrique des lieux
Dibyesh Anand, Swargajyoti Gohain, Nitasha Kaul et Sayantani Mukherjee

Résumés

Alors que les points de vue des États-nations souverains ont eu tendance à dominer la façon dont la région tibéto-himalayenne a été façonnée, vue et vécue au cours du siècle dernier, nous plaidons pour l’adoption de perspectives multidisciplinaires qui se concentrent sur les flux et les interactions plutôt que sur le cadre limité des échanges centrés sur l’État. Rassemblant des études empiriques provenant de différentes parties de l’Himalaya, ce numéro spécial met en lumière les réseaux transfrontaliers, les identités négociées et les politiques de l'espace directement et indirectement rendues possibles par les pratiques de l’État et impactant la vie des habitants de la région. Ce numéro offre une compréhension critique du rôle des facteurs culturels, matériels, politiques et économiques qui ont influencé les processus historiques et contemporains dans l’Himalaya. Dans cet article introductif, nous soulignons que l’Himalaya est un site producteur de contestations avant d’identifier certains des liens et des ruptures qui le caractérisent. Une manière utile de comprendre la région et ses populations est de mettre en avant les réseaux, les identités et la création de lieux qui marquent les réalités vécues par ses habitants.

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Special Issue:The Himalayas from its Edges: Networks, Identities and Place-Making (EBHR 62)

Special Issue:The Himalayas from its Edges: Networks,           Identities and Place-Making (EBHR 62)

Introduction

1The mountainous geographies of the Himalayas bring together the modern-day nation-states of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan as well as the Tibetan ethnocultural areas that traverse the borders of these states but are now seen as part of one or the other nation-state. In the twenty-first century, perspectives of sovereign nation-states have tended to dominate how the region is shaped and viewed, often defining, sometimes dictating, how the people, places, institutions and ecosystems of the region engage and can be engaged with. However, the adoption of multidisciplinary perspectives that focus on flows and interactions rather than the limited frames of state-centred exchanges enable a better understanding of the role of historical, cultural, political and economic networks and identities in place-making in the Himalayas (Craig 2021, Gohain 2020a, Harris 2013, Mukherjee 2024a forthcoming).

2What do we mean when we talk about the Himalayas? Today, the ranges comprising the ‘Indian’ Himalayas are further divided into the eastern, central and western Himalayan sections in academic and policy circles. The trans-Himalayas include the parallel northern ranges further extending into northern India, modern-day Tibet, Nepal and China. Research in the Himalayan region has long been inhibited by connectivity issues and geopolitical factors. Some areas have been more conducive than others to long-term research but, with improved access thanks to new roads and transport infrastructures as well as the gradual opening up of the border regions in the last decade, many researchers are now increasingly being drawn to the Himalayan region as a field of historical, political, anthropological and environmental inquiry (Berreman 1978).

3How should we conceptualise this vast landscape that is home to diverse communities, some closely interconnected, some not so much? As a peripheral and frontier space between nations, forever at the margins of dominant centres of historical power? As a strategic security challenge where regional and global powers compete (Kaul 2021a, 2022a) or as sites of ‘subalternising geopolitics’ (Kaul 2023)? As a unique regional environment with its own resilient specificities that undo the work of imperial ambitions and military border-making (Guha 2015, Dzüvichu and Baruah 2019, Mukherjee 2024b forthcoming)? As an entangled geography that makes political fragmentation irrelevant through its convergence of social, economic, cultural and religious networks (Saikia 1997, Huber 1998, Christian 2000, Li 2002, Yang 2004, Saikia 2004, Chatterjee 2013, Ramirez 2014, Gohain 2020a)?

Himalaya: a productive site of contestation

4Himalayan Studies today remain dominated by the security imperatives of nation-states whose survival depends on the preservation of hard borders. As a result, the region is often studied at best as a ‘buffer zone’ (Gohain 2020b), or a point of exchange between modern states, or at worst as remote and therefore ‘exceptional’, a discourse of strategic dismissal which severely limits the possibilities of analysis (McGranahan 2017). Furthermore, the mountain chain has been normalised in academic scholarship as a natural barrier between modern states. As a field of enquiry, the Himalayas have been conceptualised through three main approaches (Gohain 2024 forthcoming): the romantic Himalayas (Kaul 2018), a space romanticised through mystic, remote, orientalising tropes (Anand 2007); the frontier Himalayas, seen through national security, military metaphors and as a natural barrier; and the lived Himalayas, as a region that should be understood through grounded histories, oral narratives and by piecing together fragmented histories. Our collection foregrounds this last approach without denying the productive and restrictive roles played by the first two. We argue that if the Himalayas are studied as a reterritorialised spatial assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) that was deliberately restructured between the state and the market, we are able to uncover hidden geographies of social, political and cultural diversity and change in the South Asian highlands, successfully moving past the rhetoric and truth-claims of state-centred and state-sponsored narratives. The diversity revealed by these hidden geographies is also precisely the ambiguity that was weaponised by empires in the past and by modern nation-states today to justify the deployment of exceptional violent policies in frontier spaces.

5The ‘state’ remains a crucial presence in Himalayan Studies even though there are different approaches to the state as institution, state as effect, state as process and state as lived body in those regions seen as the borderlands. While political scientists often centralise the state as a tangible institution, many anthropologists shift the focus to everydayness and to the effects of the state on ordinary lives (Gupta 1995). Without seeking a consensus, we argue for the need not to forget the state even when challenging its stranglehold over political imagination. As Gellner reminds us, ‘ordinary people must have ideas about the state in order to interact with it, and any worthwhile ethnographic investigation must engage with both practices and ideas’ of state (Gellner 2013: 3). While it is tempting to see flows and networks as illustrative of ‘homeland as a place of interaction, meeting, struggle, exchange, belonging, and transition, sometimes despite vigorous attempts at state interdiction’ (Van Schendel 2013: 269), the spectre as well as the everyday presence of the state in various forms is never absent (Smith 2020).

6This is especially pertinent for border areas, where ‘uncertain sovereignty and apprehensive territoriality lead to sensitive borders’ (Van Schendel 2013: 169), a phenomenon that has marked the Tibeto‑Himalayan region significantly. Both the border dispute (Anand 2011) and the conflictual-competitive relation between China and India continue to play a conspicuous role (Aggarwal 2004, Guyot-Réchard 2017). While questions of security are doubtless a key constitutive element of what is taking place, any attempts to resolve the region’s unsustainable tensions must take into account how its environment, culture, language and security are interrelated. State-making and militarisation in the Himalayas have already yielded disastrous results for local peoples and for the global climate. The analysis of India–China‑Pakistan tensions that do not take these circumstances into account distorts its realities (David et al 2021: 29).

7While offering some insights into the Tibeto‑Himalayan region, we remain mindful of the homogenising and problematic moves of ‘Himalayan Studies’. What is studied? Where are lines drawn? Who studies? Whose knowledge is valorised? How does production of knowledge contribute to state-making and vice versa? While it is tempting to imagine a discrete and distinct subject matter for Himalayan Studies, as Des Chene reminds us,

The different polities that encompass the Himalayan region have always sat uncomfortably with the idea of Himalayan Studies and work that situates itself in this way seems frequently to try to analyze the cultural apart from these divergent political histories. One can imagine a different Himalayan Studies that took the political history of the region as its basis. (Des Chene 2007: 210)

8Even the moves to study, say, the northeastern India – southern Tibet region through ‘Indic’ and ‘Tibetan’ tropes is problematic in that it ignores cultures and experiences that resisted both.

9The Himalayas have never been under a single common rule, resulting in diverse local forms of sovereignty and territoriality which persist today. State elites have historically considered the mountains to be a problematic periphery in which local wars, ethnic confrontations and contraband trade flourish; where resources remain difficult to exploit and where state control is haphazard and expensive. As a result, the Himalayas, though considered strategically important, have also been marginalised geopolitically. While many parts of the Himalayas have resource and technologically intensive development infrastructure that is oriented to military needs and promotes a selective connectivity, for the outside world the region has otherwise been transformed into a political geography of silence and erasure. At the same time, any tendency to treat Himalayan and trans-Himalayas regions simply as sites of ‘recovery’, from which to excavate and ‘rescue’ historically marginalised voices and narratives, runs the risk of re-marginalising these perspectives, thereby cementing their so-called ‘peripherality’, a designation that has only served the interests of imperial and national powers (Mukherjee 2022).

10The diverse geographies that marked the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan landscape comprised an extensive pre-colonial map of economic, political, and cultural networks marked by the circulation of goods, people, ideas, discourse and practices. Prior to the 1800s, Himalayan and trans-Himalayan Tibetan states never conceptualised these regions or the relations and connections between them in terms of the ‘frontier’, as their archival records amply demonstrate. Rather, their intercourse was described as being conducted between independent kingdoms (see Bhuyan 1990 [1932]: 147–148, Saikia 1997: 173–218). Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their historical scope would come to be defined by the constant clashes between a loosely defined Tibetan ecclesiastical state whose sphere of influence was progressively limited and contained by British Indian and Chinese imperial power. Where multiform polities and societies once characterised these complex geographies, the result of their encounters with both British Indian and Qing states led to a significant reordering of these landscapes, ultimately limiting the definition and imagination of these regions to that of a cultural-ecological and geopolitical frontier area (Mukherjee 2022: 61).

11As these geographies then came to represent the limits or the periphery of imperial authority and influence, the idea of these imperial frontiers now signified ‘marginal’ spaces, located only at the edges of empires or imperial territories, undergirding in turn the centre-periphery model that is used to frame the discussion of these spaces in scholarship. These rich pre-colonial geographies were now discursively framed as the terra nullius that would passively anticipate the advent of imperial ambition and capital. The colonial archive came to acknowledge the distinctions between these regions as more or less savage and mysterious, while also directing attention towards creating connections between them through land routes, new market regions and communications projects. More specifically, pre-colonial networks and processes were ‘unearthed’ and appropriated by the colonial state to articulate the aims of capital and empire in the production of this new mapping (Bhutia and Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2019, Gardner 2021, Mukherjee 2022). Under the dual impact of capital and colonial empire-making through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these regions were gradually absorbed into the framework of frontiers and borderlands that linked the colonial territories possessed by imperial states (see Namgyal and Dolma 2021 [1907], Marshall 2005, Kreutzmann 2008, Zutshi 2010, Ludden 2011, Dzüvichu and Baruah 2019).

12This multidisciplinary issue brings together scholars from India and the Tibetan diaspora to discuss different parts of Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions in their historical and contemporary sense. The various papers in this collection focus on some of the historical and embedded networks – of trade, migration, kinship and mobilities of objects, texts, ideas, goods and capital – that connect the geographies, people and cultures of the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan landscapes even though politics and geopolitics might separate them. It is this persistent diversity of the interactions between its inhabitants and dwelling-places that sets the area apart from its surrounding regions, and that has historically undermined the imposition of strict imperial, national and academic borders. While the different papers in this issue adopt different methodological approaches, as a whole they combine methods and frameworks from the field of border studies with Himalayan Studies. Since the geographical Himalayas are divided by many international boundaries, tracing past and present connections and networks across border bifurcations assumes greater prominence. The historical papers included in this issue show how Himalayan borders evolved and took on their present shape. Furthermore, all the papers speak to how national borders influence wider processes of identity formation, citizenship and development in the Himalayas, even far away from the actual border location.

Connections and ruptures

13In this special issue, we contend that regions should not be viewed as fixed geographies characterised by prefigured themes. Instead, we analyse the Himalayas as an initial context for themes that generate mutable, fluid geographies. A ‘frontier’ is not simply a physical or topographical separator between political states or the site of conflict between their politics. On the contrary, these spaces are characterised by complex interactions and exchanges between various cultural, social and political communities. It is precisely this dynamic that makes frontier spaces fluid and ambiguous, thereby often negating legalised definitions of state boundaries. Frontier regions are perhaps best understood by foregrounding the historical processes that shape their geographies, through emphasis on language, culture or other attributes affixed to peoples or to space (Van Spengen 2000, Giersch 2010).

14The framing of the Himalayas as a ‘frontier’ region was closely linked to the very process of empire-making itself, as a new semantic entity that functioned as a barrier rather than as a connector. British colonial administrators in particular repeatedly framed the Himalayas as the natural and inviolate frontier of the South Asian subcontinent, and rejected ethnic or linguistic affinity as the basis for deciding frontiers (Caroe 1960). Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the production of ‘modern’ frontier and borderland spaces in Asia, such as the Himalayas, were shaped by complex processes and interactions located within the drives of imperial expansion and uneven practices of knowledge production about geographical spaces (Ortner 1989, Waller 1990, Mueggler 2011, Martin 2016, Mathur 2018, Lange 2020, Kaul 2021b, Gardner 2021, Mukherjee 2021). While modern colonial border-making preferred certainty over ambiguity in some cases, it also nurtured ambiguity in other contexts (Anand 2009) and accepted a ‘panoply of exceptions’ (Robb 1997). Exploration, wars, surveillance, mapping, control and treaty making (Kaul 2022c) have all played a role in how the region has been shaped through the colonial and postcolonial periods (Anand 2012).

15While being seen as ‘distant’, ‘at the edges’, ‘beyond the edges’ by mainlanders, people and places in the Himalayas were vibrant centres in their own right. Wouters and Heneise point out that ‘for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods, and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes’ (Wouters and Heneise 2022). The Himalayan and trans-Himalayan have also been analysed as a zone of retreat akin to or even part of ‘Zomia’ in highland Southeast Asia (Van Schendel 2002, Shneiderman 2010, Giersch 2010, Samuel 2015). The essence of a border is to separate the ‘self’ from the ‘other’ (Newman 2003: 14). By creating ‘otherness’, we create separate identities through the maintenance of the border. The location of the boundary may change through time, as some groups or territories expand and others decline, but they will always demarcate the parameters within which identities are conceived, perceived, perpetuated and reshaped (Newman 2003: 15). The acknowledgement of continuing interconnectedness and flows of ideas, networks and identities does not mean that there have not been conspicuous ruptures in the history of frontier spaces like the Himalayas.

16An important point to bear in mind is the enduring presence of the traditional Tibetan geographies in the region we are addressing. The exigencies of war propaganda and imperial frontier-making through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the spatial and territorial entities of the Himalayas and trans-Himalayan Tibetan cultural regions as ‘borderland’ areas between empires and now nations, erasing local histories, polities and communities in the process (Mukherjee 2024b forthcoming). Tibet did not disappear on its own, it was made to disappear. A few decades since 1951 we are speaking of Himalayan regions where pre-colonial Tibetan states are a spectral presence that may or may not be explicitly acknowledged depending on institutional and national politics of scholarship.

17The British installation and then the end of the princely state in Jammu and Kashmir transformed it into a site of proprietorial claims and militarised conflict between India and Pakistan, disrupting and breaking historical connections and flows (Kaul 2010). The unresolved India-China border dispute is another imperial inheritance, whereby heavy militarisation, open conflict and severe prohibitions on cross-border flows and movements since the 1950s have played both a restrictive as well as productive role in shaping the landscape. When flows are interrupted, they are not ended or wholly lost, but modified and reshaped. New paths, networks and identities are formed by new authorities as well to bypass and undermine those same authorities. For instance, the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the exile of more than a hundred thousand Tibetans primarily in India and Nepal was a major rupture in the Tibet and Himalayan region but led to the transformation and rejuvenation of old and even the creation of new Buddhist circuits in India (Gohain 2023).

Networks, identities and place-making

18Place is partially elaborated by means of the social but this does not legitimate the claim that place is merely a social construction (Malpas 1999). According to Tim Cresswell (1996), place is about two things – belonging and relation. One belongs to a particular place, and one’s place is clearly related to one’s relation to others. Jeff Malpas’s analysis extends this by arguing that places have a character and are always positioned in relation to other places, which allow a view of their character relative to other places. The idea of a place encompasses both the social activities of people and institutions, as well physical objects that constrain and are sometimes constrained by these social processes (Malpas 1999: 35). Geography and ideology intersect, according to Tim Cresswell. Space and place are used to structure a normative landscape – what is appropriate where, and who belongs where (Cresswell 1996: 9). The effect of place is not simply geographical but has a socio-cultural character which, in turn, is undergirded by power. Thus, colonial geographies of power and their postcolonial continuities mark normative landscapes that can be contested. The different papers in this collection all speak to place-making, in this sense, as both geographical, social, cultural and not limited by physical location but extending or reaching outwards to encompass, forge and claim new networks.

19We see place and place-making as both socially constituted and constitutive; in its social expression it does not exist as a neutral slate but is actively connected to collective identity. Place and identity – ethnic, national or transnational – go hand in hand in our understanding. Scholars who have critiqued identity for its implications of homogeneity and for silencing internal differences (Hall 1996) have also proposed alternative terms, such as ‘interpellation’ or ‘identification’ (Cooper 2005, Hall 1996). In our theoretical framework, we see place and identity as not being separate from each other, for places are embodied identifications.

20Networks are a third and important vector for complementing the triadic keywords of place-identity-network. After Bruno Latour (2005), the study of networks has become overwhelmingly associated with actor-network theory and science and technology studies, and as an analytic tool to understand the human, the non-human, and the technical entanglements. Insofar as the papers in this volume consider the imbrication of capital, tourism infrastructure, state and global power as different network ‘effects’ or ‘new kinds of connection that have come about as a result of technological advances which have enabled greater movement of goods, people and ideas along routes and trajectories’ (Knox et al 2006), they are working with networks. But we also look at how networked societies are not only a result of capital’s new configurations in an increasingly connected world, albeit carrying its own disconnections and dislocations, but also at how communities that are territorially dispersed, or removed from their national frameworks, can still forge new networks and inspire collaboration and comparison.

21In this conversation on networks, identities and place-making, our contributors do not take categories of identity or place for granted but examine multiple – and sometimes contested – ways in which these operate and are constituted. We defy the disciplinary boundaries of History, Political Science, Anthropology, Religious Studies and Political Economy, as we are driven not by disciplinary conformity but by a primary desire for the investigation of interconnected networks and processes in the broader Himalayan and trans-Himalayan region. We are conscious of bringing together regional and empirical content from the Indian Himalayas as well as the trans-Himalayan Tibetan regions. For various reasons, including academic specialism, access to the field, and methodological nationalism (Glick-Schiller and Wimmer 2002), the study of the region so far has been fractured and fragmented to the point where research on Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, the eastern Himalayas and the western Himalayas often do not speak to each other. As Gellner (2013: 5) reminds us in the context of northern South Asia, ‘methodological nationalism takes for granted national units that have in many cases existed only for a very short time, leading to considerable distortions of the historical record and great lacunae in what is studied’.

22Here, we analyse Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions historically and in the present, foregrounding the intersections and constitutive interactions between them and amongst them. The multidisciplinary nature of this special issue therefore brings perspectives from the ancient past to the present day, including works by historians of ancient India and the colonial period, and anthropologists and political scientists who work on the contemporary period. The analysis of different parts of the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan regions offered here emphasises the interconnectedness of histories and the present when it comes to networks, identities and place-making. It reminds us that the Tibeto‑Himalayan region is a living entity where the ethos of cultural and ecological preservation are important but ought not be a defining and restricting aspect. When moving beyond security and strategy, there is often a popular focus on fragility or beauty or both, and what is overlooked are the varied lived realities of vibrant cultures and communities.

The future of Himalayan Studies

23The papers that comprise this special issue come from a conference co-organised by Ashoka University and the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Democracy, held in January 2023 at Ashoka University in India. The Himalayas from its Edges: Mobilities, networks and geographies brought together researchers whose cutting-edge work on the region transcends the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that typically limit the scope and impact of such scholarship. Our commitment to advancing the academic (and frequently political) project of undoing the legacy of arbitrarily placed borders is offered as a provocation to the readers of this issue. By proposing to understand the Himalayas from its edges, we centre the transnational and connected nature of the mobilities, networks and geographies that make up the vast expanse of these mountains. Read as a whole, this special issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars for whom the Himalayas are much more than an academic fetish, foregrounding voices that are themselves frequently marginalised in an academic landscape dominated by the interests of the so-called Global North.

24Sanjukta Datta locates us in Magadha between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE, and by using epigraphic sources, explores the transregional interconnected networks that brought Buddhist scholars from Nepal, Tibet and China over the Himalayas to this ancient seat of learning to exchange ideas, expertise and knowledge. Historical networks such as the ones uncovered in this paper can be retrieved to counter the normative geographies of national borders in the present. Swati Chawla then moves us to Gangtok in the twentieth century to explore the cosmopolitan worlds of the Himalayan kingdoms, where Sikkimese, Bhutanese and Tibetan nobility were witness to and implicated in a new lexicon of place-making and border-building by the British colonial state in India. Such a focus on historical friendships and identifications across territorial boundaries indicates the subjective aspects of place. Following this, Tenzin Desal invites us to rethink conceptual understandings of indigeneity in Tibetan populations in the contemporary states of India and China, demonstrating the possibilities and limits of those frameworks. Tenzing Palmo complements this insight by offering a critical take on intellectual networks embedded in place among Tibetans in exile, where the scope of a questioning public sphere is limited by the view that democracy is a gift bestowed by the Dalai Lama. Kaustubh Deka further sharpens this lens by focusing on the lived realities of the people of the Arunachal Pradesh region, enquiring into the making of a complex and dynamic zone that creates new networks between nature and nationalities, challenging borders artificially imposed by modern nation-states.

25‘While “connected histories” that de-center the nation-state have offered a way to move beyond essentialisms in other historiographical contexts, this is not a clear-cut corrective in the case of the Himalaya where the region has sometimes been read as outside of history’ (Maran and Warner 2016: 33). Histories, polities, cultures, ideas and practices all remain central for understanding the Tibeto‑Himalayan region. The spatial transformation of the Himalayas illustrates clearly how frontiers and borderlands, rather than being liminal spaces between states and capital or complete worlds unto themselves, are integral to forming the very nature of ‘modern’ regions, realised as they are through the reconfiguration of different geographies across the world. ‘[I]t is vital that we create spaces and conversations for our knowledges to reflect the interlinked realities that are simultaneously political/social/economic/ecological/cultural’ (Kaul 2022b). While geopolitical contestations between contemporary nation-states have long limited our imagination of the Himalayas to their place in the practices and vocabulary of frontier management, a collection such as ours assertively reopens space for seeing these mountains in their multiple modes of being.

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Titre Special Issue:The Himalayas from its Edges: Networks, Identities and Place-Making (EBHR 62)
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Dibyesh Anand, Swargajyoti Gohain, Nitasha Kaul et Sayantani Mukherjee, « Introduction. The Himalayas from its edges: networks, identities and place-making »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 62 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 juillet 2024, consulté le 20 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/2248 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/124ev

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Auteurs

Dibyesh Anand

Professor Dibyesh Anand is the deputy vice-chancellor (Global Engagement and Employability) at the University of Westminster. Professor of international relations, he is the author of the monographs Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western imagination, Tibet: A victim of geopolitics, and Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear. He has spoken about and published extensively on varied topics including postcolonial politics and international relations, Tibet, the China‑India border dispute, Hindu nationalism, Islamophobia and colonial practices of postcolonial states. On Twitter @dibyeshanand.

Swargajyoti Gohain

Dr Swargajyoti Gohain is associate professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Emory University, United States of America, and bachelor’s and master’s degree in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her research interests include the study of borders and state, cultural politics, Tibetan Buddhist communities and Himalayan wildlife. Her first monograph Imagined Geographies in the IndoTibetan Borderlands published by Amsterdam University Press (2020) was awarded, by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, the James Fisher Book Prize honorary mention for the first book on the Himalayas. Her current book project is on modern Buddhist universities in the Indian Himalayas.

Nitasha Kaul

Professor Nitasha Kaul is a multidisciplinary academic, novelist, economist, poet and public intellectual. She holds a chair in Politics, International Relations and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies and is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), University of Westminster. She has published widely on themes relating to democracy, political economy, Hindutva/Indian politics, technology, identity, the rise of right-wing nationalism, feminist and postcolonial critiques, small states in geopolitics, regions of Bhutan, Kerala and Kashmir. Her interventions on politics, democracy, gender and human rights have appeared in major international radio, televisual, and print media. She is the recipient of multiple research grants and awards for her research and writing across genres and disciplines. For details of her work, see . On Twitter @NitashaKaul.

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Sayantani Mukherjee

Dr Sayantani Mukherjee is a historian of modern China and the trans-Himalayan Tibetan border worlds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Asia. She is assistant professor at Ashoka University in the Department of History and the Ashoka Centre for China Studies. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University in 2021 and is currently working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Between Two Worlds: British India, Qing China and the technologies of empire-making in Tibet in the nineteenth century. Drawing on archival research in multiple languages and sites across India, England, Taiwan and China, including Tibet, her project foregrounds the coercive socio-technological discourses employed by British India and Qing China in exploring, identifying and spatially constituting Tibet.

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