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

The old man by the waterfall: deep entanglements of culture, state-making and geopolitics in Arunachal Pradesh

Le vieil homme près de la chute d'eau. En Arunachal Pradesh, des interactions fortes entre culture, construction de l’État et géopolitique
Kaustubh Deka

Résumés

L’Arunachal Pradesh, un État du nord-est de l’Inde, connaît une phase d’expansion rapide de ses infrastructures, un phénomène intensifié par la situation géostratégique de l’État. Malgré l’entreprise coloniale de création de frontières et la sécurisation de l’espace qui en a résulté, la présence de la frontière himalayenne orientale a historiquement insufflé à la région de la constance et du dynamisme, sa « fluidité spatiale » persistant sous une forme ou une autre. Par ailleurs, bien que située dans un couloir himalayen, la région se trouve empêtrée dans les politiques conflictuelles dans lesquelles les États d'Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est sont enfermés. Basé sur des expériences ethnographiques dans deux lieux géopolitiquement sensibles et spatialement significatifs, Menchukha et Namsai, situés sur les pentes himalayennes orientales de l’Arunachal Pradesh, cet article examine les conditions paradoxales de « perméabilité sélective » (Popescu 2015 : 50) qui informent souvent les régimes frontaliers contemporains, où les facteurs favorisant la mobilité transfrontalière sont mis en balance avec les exigences du maintien de l’intégrité territoriale. Dans ce contexte, cet article se penche sur certains sites de pèlerinage et de tourisme religieux importants pour comprendre l’attention différentielle qu’ils reçoivent de l’État, révélant ainsi un assemblage complexe de dynamiques spatiales, de logiques culturelles et de rationalités géostratégiques qui opèrent dans des zones frontalières géopolitiquement incertaines.

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Along with a few more men from my busti (village), I trekked for many days through dense forests, guiding the retreating Indian military troops to the safety of the plains below, though I lost them at times. When we returned to our mountain busti, they [the Chinese troops] were already camping there, looking well-settled, even trying to make a water treatment plant or something at the mouth of the waterfall. – Lomtung Tago, an octogenarian, recalling his experience of the 1962 Sino-India conflict (Siko Dado falls, Shi Yomi district, Arunachal Pradesh, December 2019)

Introduction: the spectre of war and space-making in the eastern Himalayas

1I came across Lomtung Tago sitting by a fire at a small tea-stall outside Siko Dado Waterfall in Shi Yomi district, Arunachal Pradesh. The stall is situated on the road to Menchukha, the strategically important town inhabited predominantly by the Memba and Adi communities, close to the MacMahon Line that demarcates Indian and Chinese territory. The town also operates as an important base for the Indian military and has emerged as a popular tourist destination since the road network has improved in recent years. For those with keen eyes and ears, it is not difficult to come across elders along the upper ridges of eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh who have vivid memories of the 1962 Chinese incursion and who hold the unfortunate distinction of being the only people in post-Independence India to have lived, albeit briefly, under foreign occupation. This peculiar experience imparts as its legacy a sense of fragility that continues even today.

2But what was on Mr Tago’s mind on that cold winter afternoon as he sat by the fireplace near the waterfall (fig 1)? He was a teenager back in that tumultuous winter of 1962 when Chinese troops marched into his village and stationed themselves there for months. Mr Tago, along with other youngsters from his village, volunteered to act as scouts for the retreating Indian army, guiding them through unfamiliar terrain towards safer bases in the Assam plains. Two retired Indian military officials recount the episode in their book:

Menchuka was vacated on the night of 18/19 Nov and the Chinese occupied it by the morning of 19 Nov. The Independent Battalion was tasked to progress operation towards Tuting. The withdrawal from Menchuka by 2/8 GR proved disastrous. A small party of 35 led by the Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel DA Taylor who ventured out on a ‘hunters track’ to Tato, got lost. Many died of exhaustion including the Commanding Officer. The main party under Major Dar was ambushed on Menchuka–Tato track on 20 Nov. In the process of withdrawal, 2/8 GR suffered 42 casualties including three officers and 12 taken as prisoners of war (PoW). Out of a total force of 13 officers, 18 JCOs and 826 OR at Menchuka; eight officers, four JCOs and 150 OR were reported to have been be killed/missing or taken PoW. (Dwivedi et al 2014)

Fig 1: Lomtung Tago warms himself by the fire as he recalls his experiences in the Sino-Indian war of 1962.

Fig 1: Lomtung Tago warms himself by the fire as he recalls           his experiences in the Sino-Indian war of 1962.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Siko Dido falls, She Yomi, 2020.

3Since then, a lot of water has flown down the Siko Dido falls and Mr Tago has borne witness to it all. Arunachal Pradesh, a sparsely populated but culturally rich part of the eastern Himalayas tucked away between Assam, Tibet, Bhutan and Burma, has witnessed a surge in state-making in the last few decades. An intimate interaction between nature, nation and nationalities has been shaping the region, along with the expansion of interconnected infrastructures – be they military-led, tourism-based or focused on pilgrimage – which are bringing radical changes to this culturally and ecologically sensitive zone. In this context, Menchukha has been pulled into this unfolding phenomenon of infrastructural assemblages where its history as a militarised borderland interacts with the existing cultural logic of the place, mostly owing to its Buddhist spatialities. As I discuss in the subsequent sections of this paper, viewed together, the developments in Menchukha and its neighbouring counterpart, Namsai, show two different types of interactions between unfolding forms of cultural tourism and the military presence. When seen in combination with the infrastructural development that has started to define the region, this duality is further revealed to be the result of a militarised state in which the cultural sphere of religious tourism can take on different manifestations depending on the historical location and geopolitical contexts, often intertwined in such a way that these factors begin to reinforce each other.

4The communities who have been living in these spaces for a long time and who were later classified and counted as ‘tribes’ in the Indian political system, nevertheless continue to have their own imagination about local life-worlds. The discussions in the following sections of this article therefore relate to what Gohain describes as the unfolding of an ‘imagined Himalayan geography’, ‘new circuits of belonging – formed by networks rather than a circumscribed location’, where the Himalayas ‘indicate not simply a physical terrain, but an imagined space of belonging’ (2020: 17). This trans-Himalayan space, straddling the eastern Himalayas, is essentially a ‘place of relations’ (Saikia et al 2017) that owes its historical shape and contemporary dynamism to an abundance of movement, connections and flows (van Schendel et al 2022: 11).

5To understand what influences these flows and frictions in the ‘truly ancient passageway’ (ibid) of the eastern Himalayas, we have to evoke the phenomena of making the region into a resource frontier at a particular point in history where communities forge their lives ‘against the backdrop of a militarised extractive economy regime’ (Kikon 2019: 7). A long history of colonial interventions followed by postcolonial conflicts has shaped the very foundation of the region, setting it up as a resource frontier, as an empty or underpopulated wilderness which holds the promise of high rates of return on investment. The resource frontier is the inevitable product of ‘capitalist globalisation’, where ‘capital actively seeks out and establishes new resource peripheries, thereby reproducing uneven development and marginalisation’ (Barney 2009: 148). As van Schendel (2013) argues, these complex interactions and interventions call for an understanding of such transboundary spaces through an ‘anthropology of frayed edges’ rather than with a definite ‘geography of lines’. To understand the (continued) production of these ‘frayed edges’, we need to engage with the (still unfolding) history of resource appropriation in these transboundary frontier spaces. The nineteenth-century discovery of oil, tea and coal in the eastern Himalayan foothills had a profound and enduring impact on life in the region. With these discoveries, the region turned into one of the most important eastern frontier outposts of the British Colonial Empire in India. Since the locals were seen as ‘lazy natives’ and the hill groups as ‘wild tribes’, indentured labourers from outside the region served as the foot soldiers for improving the empire’s garden estates (Sharma 2011: 87). Resource extraction not only altered social relations and reconfigured the ‘inner spatiality’ of the region, for example by accentuating binaries such as hills and plains, but also shaped the spatial boundaries of the region as a frontier.

6Historian Sugata Bose’s (2006: 56) observation of the case of frontiers elsewhere is relevant to the discussion on Northeast India: most colonial frontiers were ‘historically no frontier at all’ but the ‘heart’ of a continuum. Envisioned as liminal zones, as ‘an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet – not yet mapped, “not yet” regulated’ (Tsing 2003: 5100), the making of resource frontiers thus results in disruptions of various kinds. Van Schendel observes that ‘the new spatial frame of Northeast India sets limits on our enquiries into history, both pre- and post-Partition’ (2018: 275). In a similar vein, Harris talks about the emergent boundaries of the unit called Northeast India which was detached from much older circuits of trans-Himalayan trade, kinship and pilgrimage, curbing the existence of a longstanding ‘web of extensive trade and pilgrimage routes [that] have cut across Himalayan region’ and once defined it (2013: 7). The region is called ‘India’s last remaining resource-frontier’ (Guha 2006: 232) and analysing it as such remains relevant to understanding disruptions and spatial (re)configurations, as these reflect the social and environmental legacies of resource appropriation, ‘the way the region was included in the capitalist world market as a supplier of raw materials – that still structures contemporary Northeast Indian societies’ (Karlsson 2022: 283). The sociocultural dynamics in the mountainous regions of Northeast India, the flows and frictions of lives therein, can therefore be best understood as an outcome of a dynamic interaction between two seemingly oppositional tendencies. On one hand, there has been a history of a certain kind of ‘anarchism’, hill people in these regions being ‘runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys (Scott 2009: ix). Thus, the region constitutes an ‘otherness’, a common predicament faced by communities living in ‘Zomia’ (van Schendel 2002) – a historically largely non-state space, including highland Northeast India, now located on the margins of neighbouring nation-states, a vast upland space that transcends political and academic boundaries (Wouters 2022). On the other hand, there is an unleashing of aspirations, anticipations and anxieties as the region is drawn into the dynamics of a resource frontier. It has been observed that the making of resource frontiers is often complemented by other measures of spatial reconfigurations such as ‘corridorisation’ – that is, the emergence of corridors that implies spatial intensity as well as anticipatory or accelerated temporality (Murton et al 2020). In the topographically channelled Himalayan region, most of the time these newly imagined corridors track older pathways of trade and exchange (Saxer 2016). However, as the insights from the ethnographic engagements in the ensuing sections of this article suggest, the nature and extent of this reimagination of spaces or reconfiguration of spatiality varies significantly depending on the assemblage of geopolitics and culture.These prospects also denote ways in which geopolitics displace traditional knowledge systems and disrupt animist cosmologies.

7The envisioning of Northeast India as a zone of convergence has grown stronger in recent years with the coining of concepts such as ‘multiple state space’ by Sara Shneiderman (2010), ‘borderworld’ by Mandy Sadan (2013), and ‘multistate margin’ and ‘perpendicular geospatially’ by Dan Smyer Yü (2017, 2021), to name a few. The region as a geographical and historical entity has begun to attract attention as a productive site for research since its dynamic geographies are calling attention to ‘emergent spatial configuration between the national and the global’ (van Schendel 2002, Karlsson 2018). Focus is shifting to the way people in the region continue to find means of forming passages back into their collective cultural memories despite securitisation and spatial disruptions, moving through an assemblage of nostalgia and aspiration. These mobilisations take resurgent, aspirational or stagnant forms depending on the nature of their assemblages, giving these border spaces an ‘intersubjective dimension’ which has shifting and provisional boundaries (Gohain 2020: 17). Against the predominant perception of remoteness, the circulation of mobility and the persistence of connectivity are garnering more attention from researchers. Kikon calls for the need to combat taken-for-granted categorisations such as remoteness, unruliness, backwardness and underdevelopment and to look at ‘Northeast India as an important location through which we can understand new forms of heterogeneity, citizenship, indigeneity, legitimacy and gender relations in contemporary India’ (2019: 25). In the eastern Himalayas of Northeast India, places that once sat prominently on the highways of Himalayan caravans became frontiers for empires and were subsequently turned into militarised borderlands. However, as the discussions in the following sections show, the lost connections at times remain dormant, waiting to be revived. Sometimes ways are found to circumvent the ‘closed’ boundaries by activating various sorts of networks.

Being part of an exceptional region: India’s Northeast and its many life-worlds

8The territory that is known today as Arunachal Pradesh, a state in the Union of India, is

largely mountainous, straddling a great stretch of the southern slopes of the Eastern Himalayas. On its east, it shares its frontier with the central Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. The entire northern portion runs parallel to the Tibetan Plateau until it reaches the tri-junction where Tibet, China and Myanmar meet. It takes a syntaxial bend southward along the Irrawaddy–Salween divide, following ‘knuckles’ of the Pat until the borders of the present Tuensang district of Nagaland. Its skirts the Brahmaputra valley on its south as it moves eastwards. (Hilaly 2015: 289)

9The present-day political unit of Arunachal Pradesh is home to distinct ethnic groups which existed historically at the margins of various other established states at various points, namely the Tibetan, Ahom and various Burmese kingdoms, and lastly the British Empire.

10Subsequently, the territory that was named Arunachal Pradesh, designated as the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA) until 1972, became a part of the geopolitical region collectively known as India’s Northeast, a positionality that ‘both controls our spatial imagination and conveys a specific location, identity and meaning’ (ibid: 291). Containing a little less than 4% of the country’s total population and approximately 8% of its total land area, the eight north-eastern states of India, collectively referred to as India’s Northeast, assume significance due to their geopolitical location (at the trijunction of South, East and Southeast Asia), ecological resources (a rich biodiversity zone with abundant water, mineral and forest resources) and cultural diversity (hosting eclectic ethnic minority identities resulting in competing territorial nationalisms). Northeast India is in many ways ‘an umbrella connotation, which tends to wipe off its immense diversity of history, culture and politics’ (Misra 2014: 8). Yet the term persists and assumes increasing significance as a normative and instrumental framework for both policymaking and social movements.

11The history of India’s Northeast, as a region and a borderland, ‘the residual fallout of colonial politics and administration’ (Phanjoubam 2009: 158) and ‘a freak child of partition’ (van Schendel 2018: 273) continues to shape the public discourse in the region in many ways. ‘Historically a suspect, contemporarily an experiment, and potentially an investment’ (Deka 2020: 520), the construct of ‘Northeast India’ within the official state discourse posits the region as a ‘zone of exception’ – a geopolitical and geo-cultural unit that justifies and even requires ‘adjustments’ to India’s macro-liberal democratic ethos (Baruah 2005, Baruah 2020, Vandenhelsken et al 2017, Oinam et al 2018). As a prelude to this, van Schendel and Cederlöf (2022) talk about a certain production of ignorance about the region, in which ill-informed colonial accounts of the inhabitants of the trans-Himalayan corridors as mysterious, outlandish and violent began to circulate. ‘Echoes of these ideas still shape contemporary notions of the region, and there is a need to decolonise such perceptions’, they argue (ibid: 21). As in other parts of the world, in the enterprise of colonialism, the gun, the compass and the Bible moved together into Northeast India (Thomas 2017). Territories were mapped, people were subjugated and cultures were labelled. At the root of the ensuing political violence was an epistemic violence. Beyond objectifying the ‘geo-body’ of the region, a cognitive dissonance was created with its image as a land of witchcraft and magic, animism and wild tribes (Deka 2020). For a long time ‘the lens of insulation and remoteness’ thus remained dominant tropes through which the region has been seen: ‘as a land of marginalized minorities, an economic backwater, the political and cultural fringe of India, a place where India’s territorial sovereignty is defended, where raw materials are extracted to fuel its economic growth, and where ethnographic and other empirical data is mined to debate theories from elsewhere’ (Wouters et al 2023: 3). This justified the overwhelming presence of a ‘military metaphysics or a military definition of reality that dominates the official narratives of the region’ (Baruah 2020: 129). A contentious intersection between national security from above and ethnonationalism from below thus shape the discourse of change in the region, a phenomenon that can be understood in the context of ‘a society coming to terms with historical social change’ (Baruah 2009: 952). As some would argue, the dominance of this security-centric doctrine also perpetuates an ‘infrastructure of injustice’ (Ziipao 2020), a deliberate negation of hill communities in dominant discourses of development, reflecting a particular ideology of development and governmentality (Arora et al 2020). A later section of the paper discusses this point further.

12In discussing the eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh, this article analyses two regions with unique and sometimes even contrasting cultures, Menchukha (Shi Yomi District) and Namsai (Namsai District) to further illustrate these aspects (fig 2). For the purposes of this article, I find what Martin Saxer (2016) calls a methodology of ‘co-itinerant ethnography’ relevant and appropriate. This term ‘emphasises the analytical value of time spent on the road and the encounters it fosters’ (Saxer 2016: 115). An extension of the multi-sited practice of ethnographic research, the co-itinerant ethnographic approach tries to move beyond a focus on space, place or landscape to an analysis of movement, mobility and flow. Thus, in the following sections, information from the official archive is placed alongside and measured against informative conversations with locals, tales shared by the fireplace or vignettes heard during a walk. The idea is to make sense of these spaces as a ‘socio-spatial constellation that aggregates heterogenous elements’ (ibid).

Fig 2: Political map of ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ (She Yomi district and Namsai district highlighted by the author)

Fig 2: Political map of ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ (She Yomi district           and Namsai district highlighted by the author)

Source: Maps of India, https://www.mapsofindia.com/​maps/​arunachalpradesh/​

‘The land of medicinal snow water’: fragmentations, appropriations and resilience in Menchukha

  • 1 Interview by the author at Menchukha, January, 2021. The Memba are a Tibeto-Burman Buddhis (...)

13‘One fine day, perhaps the borders as they exist now will not be there anymore. I will be able to go and meet my loved ones left behind on the “other side” once more’, chuckled Lhakpa Sona, the oldest living Memba in Menchukha at that time.1 He is often found dressed in fine traditional clothing, sometimes adorned with ornaments. He cannot speak much Hindi or English, unlike the later generations of Membas. His life as well as his memories are split by the McMahon line which has driven a wedge into his very life-world. Grandpa Sona passed away recently in August 2023 at the age of 96. His history is a testament to how empires disrupt the flow of life. His eyes would gleam while narrating stories of his many visits to Lhasa on foot; he would cross over the Lola pass, carrying business loads and meeting friends and family. He was always ‘home’; it was the borders that came to him (fig 3). With him, a rich repository is laid to rest. This repository, however, needs to placed also in the context of the colonising endeavour of the Tibetan state, as different accounts show the ways ‘Tibetan state authorities, high-ranking Buddhist dignitaries, and local Tibetan rulers were engaged in the colonisation process, making Pachakshiri the estate of a Lhasa aristocratic family [that] was administered through the authorities of Sgar chags rdzong’ (Grothmann 2020).

Fig 3: Lhakpa Sona recalls his caravan trading days along the Himalayan corridors, and through his memories he continues to transcend spatial fixities.

Fig 3: Lhakpa Sona recalls his caravan trading days along the           Himalayan corridors, and through his memories he continues to           transcend spatial fixities.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

  • 2 Interviews across various parts of Menchukha, such as Dechenthang village, Dorjeeling vill (...)

14Most Memba houses continue to use artefacts and everyday items such as wooden kitchenware, shawls, pots and wares used for religious rituals etc, which they procured from the ‘other side’ (fig 4). They are their cultural heirlooms and their significance has been confirmed by various elders of the community.2 One can also discern a sense of fondness and nostalgia that the Membas attribute to these items. Through the retelling of memories and oral narratives of trade, pilgrimage and kinship, regions like Menchukha continue to be a part of a Himalayan ‘transnational circuit’ (Gohain 2020: 17). The story of the Membas is otherwise one of forced ruptures, given the fact that Menchukha lies close to the much-contested McMahon Line, the effective boundary between India and China, which causes the state to be hyper-present, turning the region into one of the most militarised borderlands in the country.

Fig 4: The interior of a Memba home, located in Dechenthang village, Menchukha. Memba houses are often filled with various cultural heirlooms that serve as a connection with a disappearing past.

Fig 4: The interior of a Memba home, located in Dechenthang           village, Menchukha. Memba houses are often filled with various           cultural heirlooms that serve as a connection with a disappearing           past.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

  • 3 Interview with Mr Gebu Sona, Menchukha, January 2021.

15The biggest structure that dominates the landscape of the small mountain town is the imposing Advanced Landing Ground maintained by the Indian Air Force, a sizeable airstrip surrounded by high concrete walls decorated with military colours. Menchukha provides plenty of insights into the complex influence of a modern penetrative state on people’s shared social memory – memory which is a repository of collective history. As an instance of this, we might discuss the case of a particular stone formation by the river on the way to Dorjeeling village that the Membas consider to be a sacred relic and which, they believe, depicts the entire topographical design of the Memba dwelling-place , spanning across the man-made international border. Called ‘Shinjong Saptra’, this map-stone of Pachakshiri (the old name for Menchukha) is believed to have been visualised by Yabme Pawo Dorje after a long meditation at Pemajeling (Grothmann 2012) (fig 5). Such accounts of map-stones being divined by religious masters not only refer to a belief in the power of Buddhist masters in defining the boundaries of the Beyül – the sacred hidden lands but also alludes to a cultural notion of fluid spatiality. These spatial dynamics intimately tied to cultural and religious beliefs have intersected with state-led spatiality in more recent years. Pilots of the Indian Air Force are said to have confirmed the accuracy of the map-stone with an aerial map of the region. This was told to me in a matter-of-fact way with much pride and satisfaction by almost everyone I spoke to about it as a validation of their belief whenever the topic of the map-stone was raised.3 Intersections of varying notions of space do not always fit so well however.

Fig 5: The ‘Shinjong Saptra’ map-stone believed to be designed by Buddhist masters at Menchukha.

Fig 5: The ‘Shinjong Saptra’ map-stone believed to be designed           by Buddhist masters at Menchukha.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

  • 4 ‘Arunachal Pradesh: Gurudwara in Mechuka converted into Buddhist shrine, alleges SGPC.’ NE (...)

16The example of the map-stone contrasts with another sacred spot, a waterfall with a cave beside it, known as Neh-Pema Shelphu, which the Membas consider holy, believing it to be a spot where the great Buddhist master Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) meditated (fig 6). Once the region became a zone for the movement of military troops, the spot was ‘identified’ by a certain military colonel as one where the founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak meditated on his way to Tibet (Grewal 2021). A plaque mentioning this has been installed since then and tourists crowd around it to take photos. A gurdwara (or gurudwara, the Sikh place of worship and assembly) subsequently called ‘Gurdwara Menchuka Sahib’ has also been built. It was only after some local complaints that the structure was moved across the road. However, in recent times, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) (which translates as ‘Supreme Gurdwara Management Committee’), the Sikh religious authority responsible for managing Sikh places of worship, has complained that the gurdwara has been converted into a Buddhist shrine.4 The overwhelming presence of the military and its support for the gurdwara, the fact that the gurdwara is maintained by the 5 Para Battalion, the fact that an appeal has been made for soldiers to keep a guard there permanently for protection of the Gurudwara’ (Grewal 2021) and the fact that the gurdwara is a tourist attraction (promoted as a must-see place when in Menchuka by various tour operators) that has become one of the mainstays of local income have all served to contain any possible local resentment towards this issue.

Fig 6: Neh-Pema Shelphu, the waterfall and cave held sacred by the Membas because Buddhist Guru Padmasambhava, also known as Rimpoche, is supposed to have meditated there.

Fig 6: Neh-Pema Shelphu, the waterfall and cave held sacred by           the Membas because Buddhist Guru Padmasambhava, also known as           Rimpoche, is supposed to have meditated there.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

17Then there is also the case of yet another must-visit tourist destination – ‘the Hanuman face point’ – that has grown popular in recent times with the surge in tourism in the region. This particular rock formation on a mountain overlooking the highway to the McMahon Line, on the outskirts of Menchukha on the way to Yarlung, is supposed to depict the face of Lord Hanuman – a revered Hindu deity. However, elders from the area call it a recent development, with no such local or traditional interpretations of the rock face existing before then (Menchukha, January 2021). A Hanuman Temple has nevertheless been built on the highway overlooking the rock formation, as well as a few tea-stall shacks to cater for the tourists who often stop there to take photographs. These developments underscore the question raised in the introduction to this article concerning the extent to which the undercurrents of geopolitics and state-making can displace traditional knowledge systems and disrupt animist cosmologies. In light of this, Gohain and Grothmann’s (2015) study is relevant; they discuss how the culturally Tibetan Buddhist regions in Arunachal Pradesh have been the subject of a protracted Sino-Indian border dispute for more than half a century now, with rampant practices of replacing local place names to map these areas as Indian territory, while marking them as discontinuous with cross-border circuits. This point is further illustrated by Gohain in another context: the Monyul region of Arunachal Pradesh, where she quotes a local respondent who says ‘wherever the army people have moved, they altered the place-names’ (2020: 153).

18One needs to keep in mind, however, that the effects of the state are not a totalising project and defiance emerges in surprising ways (Gohain et al 2015, van Schendel et al 2022). The small gonpas (monasteries) and prayer centres in the sleepy town organise chanting sessions and ritualistic events where Membas, many of them engaged as petty traders or government employees in other towns, participate in the trance with a sense of devotion. To someone not from the place, it feels like going into a lost world or to a world fast disappearing, hanging by loose threads of prayer. It makes one reflect on the ‘need to pay attention to the structures of feeling that bind space, time, and memory in the production of location’ that Akhil Gupta (1992: 76) talked about in the context of transnational identities and the reinscription of space in late capitalism. One could sense a certain kind of precarity and preservation around the prayer meetings and other Buddhist programmes at Menchukha that can be better explained if put in the context of the precarious existence of the oldest gonpa of the region.

19The Samten Yongcha Gonpa of Menchukha is said to be one of the oldest gonpas belonging to the Mahayana sect in the whole of the eastern Himalayan region (fig 7). The monastery, said to be more than four hundred years old, is in a visibly derelict condition compared to some of the better-known ones such as the gonpa at Tawang and even those dating to a later period (and of different sects), such as those of the Namsai region which we discuss in detail later. The road to the gonpa is barely motorable and only in good weather. The many precious materials, scrolls etc in the gonpa are in the need of urgent preservation. Evidently, the place lacks the support and attention from the relevant authorities. The rise of the gurdwara, which we discussed earlier, and the decay of the gonpa present a telling picture of the place.

20The question here is not about the lack of adequate infrastructure of religious tourism at Menchukha alone, but that of place-making and cultural appropriation in a militarised borderland. Drawing comparisons with other parts of the state which experience a different religious tourism will help us to better engage with this question.

Fig 7: The Samten Yongcha Gonpa of Menchukha, said to be one of the oldest gonpas belonging to the Mahayana sect in the entire eastern Himalayan region.

Fig 7: The Samten Yongcha Gonpa of Menchukha, said to be one           of the oldest gonpas belonging to the Mahayana sect in the entire           eastern Himalayan region.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

Pagodas at the edge of the nation: envisioning a ‘Pali cosmopolis’

21‘Take these to your queen and tell her these are the weapons we fight with. You cannot enter Thibet, it is against the order of the Chinese Government. Go back, or we will kill you’, a Mishimi chief told Thomas Thornvill Cooper after presenting him a dao (native sword) and spear. Cooper was the first Englishman to extensively tour the Mishmi Hills, after camping in the Tai-Khampti (Khamti) village of Chongkham (Chowkham) to explore a trade route from India to China through Tibet and via the Mishimi region (present Lohit district of Arunachal Pradesh) (Cottam 1876). The tragic rebellion of the Mishimi chiefs did not hold in the long run, and the area effectively came under British imperial control, an exploit accomplished through many punitive British expeditions. However, the encounter between Cooper and the chief and the latter’s defiant stance reflect the dynamics that were to unfold in the region in the years to come. Near Chongkham, the adjoining town of Namsai, the capital of Namsai District, is primarily inhabited by Khamti people who belong to the Tai group and are followers of Theravada (Hinayana) Buddhism. Places like Namsai, along with local historical villages such as Chongkham, need to be understood through the geographic lens of a Himalayan corridor because these places were not only important points in trans-Himalayan trade but also in the expeditions led by the British Empire. The region continues to emerge in postcolonial times as a relatively prosperous area within Arunachal Pradesh and its reported growth presents an opportunity to look into the assemblage of resource extraction, militarisation, local aspirations and identity formation. It also illustrates the important interplay between forces of culture and geopolitics.

  • 5 Field interview with various community members, Namsai, April 2021.

22Unlike the difficulties faced by Menchukha in trying to maintain its old gonpas, as described in the previous section, Namsai has built substantial tourism around its pagodas. The centres of Theravada Buddhism have been renovated with generous donations both from the government and from private sources from Japan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and other Theravada Buddhist countries. Kognum Khu, known popularly as the Golden Pagoda (fig 8), has grown into a prominent tourist attraction over the years and is an illustration of such collaborations. Elsewhere in the town, the construction of a stone statue of the Buddha, supposed to be the largest Buddha statue made of this material in the whole of South and Southeast Asia, is underway at the behest of a prominent Khamti clan supported by funds from all across the world (fig 9).5 This successful mobilisation of resources and the effective support system for the increase in religious tourism in Namsai needs to be understood in the context of a complex assemblage of spatial dynamics, cultural logics and geostrategic rationales that operate in these geopolitically charged borderlands. This point will be further discussed in a later section.

Fig 8: The Kognum Khu or Golden Pagoda in Namsai has emerged as a popular tourist destination.

Fig 8: The Kognum Khu or           Golden Pagoda in Namsai has emerged as a popular tourist           destination.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Namsai, 2021.

Fig 9: The stone statue of the Buddha, currently under construction and touted to become the largest stone Buddha statue in the whole of South and Southeast Asia.

Fig 9: The stone statue of the Buddha, currently under           construction and touted to become the largest stone Buddha statue in           the whole of South and Southeast Asia.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Namsai, 2021.

23Here a counter argument can be made whereby the contrasting experiences of Namsai and Menchukha allude to the lingering effects of a civilisational thesis that was once powerfully advocated by scholars like Sheldon Pollock to describe a phenomenon of ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, an enormous geographic sweep of the Indic discourse that led to the ‘Indianisation/Hinduisation’ of Southeast Asia (Pollock 2006). For a more relevant ethnographic engagement with the region, Bhattacharya (2023) argues for the use of the lens of ‘Pali cosmopolis’ developed by Tilman Frasch (2017) which better describes the dynamic forms of interaction between the Indic and Southeast Asian cultures and ideas.

  • 6 Field interview with members of the Pali school, Chongkham, December 2021.

24To illustrate this ‘Pali cosmopolis’, we can refer to the case of the Pali school in Chongkham (fig 10), one of the few residential Pali schools in the region for monks to study the ancient language. There are purported instances of young monks from the other side of the border seamlessly fitting in and attending the school.6 Fluidity is normalised in such spaces. The ‘Pali cosmopolis’, or the long arm of Indic discourse, seems to have endured modern disruptions. Such ethnographic material continues to question hard boundaries by showing that there are multiple subtle and ongoing Himalayan interrelations that disrupt dominant nation-state-driven narratives of borders and difference, even against the backdrop of militarisation and nuclear neighbouring states. To what extent does the presence or absence of an Indic imagination continue to influence the geopolitical presence of a place? To meaningfully understand the presence of fluidity in some places and the lack of it in others, we will have to explore the context of the unfolding discourse on infrastructure in the region.

Fig 10: The Pali school in Chongkham represents the way cultural links survive beyond spatial rigidities.

Fig 10: The Pali school in Chongkham represents the way           cultural links survive beyond spatial rigidities.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Chongkham, 2021.

A region of contentions concrete: Arunachal Pradesh as an infrastructural hot spot

25Northeast India is littered with concrete. From winding flyovers to towering churches on village hillsides to surveillance towers housing paramilitary forces, concrete is integral to the region’s urban and rural landscapes and everything in between. What does all this concrete tell us? What stories does it reveal? What questions about politics, power, development and culture can concrete raise (McDuie-Ra 2018)?

26From a policymaking perspective, the Northeast Indian region has been construed in terms of a complex geography of difference where it is projected as being trapped and languishing in an infrastructural void. This void marks the general perception of the region as remote, isolated and less developed. The ‘chicken neck’ corridor, the 22-kilometre-wide land corridor that is seen to connect Northeast India with the rest of the country, is often considered ‘a congested space, the techno-formal domain of security and modern logistics’ (Townsend 2018), a tenuous connection needing surveillance, control and more infrastructure investment. In this understanding, infrastructure is both a practice and a discourse manifesting tangible material forms as well as intangible forms in terms of networks and institutions.

27In the Northeast, besides the presence of international and state boundaries, there is also the presence of

multiple, less tangible but nevertheless real boundaries that crisscross the region – fiscal, legal, liquor and emotional borders among them. Such borders, which do not usually appear on maps, are also underpinned by a similar ‘border-logic’ of dividing and relating territories and peoples. (Tunyi et al 2016: 1)

28How do the phenomena of infrastructure development engage with these regional complexities? Here one needs to radically expand the idea of infrastructure and situate it in the concrete context of the eastern Himalayas or South and Southeast Asia more broadly. The paramount importance of the context of a militarised frontier is seen to create a sharp binary divide in the region between what Ziipao describes as ‘civilian infrastructure that remains underdeveloped, un-modern and military infrastructure that gallops ahead as developed and modern, thereby creating a condition of “infrastructure of injustice”’ where the indigenous people of the region are placed in a disadvantageous position, even being dispossessed of their resources (2020: 41).

29The state of Arunachal Pradesh is undergoing a phase of intensified infrastructural expansion, as a few new significant policies have been drawn up and approved by the central government. According to reports, there was a 65% increase in the construction of national and state highways between the periods 2015–16 and 2022–23 in the state. From 30,692 kilometres in 2015–16, road construction covered up to 50,555 kilometres in 2022–23, of which 2,506 kilometres are border roads (Tripathi 2023). These include the Union’s Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways’ (MoRTH) permission for the 1,500-kilometre Frontier Highway that would connect all the border areas of the state from East to West at an estimated cost of ₹44,000 crore. Another significant road expansion plan, the ambitious Trans-Arunachal Highway scheme, is nearing completion. Currently under construction, it includes an existing 1,811-kilometre route comprising NH-13 (1,559 kilometres) and parts of NH-15 (80 kilometres), NH-215 (30 kilometres) and SH-25, and consists of a two-lane highway covering more than 2,407 kilometres and passing through 16 districts in Arunachal Pradesh. It runs from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Tawang in the northwest to Kanubari in the southeast at the tri-junction of Assam–Nagaland–Arunachal Pradesh and interconnects at least 16 districts of Arunachal Pradesh. Another strategically important frontier highway project has been proposed, starting from Bomdila in West Kameng and ending at Vijayanagar in Changlang, and covering 1,748 kilometres (Sharma 2023).

  • 7 ‘Arunachal developing infrastructure along international borders: deputy CM’. The Hindu, 9 (...)

30Another programme called the Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP) with a financial allocation of ₹4,800 crore has also been launched. According to government claims, the scheme aims at the comprehensive development of villages in border areas to improve people’s quality of life, which would help encourage them to stay in their native locations in border areas, thus reversing migration. The VVP will provide funds for the development of essential infrastructures and the creation of livelihood opportunities in 19 districts and 46 border blocks in four states and one Union Territory along the country’s border. Besides these, the Arunachal Pradesh government has initiated several infrastructure development programmes in 65 model villages in areas bordering China, Bhutan and Myanmar under the Border Area Development Programme (BADP), which the Deputy Chief Minister of State recently announced to the assembly.7

31Many of these initiatives have been placed under the rubric of the major policy initiative by the Indian government called the Act East Policy, which proposes to develop the infrastructures in the region by building roads and highways, expanding air connectivity, extending railway networks, opening trade routes and creating infrastructural conditions for border trade. These have put the Northeast region on a fast track to expand its infrastructures. Indeed, most of the Ministry of Urban Development flagship schemes have been focusing on the region. Nine cities across the Northeast region have been declared Smart Cities – two of them, Pasighat and Itanagar, are in Arunachal Pradesh. Funding amounting to ₹14,124 crore for 464 projects has been earmarked in the first phase for part of the Smart City Mission in the north-eastern region. In essence, policy thrusts like this mean the construction of many bridges, highways, railroads and airports. Whereas many of these developments can be understood through the lens of ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1990) (to refer to the way the acceleration of economic activities leads to the destruction of spatial barriers and distances), given the way the expansion of infrastructures unleashes a flow of resources, it can also be seen as having triggered a specific form of desire: ‘a desire specifically of communities to be recognised by the state as ethnically and culturally unique, and, relatedly, a desire for a privileged state-community political sociality’ (Wouters 2022: 32). What Gonzaga discusses regarding how ‘infrastructure has become one of the primary mechanisms for governments, businesses, citizens and migrants to negotiate flows, interchanges and transplantations of images, knowledge, technologies and money’ (2020: 60) in the larger Southeast Asian context is relevant here. In such scenarios, and especially in the case of border spaces, one can observe the dynamic interplay of the triangular interactions of state, regional elite and local people (Baud et al 1997).

32What does this high level of infrastructural expansion do to a region which is mired in contradictions of conflict and transition? The critical task here is to assess the foundational doctrine on which the rationale of such ‘developmental interventions’ are premised. Under present circumstances, if one travels to remote parts of Arunachal Pradesh where roads are just reaching or being improvised, one is very likely to see a few land-moving vehicles, known in popular parlance as JCB (the name of a particular company), in action. JCBs have become the true Himalayan constant in that sense, and owning a few of them is a matter of social status (fig 11). Infrastructure in this light not only imposes spatial limitations but also creates and consolidates boundaries and borders. In other words, social identities become induced performances, conditioned by the flow and tenor of infrastructural designs. Infrastructure is both a practice and a discourse manifesting tangible material forms, as well as intangible forms in terms of networks and institutions. Sharma et al goes so far as to say that

infrastructure more than the border shapes the ways in which territoriality is performed and enacted by state and non-state actors. While political boundaries (between states, armed groups and sub-state entities) have traditionally shaped b/ordering practices, in recent years the management of both territory and flows has been sculpted by and for particular infrastructure projects. (Sharma 2022: 16-17)

Fig 11: A JCB near the frontier areas in Menchukha. The earth-moving vehicles, commonly called JCBs, seem to be the Himalayan constant, as one finds them digging across the length and breadth of the region.

Fig 11: A JCB near the frontier areas in Menchukha. The           earth-moving vehicles, commonly called JCBs, seem to be the           Himalayan constant, as one finds them digging across the length and           breadth of the region.

Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.

Where JCBs lead to monasteries: religious tourism, infrastructure and space-making

33The promotion of religious tourism in Arunachal Pradesh occurs in three broad and interrelated contexts. First, it is connected to the issue of India’s soft power projections in South and Southeast Asia. Second, it is linked to the project of a certain nationalisation of space, ‘an angle of cultural co-option’ (Gohain, 2020) in contentious spaces through an intensified infrastructural expansion, both military and civil. And lastly, there is the dimension of transnational policies like the Act East Policy that revolves around economic, political, strategic and cultural initiatives to engage with the Asia-Pacific region. These contexts therefore span from the local to the international region through interplay with the national.

  • 8 ‘3 Buddhist Circuits identified by the Ministry of Tourism’. Press Information Bur (...)

34It needs to be emphasised here that the issue of the promotion of religious tourism in the Northeast Indian region, especially the projection of Buddhist circuits, is deemed important from the point of view of India’s soft power projection in the neighbourhood at large, as mentioned earlier. The spread of Buddhism from India to Southeast Asia is considered one of strongest threads of a longstanding civilisational contact with shared cultural aspects in terms of food, language, art, architecture and so on (Bhonsale 2019). The idea of developing and extending the concept of Buddhist heritage circuits in the north-eastern part of India has been taken up by the Indian state since at least 2015, when the Ministry of Tourism announced the establishment of Circuit 3 as ‘Buddhist Heritage Trails (State Circuits)’ and when Arunachal Pradesh, Tawang and Bomdila were placed on this list. These Buddhist circuits identified by the Ministry of Tourism were to be developed with the help of central government, state government and private stakeholders.8

35An interesting comparison can yet again be made with Menchukha where, under the Domestic Promotion and Publicity including Hospitality (DPPH) scheme, the government has begun to promote ‘festival tourism’ at Menchukha rather than religious tourism. Since 2014, a ‘Mechuka Adventure Festival’ has been organised. Prominent Bollywood stars have been called upon to inaugurate and attend these events. After Bollywood ‘superstar’ Salman Khan came to inaugurate one of the early editions of the festival, Dorjeeling village, one of the oldest settlements in Menchukha region, gradually began to be known as ‘Salman Point’ in tourist parlance. At a certain level, historians studying the region would find a thread of continuity in perception in terms of a certain nationalisation of space from the ‘hegemonic standpoint of centralised states, where the histories of these states constantly featured in place of the peoples’ histories’ (Hilaly, 2015). However, today, centralisation is mediated through the growing association between Bollywood popular culture and tourism that ‘serves the purpose of nationalism by mapping these spaces as marginal, to be sure, but also appropriable as us and ours’ (Gohain 2020: 157).

  • 9 ‘Places of religious tourism earned ₹1,34,543 crore in 2022, reveals govt data’. Hindustan (...)

36Comparisons like this also suggest that a growing link between a project of place-making, infrastructure discourse and religious tourism in the region cannot be overlooked. Since 2014–2015 the Ministry of Tourism of the Indian government has initiated a scheme called the National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive (PRASHAD) that provides financial assistance to the state governments/Union Territories for the creation of pilgrimage and/or heritage tourism infrastructures at pre-identified destinations across the country.9 In Arunachal Pradesh, the site selected for development under the PRASHAD scheme is Parasuram Kund in Lohit District, a pilgrimage spot for Hindus. The amount allocated in the year 2020–21 was about ₹37.88 crore. Here, what Gohain (2020: 155) has observed in other parts of Arunachal Pradesh seems relevant when she points out that any ‘history’ of Arunachal Pradesh is only projected ‘through pan-Indian legends – and indeed, tourist brochures of Arunachal Pradesh often promote only those historic ruins or sites that have mythological associations with the Indic culture, such as Malinithan or Parasuram Kund in eastern Arunachal Pradesh’.

37It is important to look at the way religious tourism is being projected as part of a larger infrastructural upgradation of these regions. Union Minister of Tourism G Kishan Reddy gave a detailed account of the infrastructural and essential facilities developed under the PRASHAD scheme in Parliament on 13 February 2023:

  • 10 ‘Projects approved under PRASHAD scheme’. Government of India, Ministry of Tourism. http (...)

The infrastructure facilities being approved under the scheme include development/up-gradation of destination entry points viz. passenger terminals (of road, rail and water transport), basic conveniences like tourism Information/Interpretation/Amenities Centers with ATM/Money exchange counters, last mile connectivity, pathways, procurement of equipment for eco-friendly modes of transport and equipment for tourist activities such as Light & Sound Show, renewable sources of energy such as Solar Lights, Solar Power Systems, Electric Charging points, Rain Water Harvesting, parking facilities, drinking water, toilets/bathrooms, changing rooms, cloak room, waiting rooms, Craft haats/bazars/souvenir shops/cafeteria, rain shelters, watch towers, First Aid Centers, improvement in communication through establishing telephone booths, mobile services, Wi-Fi hotspot, soft and hard landscaping, Shoreline development & rejuvenation of natural water bodies, Swachchhta Components like dustbins, Solid Waste Management, provisions of lightings, illumination, CCTV surveillance system, signages etc.10

38Such wide-ranging infrastructure development measures need to be understood in the context of the ‘the multi-scalar processes through which politics articulate infrastructures and infrastructures articulate politics’ (Murton et al 2020: 11).

Continuous entanglements

39We have seen, on the one hand, how geopolitical zones such as Arunachal Pradesh have increasingly come to embody heightened attempts at territorial control and the securitisation of spaces, ‘the securitized calculations of China and India’ bringing both countries to shore up their strategic footprint along their borders by ‘infrastructuring the borderland’ (Rahman 2022). Dean and Sarma argue that ‘the criss-crossing infrastructure assemblages at the China-Myanmar borderlands have enabled state, global and indigenous capitalism to extract profits while disciplining peripheries, making territories legible and securitizing these areas expediently’ (Dean et al 2022: 5). Ethnographic insights discussed in the previous section, however, reveal the many subtle and innovative ways in which these projected hard lines continue to be transgressed, whether it is the Menchukha Membas’ continued remembrance of ancient trade routes and expectations to see them reopened, or the circuits of cultural-religious flow being kept alive by the Khamtis in Namsai.

40What is the broader context to these entanglements that are being continuously produced in India’s Northeast? Is it the flow of a civilisational discourse, or the lost footnotes of a complex history, battered and bruised by equally complex geopolitics? An overpowering march of capital in the form of an all-encompassing discourse of infrastructure development? Or is it an assemblage of all these? A polyphonic unfolding of history that carries people forward? Places like Arunachal Pradesh thus also illustrate the paradoxical development and a major dilemma for contemporary bordering practices in times of globalisation: creating conditions of ‘selective permeability’ (Popescu, 2015: 50) where ‘state borders are expected to allow uninhibited cross-border flows while at the same time retaining effective territorial protection capabilities’ (ibid). What complicates this paradox in this case is the continuous production of the Northeast India region as a resource frontier standing in the perilous ruins of capitalism. The example of infrastructures such as roads, plantations and special economic zones (SEZs) on the China–Myanmar borderlands put forth by various scholars is comparable to the phenomenon of plantation infrastructure springing up in Arunachal Pradesh in the form of oil-palm cultivation, which has the potential to change the landscape of the region substantially in the years to come. The agriculture department of Arunachal Pradesh has started an oil-palm plantation/cultivation project in nine districts of the state under mini-mission-II of the National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm. The department has selected four zones, including nine potential districts in the state and has identified approximately 1.26 lakh hectares for oil-palm cultivation. In 2017, as part of this project, the state government signed a memorandum of understanding with Ruchi Soya Industries to plant 25,000 hectares of oil palm in four districts – East Kameng, Papumpare, Lower Subansiri and West Siang. However, studies have suggested further ecological entanglements in the form of loss of biodiversity in this otherwise biodiversity-rich region once these measures unfold. Experts have called the phenomenon of expanding oil-palm cultivation in Arunachal Pradesh ‘a risky proposition’ (Srinivasan 2017).

41Despite these sweeping changes, intimate ethnographic narratives like the ones touched upon in this article illustrate the way human relations and cultural connections continue to disrupt the dominant discourses of territorialisation and securitisation. At times trans-Himalayan routes and corridors in the region become a ‘thoroughfare of globalisation’ (Campbell 2013), embodiments of the political and economic ambitions of states; or they remain ‘pathways’, a configuration that is ‘at once geographical and social’, shaped and maintained by lived practices of passage and exchange (Saxer 2016: 105). Himalayan pathways in the region, at times dormant (like the ones at Menchukha), at other times more vibrant (such as the ones at Namsai), ‘with the capacity to survive centuries and resurface as crucial sites of socioeconomic exchange at different historical conjunctures…continue to shape the Himalayan experience of remoteness and connectivity until the present day’ (Saxer 2016: 105).

42One therefore needs to place the growth of religious tourism and the promotion (or lack of it) of certain pilgrimage circuits in the context of the dynamics of a quickly transitioning and contentious borderland spaces. The growth trajectory of religious tourism needs to be highlighted against certain formations of what Dan Smyer Yü calls a ‘perpendicular geospatiality of corridors and borderlands’ (2022: 6), which ‘signifies the paradoxical pairings of commons-fragmentation, movement-fixity, flow-interception, connectivity-disconnectivity and freedom-confinement’ (ibid). In this sense, a discussion on the varied experiences related to the growth or stagnation of the religious sites and sectors across the eastern Himalayas, such as the comparison between the two regions of Namsai and Menchukha, helps us to better situate these spaces in the broader discourse on borders, corridors and crossroads, and place them at the intersections of space, subjectivity and agency (Anderson 2012) as regions made of ‘unstable territorial signifiers’ (Ludden 2003: 31). In a sense, the world of JCBs, the ever-busy earth diggers in the Himalayas, and the ancient life-worlds at gonpas symbolise two different and conflicting worlds – and yet they are increasingly entangled with each other through an extensive military presence accompanied by the growing securitisation of landscapes and through the rapid but strategically selective expansion of infrastructures. The growth trajectory of religious tourism and its flows and frictions in the eastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh fully illustrate the deep entanglements of culture, state-making and geopolitics in trans-border spaces.

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Notes

1 Interview by the author at Menchukha, January, 2021. The Memba are a Tibeto-Burman Buddhist community who live in Tibet as well as the Menchukha Valley nestled along the Yargapb-chu (Siyom) river in Arunachal Pradesh. However, scholars like Grothmann (2012, 2020) argue that the word ‘Memba’ is a new classificatory reference created by the Indian administration in 1950s when it reached the region and assumed control. The ancient name of the region is Pachakshiri or ‘hidden land’ and the inhabitants identify themselves as Pachakshiriba – the ones from Pachakshiri.

2 Interviews across various parts of Menchukha, such as Dechenthang village, Dorjeeling village and Regong, December 2020 and January 2021.

3 Interview with Mr Gebu Sona, Menchukha, January 2021.

4 ‘Arunachal Pradesh: Gurudwara in Mechuka converted into Buddhist shrine, alleges SGPC.’ NE Now News, 24 April, 2023. https://nenow.in/north-east-news/arunachal-pradesh/arunachal-pradesh-gurudwara-mechuka-converted-buddhist-shrine-sgpc.html (accessed 10 September 2023)

5 Field interview with various community members, Namsai, April 2021.

6 Field interview with members of the Pali school, Chongkham, December 2021.

7 ‘Arunachal developing infrastructure along international borders: deputy CM’. The Hindu, 9 March 2023. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/arunachal-developing-infrastructure-along-international-borders-deputy-cm/article66599288.ece (accessed 21 September 2023)

8 ‘3 Buddhist Circuits identified by the Ministry of Tourism’. Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Ministry of Culture, 4 March 2015. https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=116398 (accessed 20 September 2023).

9 ‘Places of religious tourism earned ₹1,34,543 crore in 2022, reveals govt data’. Hindustan Times, 21 March 2023. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/places-of-religious-tourism-earned-1-34-543-crore-in-2022-reveals-govt-data-101679388028123.html (accessed 20 September 2023).

10 ‘Projects approved under PRASHAD scheme’. Government of India, Ministry of Tourism. https://sansad.in/getFile/loksabhaquestions/annex/1711/AU1748.pdf?source=pqals (accessed 20 September 2023).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig 1: Lomtung Tago warms himself by the fire as he recalls his experiences in the Sino-Indian war of 1962.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Siko Dido falls, She Yomi, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 3,7M
Titre Fig 2: Political map of ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ (She Yomi district and Namsai district highlighted by the author)
Crédits Source: Maps of India, https://www.mapsofindia.com/​maps/​arunachalpradesh/​
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 208k
Titre Fig 3: Lhakpa Sona recalls his caravan trading days along the Himalayan corridors, and through his memories he continues to transcend spatial fixities.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 112k
Titre Fig 4: The interior of a Memba home, located in Dechenthang village, Menchukha. Memba houses are often filled with various cultural heirlooms that serve as a connection with a disappearing past.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 70k
Titre Fig 5: The ‘Shinjong Saptra’ map-stone believed to be designed by Buddhist masters at Menchukha.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 107k
Titre Fig 6: Neh-Pema Shelphu, the waterfall and cave held sacred by the Membas because Buddhist Guru Padmasambhava, also known as Rimpoche, is supposed to have meditated there.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 4,7M
Titre Fig 7: The Samten Yongcha Gonpa of Menchukha, said to be one of the oldest gonpas belonging to the Mahayana sect in the entire eastern Himalayan region.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 108k
Titre Fig 8: The Kognum Khu or Golden Pagoda in Namsai has emerged as a popular tourist destination.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Namsai, 2021.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 270k
Titre Fig 9: The stone statue of the Buddha, currently under construction and touted to become the largest stone Buddha statue in the whole of South and Southeast Asia.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Namsai, 2021.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 89k
Titre Fig 10: The Pali school in Chongkham represents the way cultural links survive beyond spatial rigidities.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Chongkham, 2021.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 84k
Titre Fig 11: A JCB near the frontier areas in Menchukha. The earth-moving vehicles, commonly called JCBs, seem to be the Himalayan constant, as one finds them digging across the length and breadth of the region.
Crédits Photo: Kaustubh Deka, Menchukha, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2407/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,5M
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Référence électronique

Kaustubh Deka, « The old man by the waterfall: deep entanglements of culture, state-making and geopolitics in Arunachal Pradesh »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 62 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 juillet 2024, consulté le 24 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/2407 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/124f0

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Auteur

Kaustubh Deka

Kaustubh Deka teaches at the Department of Political Science, Dibrugarh University, Assam. He was formerly at the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has also been a fellow at the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Chennai, where he researched the issue of youth activism and political participation in the context of India’s Northeast. His academic interests cover aspects of borderland studies, ecological politics in Northeast India, as well as trends in youth activism and new forms of politics in the northeast region. His recent publications include ‘Youth activism’ in the Routledge Companion to Northeast India, edited by J J P Wouters and T B Subba (Routledge, 2023).

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