2The emergence of territorially circumscribed states raised questions about what was happening at their edges. The “natural” character of the border or the isomorphism between territory and culture curated by national boundaries has remained incomplete and open to challenge (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). No longer viewed merely as fixed lines on the ground, borders represent “categories of difference” and processes of differentiation between an inside and an outside, determining affiliations and identities (Kolossov and Scott 2013; Newman 2003; van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002). This approach paved the way for explorations of borders produced through various forms of performance (Aggarwal 2004; Green 2010; Murton 2019; Schimanski and Nyman 2021). Borderlands were also recast as operating at various scales and dimensions, suggesting that they were amenable to additional theoretical reflection and ferment (Baud and van Schendel 1997; Michael 2014; Paasi 1998; Rumford 2006; Sassen 2013; Tagliacozzo 2016; Tripathi 2021; van Schendel and de Maaker 2014). Studies on the colonial period illustrate how borderlands increasingly became “exceptional” zones characterized by the strategic priorities of the state (Bayly 2016; Benton 2010; Misra 2011; van Schendel 2005; Zou and Kumar 2011).

3Simultaneously, the entanglement of specific environments, mobile populations, and social networks spilling over established territorial boundaries and divisions play a role in constituting borderlands (Agnew 1994; Billie, Mehendale and Lankton 2022; Cederlöf and van Schendel 2022; Gros and Fontanari 2024; Huber and Blackburn 2012; Jones 2012; Leadbetter and Sastrawan 2024; Ludden 2017, 2022; Michael 2012; Saxer and Zang 2017; Sur 2021; Vandenhelsken, Barkataki-Ruscheweyh and Karlsson 2018). Notions of “terrain” (Elden 2021), “friction,” (Cederlöf and van Schendel 2022; Tsing 2004) and “remoteness” (Kakati, this issue; Saxer and Andersson 2019) enriched the field with concepts that better explained the intricacies at work at the dynamic edges of states.

4The articles in this special issue revisit the Himalayan contours of what has been locally and academically referred to as “Southern Asia,” viewed as a historically fluid territorial and intellectual framework that departs from a traditional Area Studies classification (Mohammad-Arif 2014). More specifically, recent multidisciplinary reconceptualization of Southern Asian geographies focusses on forms of life and presences along the edges of states (Abraham 2014; Dean, Sarma, and Rippa 2022; Harris 2013; Rippa, Murton, and Rest 2020). Variously describing borderlands in terms of “borderworlds,” or “borderscapes,” these debates have yielded rich accounts of life in these out-of-the-way places (Sadan 2013; Spengen 2000; Brambilla, Laine, and Bocchi 2016; Brambilla 2015; Bringa and Toje 2016; Klieger 2006). They suggest that the territorial impulses of state agents are not absolute; rather, they are constrained by the agency of people who inhabit its borderlands. In this sense, borderworlds are products of both territorialization—the “outcome of a disciplinary vision applied to an environment to regulate it” (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015:7)—and deterritorialization. That is, the formation of borders rarely achieves the kinds of closures they aspire to create. Rather, they are increasingly reconceptualized as “moving” sites, whose meaning, locations, perceptions and experienced effects do not overlap with physical borderlines (Gohain 2025). Thus, exploring the contestations and contingencies that make borders malleable, both conceptually and physically, and transcend their spatial functions, becomes pertinent.

5The ongoing scholarly ferment in studying borders has been productive. The greater focus on the margins of the state has prompted the questioning of Area Studies frameworks and the territorial model of the nation-state underlying them (Lewis and Wigen 1997; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Mohammad-Arif and Ripert 2014). Asian borderlands scholars have proposed several important counterpoints bringing into focus vast shifting zones of connected histories and geographies. Variously termed Zomia (Jonsson 2010; Ludden 2017; Scott 2009; van Schendel 2002), Zomia+ (Michaud 2010, 2017), Southeast Asian Massif (Michaud and Ovesen 2000), Himalayan Massif (Shneiderman 2010), Northern South Asia (Gellner 2013), Inter-Asia (Ho 2017; Rippa, Murton, and Rest 2020), and Highland Asia (Wouters 2011; Wouters and Heneise 2023); they have yielded promising interdisciplinary inquiries, revealing that bordered territories are produced not only by states, but also in negotiation with borderlanders (Billé 2020; Dunn and Cons 2014; Kakati 2023; Moran 2019). Here, we do not define borderlanders by fixed identities or ethnic categories, but rather as those living in regions that came to be designated as borderlands through shifting territorial regimes.

7More significantly, we explore how borderland inhabitants in the Eastern Himalaya harbor dynamic visions of spatial ordering and subvert bordering practices—forces in tension that challenge the dominance of Westphalian notions of territorial organization (Murton 2017; van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002). In this sense, highland regions were never “blank spaces” or pliant landscapes that were “no man’s land” (Wouters 2021; Kakati 2023) on which states and other dominance-seeking entities could freely fix their territorial designs and boundaries unopposed by local agency. Rather, they were in perpetual tension with the multiple processes, including the infra-political activities of subordinate groups, whereby borders are continually made and unmade. We elaborate on this longstanding tension between border-crossing and the impulse for spatial fixation in following sections.

MOVING BEYOND SPATIAL FIXATIONS

8The conceptual impetus for this special issue came from a series of interdisciplinary conferences and workshops on borderlands and transborder communities held at several venues since 2021. These included the workshop “Trans-border Communities, Connections and Bordering: Belonging and Political Membership across India’s Borders” in 2021 (Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History, University of Vienna), two panels “Re-orienting Borderlands: Beyond Spatial Fixations in South Asia” at the European Conference on South Asian Studies at the University of Turin (2023), and “Seeing other Sovereignties: Beyond the Territorial Hegemony of Borders across the Ends of Eurasia” at the Eur-Asian Border Lab’s symposium at Tallinn University in January 2024. These discussions affirmed the fruitfulness of examining borderlands as important testing grounds for the epistemological claims of not only larger spatial designations such as nation-states and their underlying area studies architectures, but even their alternative counterpoints such as Zomia, Inter Asia, and Highland Asia. The articles focus on the Eastern Himalayas, from the Indo-Nepalese border to the frontier between India and Burma, including Sikkim and West Bengal, as well as present-day Arunachal Pradesh (see the map of the study area). This sub-regional focus on the Eastern Himalayan zone becomes even more pertinent with the periodically recurring and recently heightened political pressures and tensions erupting along the borderlines of India, China, Myanmar and Nepal.

9Our approach also highlights a historical coherence and growing visibility of the region, in particular because its borders were established during the final phase of British colonial expansion, in the nineteenth century, with lasting repercussions today. The violent history of border-making leaves behind a legacy of boundary disputes and demands for more checkpoints and fences (Chester 2013; Cons 2016; Leake and Haines 2017; Westcott 2022). In using the phrase “beyond spatial fixations” in this issue, we acknowledge that the subjectivities and lifeways of inhabitants living in borderlands were never fully contained by boundary lines on a map. It is the incompleteness and “un-fixed” nature of bordering in this region, as well as the attempts to fix them, that the articles bring into starker relief.

10Within such a context, the concepts of border as process, and of “territoriality” (or territorialization) are central to our endeavor. We approach “territory” as the space within which territorialization takes place. Territorialization refers to “the state’s strategy to exert complete authority and control over social life in its territory” (van Schendel 2005:3). These processes resulted in the “fixation” of ethno-territorial borders that were meant to contain ethnic homogeneity within bounded space (such as a nation-state or an ethnic homeland)—as a key component of colonial and post-colonial territorialization (Baruah 2019). This concept assumed a specific meaning in the Eastern Himalayas where, from the beginning, the British colonial perception of this region framed it as a “frontier” that would remain a buffer zone that was never fully controllable. Europeans equated the populations here with “barbarous” people, a concept that legitimized disruptive interventions by colonial agents (Simpson 2015), as well as the “fixing” of tribal communities on the margins (Baruah 2013).

11However, borders remained arbitrary and inconsistent, as exemplified by the 1873 Inner Line in Assam (Simpson 2015), as well as unfinished, as in the case of the India-Myanmar border (Guyot-Réchard 2021). Territorial fixation remained an aspiration never to be achieved, and incomplete borders needed continuous re-affirmation (van Schendel and de Maaker 2014). As the special issue articles point out, historical and contemporary forms of resistance in this region are quite rife, with movements for autonomy and ethnic “homelands” as in the case of Gorkhaland in West Bengal, ongoing demands for more internal borders in Northeast India, and inter-ethnic and anti-state conflicts in Myanmar’s western borderlands with India. We interrogate the possibilities for recovering alternative territorial orderings, and current demands for myriad types of bordering that comes from borderlanders themselves.

12An attempt to move beyond spatial fixations invites us to reinterrogate conceptual schemes for ordering territory, but also to better understand the process by which borders are reproduced and transformed. The efforts of South Asian regimes to represent the territorial limits of the state have invariably remained incomplete exercises. The “un-fixity” of Eastern Himalayan borderlands, paradoxically enough, has been generated by alternative processes of territorialization. The academic literature has analyzed such spatial encounters and negotiations in borderlands using several concepts, each highlighting a different aspect, such as the bordering practices, and “infra-politics.” The latter is derived from James Scott’s work and refers to “the everyday politics, of class relations especially, encoded in myriad everyday acts, from tax evasion to snide asides to working-to-rule” (Weiss 2021:434). The articles in this issue share similar concerns. They give glimpses into the spatial construction of borderlands by its inhabitants through dense layers of entitlements (Michael), rituals, cultural and family ties (Vandenhelsken), trade (Ghosh), and trans-border homelands such as a Lepcha Mayel Lang (Namchu). The relations between the Abors (Adis) and Miris (Mising) in present-day Arunachal Pradesh (Ghosh), (dis)connections in the region that became the Indo-Myanmar borderlands (Kakati), and the Lepcha’s (Namchu), and Limbu’s (Vandenhelsken) transborder connections were interrupted and divided by colonial borders. Similarly, the conceptions of territorial sovereignty upheld by the kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) remained fluid with borderland populations and elites playing a key role in determining the edges of the state, without any obsession for Westphalian notions of linear boundaries and fixed territorial space (Michael). In this sense, local communities had always inherited and lived transbordered identities and lives, in friction with various territorial schemes, political and otherwise, while also straddling hill-valley distinctions that marked Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Nepal, Kalimpong, and Darjeeling.

BORDERWORK: BETWEEN AND BEYOND TERRITORY

13The concept of borderwork accurately grasps the processes of borderland formation in the region, examined in this special issue, by revealing the territorialization imposed by dominant powers, alongside the encounters between often divergent conceptions and uses of space. Madeleine Reeves (2014:6) construes borderwork as the “messy, contested, and often intensely social business of making territory ‘integral’” The concept also gives greater attention to borderland people’s role in “constructing, shifting, or even erasing borders” (Rumford 2012:897). Such an approach highlights borders as sociological constructs—as Simmel (1997:142) noted, “[t]he boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially”—well before they become barricades or checkpoints imposed by violence. In this sense, the notion of borderwork lends weight to our argument about moving beyond spatial fixations.

14We suggest that borderland populations have always harbored their own spatial visions and lived expressions of spaces that jostled uneasily not just against Westphalian territorial concepts, but also scholarly notions of territorial order like Area Studies or Zomia (Reeves et al. 2014). We also approach borderlands as the outcome of the encounter and negotiation between borderland people’s spatial constructions and territorial regimes. Our articles emphasize the lopsided territorialization resulting from the inability of British colonial forces to control populations (Ghosh) in the nineteenth century. Similarly, the late-colonial British Indian state in the 1940s failed to keep promises of self-determination made to indigenous populations for their support during a global war. The state withdrew the economic benefits and employment given to locals, thereby recasting them within a globally exportable imaginative category of a “remote frontier,” unworthy of being developed by the state, but amenable to state securitization needs when required (Kakati). Life in these borderlands coexisted with colonial notions of “remoteness” and “uncivilized,” and yearnings for trans-border homelands such as a Lepcha Mayel Lang (Namchu), or Limbu “native spaces” (Vandenhelsken). The responses of borderland communities disrupted colonial and postcolonial projects of “territorialization” by crossing borders, remembering alternative geographical arrangements of the borderlands, and reimagining them as connected areas.

15The contributions to this special issue additionally highlight the intellectual processes of conceptualizing competing spatial visions, whereby some existing concepts of space and sovereignty were marginalized. For example, in Michael’s analysis of the agrarian landscapes of the Anglo-Gorkha borderlands, Gorkhali and colonial leaders indexed territory in language in distinctive and even mutually incommensurable ways, resulting in a breakdown of communication. Similarly, Ghosh’s exploration of the concept of “reclamation” in Northeast India highlights how the colonial presupposition of a fundamental “difference between the ‘hill-tribes’ and the ‘plains-subjects’” drove the implementation of policies aimed at handling classifications that the colonists themselves had imagined. In both cases, the implicit and unarticulated meanings embedded in ambiguous colonial language, coupled with the absence of effective communication regarding these terms, played a key role in enforcing colonial notions of territory, sovereignty, and borders. These contributions show how the “landscape is constituted in language” (Wong 2006)—through implicit and unspoken meanings, and the reduction of semantic diversity to uniform interpretations—that enabled the powerful to exercise final control over borders and people. Similarly, Vandenhelsken’s contribution analyzes how religious conflicts within the Limbu community can be viewed as transfer or internalization of the border as part of their ongoing claims for greater recognition by the state apparatus. In an unintended consequence, the community’s representations of its religious and ethnic boundaries became more aligned with the territorial extent of the state. In this way, viewing border-making from the borderlands deconstructs statist rationalized policies, and highlights borders as an outcome of the encounter between colonial and borderland people’s conceptualization and practice of space. Viewing border-making from the perspective of the inhabitants of borderlands, thus, serves as a valuable counterpoint to the rational spatial planning of state actors. Such an approach increases the possibilities of understanding many forms of bordering activity that have had lasting consequences for contemporary citizenship amidst ongoing struggles over ethnic identity and the distribution of resources.

16It would not be an overstatement to suggest that borders in this region remain contested and a source of disruption. The articles in this collection show how borders emerged as the product of a struggle between the forces of territorial control and the lived realities of people in the borderlands (on this point, see also van Schendel 2005; Simpson 2015). Closer to our time, the updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam in 2019 coupled with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) reflect a homogenizing territorialization process, seeking religious and ethnic homogeneity contained within borders, excluding specific groups like Muslim international migrants, contrary to the historical realities of the region (Baruah 2019). Here, borders “move” non-territorially, through asymmetric and exclusionary legal citizenship regimes like the NRC and CAA that make immigrant populations perceive the border as shifting, and a source of precarity and deportability (Gohain 2025).

17The state’s incapacity to impose its own spatial order is evident in the continual need to reassert its authority, as well as conformity to statist imaginations of territorial order—whether by redefining citizenship legally or erecting physical borders. Several of the borders imposed in the late phases of colonial territorial expansion are today disputed and increasingly militarized, such as the Bengal borderland (van Schendel 2005; Ghosh 2023), the McMahon line (Gohain 2020b), the Indo-Myanmar borders (Singh 2025), and the Indo-Chinese border in Sikkim (Rai and Lal 2025).

18The methodologies adopted by the contributors reflect the above perspectives and approaches, through interdisciplinary collaborations that enrich the study of these dynamics. We supplement this cross-disciplinary engagement with multi-sited archival and ethnographic work engaging academic debates in History, Anthropology, and Geography. Furthermore, in using ethnographic and archival research, the authors reflect a shared commitment to centering the voices, experiences, and agency of borderland communities. This approach to borderland space as perceived by people living in border regions is essential in highlighting the central role of interactions between dominant powers and borderland communities in constituting these areas as bordered lands. Drawing on oral histories, information gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, and a wide range of colonial and indigenous records, the authors seek to recover the experiences and perspectives of those whose lives were reconfigured through colonial and postcolonial border-making processes.

19In approaching their respective subjects, the contributors adopt a variety of approaches. For instance, rather than taking the archival record at face value, they read it critically—attentive to its silences, contradictions, and the power dynamics embedded in its production. Michael, for instance, works with Gorkhali and East India Company records to trace spatial imaginaries and produce historically thick descriptions of language shaped by cross-cultural encounters and conflict in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kakati reads official and personal archival materials of colonial and post-colonial state representatives, both along, and against the grain to uncover underlying ideologies that imposed remoteness on populations who were actually well integrated with a wartime colonial state and sought to retain a deep-relationship with it, rather than reject or evade it. Ghosh engages published documents, including administrative reports, memoirs, and official correspondence between the British and Bengal governments in the nineteenth century, contrasting their accounts with alternative readings that foreground the perspectives of the Abor Hills’ inhabitants.

20Together, these contributions highlight a methodological commitment to rethinking borders not only as imposed structures but as sites of interaction, resistance, and lived experience. In this spirit, Vandenhelsken’s contribution focuses on several sites where the Limbu people live, including Kalimpong, northeastern Nepal, and the border region itself, and spans a long historical period, particularly from the early twentieth century to the present day. It examines the relationship to space through various practices—political mobilization, cultural production, and ritual practices—to reveal how Limbu people in Sikkim and West Bengal negotiated and contested the borders, which divided the community. Namchu’s article similarly draws on information collected through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in several localities in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills, as well as in Sikkim, to highlight the social diversity and interconnectedness of the Lepchas, which resisted the fragmentation of the community by colonial borders.

BORDERLANDS, ZOMIA AND HIGHLANDS IN THE EASTERN HIMALAYA

21Our approach to the Eastern Himalayas acknowledges the debt to the “Zomia studies” approach first proposed by Willem van Schendel (2002) and further developed by others (Jonsson 2010, 2012; Michaud 2010; Shneiderman 2010; May 2014; Ludden 2017; Misra 2018; Scott 2009). His formulation of Zomia presents a novel conceptual and spatial framework to rethink the interconnected highland regions of South and Southeast Asia, challenging conventional nation-state and Area Studies perspectives. James Scott (2009) further popularized this idea of Zomia as a “shatter-zone,” where populations deliberately escaped incorporation into states located in the plains by moving up into the more inaccessible highlands. They adopted subsistence strategies, social structures, and relationships that obstructed the coercive demands of lowlands states located in valleys and plains. Scott’s anarchist interpretation viewed highland populations as “state-evaders” with significant implications for our understanding of borderlands as sites of resistance. His formulations about Zomia sparked significant debates on resistance, agency, and the nature of state power. Zomia now designates the political agency of highlanders in contrast to their peers inhabiting valley state civilizations marked by settled agriculture. Zomia studies showed that states were often reluctant to integrate their peripheral areas, preferring temporary governance and coercive, exclusionary border practices over long-term welfare or development (Guyot-Réchard 2018; Slater and Kim 2015).

22Zomia and its borderlands have emerged as a vibrant field of work affirming the important role played by the highlands in the constitution of political relations and social order in Asia (Longkumer and Heneise 2019; Rippa, Murton, and Rest 2020; Wouters and Heneise 2023). This special issue scouts out this possibility with its articles traversing a straggling corridor of lands stretching from Northeast India and the Indo-Burmese highlands to West Bengal, Sikkim and Nepal. It also recognizes the dynamic imaginative geographies at work in colonial and postcolonial encounters. Scott’s Zomia thesis which views the inhabitants of the Himalayan highlands predominantly through the paradigm of resistance, while intellectually generative, might not fully hold true in the Eastern Himalayan borderlands, as we can see both in their history and in contemporary times (Post et al. 2022, Lieberman 2010). Scholars argue that inhabitants of Zomia developed complex eco-cultural societies that pre-dated state formation, and thus, Zomian societies did not always emerge from a desire to escape states to take refuge in the highlands. In fact, Eastern Himalayan highlanders have engaged with, and resisted states so as to define the kind of relations and resources they could negotiate with the state (Shneiderman 2010; Wouters 2011; Karlsson 2013; Kakati forthcoming).

23Consequently, even as these new spatial epistemologies like Zomia correct older ones drawn from Area Studies approaches; they too, like their predecessors, need to be continuously evaluated for their strengths and limits. That is, the realities of borderland life on the ground invariably exceed such conceptual territorial frameworks, which are erected by political elites and scholarship on the subject. Views from the ground may strategically comply, refute or seek other ways to think around and “beyond the territorial confines of states, nations, and academic disciplines” (Ibrahim and Kothiyal 2017:32).

24Marginalized populations like those on the highland edges of Southern Asia have negotiated various types of spatial ordering and territorial ideologies historically, even as the space for alternatives shrunk in the postcolonial decades. However, such processes were not unique to the colonial and postcolonial periods, and are identifiable in the precolonial world. Take, for instance, the case of the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal). Gorkha’s rulers, like Prithvinarayan Shah (1723–1775) and his successors, self-identified as the rulers of the hills (pahad) and culturally distinct from the plains lying to the south in North India referred to as moghlan (Stiller 1968:43,46). Yet, at the same time, the Gorkhalis were willing to reconsider this distinction when they recognized the value of the resource-rich lands of the plains, and made every effort to possess them until they were thwarted in these efforts by the English East India Company (Michael, this issue). Here, both states were confounded by a host of competing vernacular visions of territorial rights harbored by local actors and subaltern groups that had to be managed (Michael 2012). In this way, these precolonial borderlands remained a differentiated frontier space with its own unruly histories of entangled borderlines (Kasturi 2021).

25Moreover, even today in Northeast India for example, we find a plethora of internal borders, many of which are not territorial, but pertain to different legal, fiscal (tax) and administrative borders (Wouters and Tunyi 2018). The special issue articles highlight historical and contemporary negotiations of highlanders with states in the Eastern Himalayas, and how such processes have led to various concepts and possibilities of territoriality. We revisit the early-colonial vocabularies of territorialization, alongside concepts such as Inner Lines, Crown Colonies, Frontier Areas and their juxtaposition with kinship-religious networks, the memory of past sovereignty, ethnic homelands, and native spaces. Such concepts do not always conform to the border categories created by the agents of the Westphalian nation-state (Cons 2014). It is this historical interactive dynamic between representatives of state-like entities, and trans-border communities that has allowed certain logics and practices of bordering to emerge as processes.

26Britain’s colonization of the subcontinent proceeded with the gradual evolution of frontiers into boundaries (Embree 2020). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this went hand in hand with a growing appetite to survey and map the layout and edges of its territorial possessions. The process was localized and unevenly dispersed in the mid-eighteenth century, becoming increasingly systematized with the launch of the Great Trigonometrical Survey in 1802 and the establishment of the Office of the Surveyor-General under Colonel Colin Mackenzie in 1815. Despite these efforts, colonial officials remained concerned about the presence of dispersed territories, illegible frontiers, and the delineation of linear boundaries (Barrow 2003; Edney 1997; Michael forthcoming; Phillimore 1945–1958).

27Colonial officials like the British Indian Viceroy, George N. Curzon and his successors, deeply influenced by the new intellectual discourse on the North American frontier, deemed frontier management a “scientific enterprise” calling for the demarcation of linear boundaries (Curzon 1907; Simpson 2021). Under Curzon’s Viceroyship, the creation of the Northwest Frontier Province (1901), the first and short-lived partition of Bengal (1905), and the North East Frontier Tracts (1910) lent coherence to the edges of the British Indian subcontinent (Simpson 2021:259–62).

28While colonial efforts to reorder territory proceeded apace, the Himalayas acquired a status that would remain unique. The Himalayas remained romanticized as a natural geographical boundary, marked by border passes and points, and not borderlines (Gardner 2019; Simpson 2021). Such ideas about the Himalayas, which also echoed older notions of Puranic sacred geography, were picked up by Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century as they endeavored to define the limits of national space (Kar 2004; Goulding 2023; Jaffrelot 2009).

29Over time, colonial frontier-making, ideological imageries and political projects came to portray Himalayan space as “empty.” Emptiness is a recurring colonial spatial trope and imagery, often associated with highlands globally, including the Himalayas, to invoke ideologies of terra nullus. Such “blank spaces” delineate some form of absence—whether culture, societies, states, government, or even colonialism (Lüthi et. al 2016; Kakati 2023). Indeed, these were never “blank spaces,” but were imagined to be so in colonial officials’ eyes (Kakati 2023). The Himalayas then came to mark the natural edges of regions like Southern, Southeastern, and Eastern/Inner Asia that were then crisscrossed by other internal border differentiations.

30The imposition of colonial and postcolonial boundaries became acts of violence that would marginalize highland communities, rendering their members borderlanders in the process. The colonial designation of regions and borders along with the vagaries of their postcolonial afterlives remained an outcome of strategies to ensure security and control, access to resources and the movements and aspirations of local populations. All five articles in this special issue examine the processes and legacies of colonial and postcolonial efforts to impose a vision for territorial sovereignty marked by linear boundaries, which have shaped the areas under study.

31Due to this legacy, Himalayan borders have become the sites for all kinds of conflicts, ranging from international to local geopolitics. Such conflicts are centered on a variety of bordering demands and have been driven by ideological and cartographic anxieties about sovereignty in the Himalayas. These cartographic anxieties appear more complicated through a “voluminous” approach to territory that views bordering beyond territory merely located on the ground, and factors in aerial space for instance (Billé 2020; Kakati 2024; Krishna 1994). Thus, rethinking notions of territory and spatial fixations by re-examining the colonial legacies, contemporary tensions and intense militarization produced by them in the Himalayas warrants attention.

32The articles in this special issue deepen the historical understanding of such processes and the origins of borders in the Eastern Himalayas, offering new examples of their original instability and alternatives (Ghosh, Michael and Kakati). We provide instances of the conflicts that must arise out of the discordant tensions between bordering logics and borderland life (Namchu), as well as of the persistence of non-territorial conceptualization of the borderlands (Vandenhelsken). Each examines a specific region within the Eastern Himalayas over several decades: the early nineteenth century in the Indo-Nepalese border (Michael), 1820–1860 in present-day Arunachal Pradesh (Ghosh), the period of the Second World War along the Indo-Myanmar border (Kakati) in the 1940s, and from the establishment of current borders in the early nineteenth century to the present in West Bengal (Namchu) and Sikkim (Vandenhelsken).

33While attending to the spatial configurations of borderlanders and their engagement with statist ideologies and practices, we find that territory remains a central caveat. However, we aim to unsettle the spatial fixations by illustrating the contingency of how bordering also reflects a dynamic of projecting and contesting places. This calls for paying attention to the concerns of borderlanders as they intersect with the interests of agents of the state like administrators, bureaucrats, local elites, or military personnel.

DE-CENTERING BORDER TERRITORIALITY IN HIGHLAND ASIA

34Our collective approach acknowledges and builds on recent works. For example, Swargajyoti Gohain has highlighted the territorially discontinuous Himalayan “imagined geographies” of the Tibetan Buddhist Monpa community that straddled the modern boundaries of India, Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet (Gohain 2020a). She draws on Benedict Anderson’s (1991) notion of imagined communities, Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) idea of post-national geography and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of representational space to develop the idea of “non-territorial identities,” or shared identities that are not bound to a specific territory but are instead rooted in transnational allegiances and networks of connection sustained through shared practices of Tibetan Buddhism. Such alternative perspectives of shared transborder identities invoke imageries of a geographical “place,” but one that is not defined by territory. These projections are also carefully and strategically articulated without challenging the national territorial sovereignty of countries like India and China, as Gohain argues.

35Using ideas of “imagined space” opens up analytical room to move beyond a simple deconstruction of the presumed isomorphism between culture and territory (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), and to reassess the relationship between communities and the state. It enables reconsidering modes of construction of “cultures” or “identities” beyond the framework of the state, insofar as their existence often predates national borders—as is the case in the region under study, where borders were all drawn during the colonial period—and because these transnational allegiances have been continually reactivated despite those borders. The concept of “imagined (Himalayan) geographies” also highlights forms of identity and social relations that are not determined by the notion of territory itself. Gohain further contrasts her concept of imagined geography with that of moral geography, understood as a normalized national order to which identities must conform in order to be recognized by the state—an order closely tied to physical space. In this sense, these “imagined geographies” are not ethnic homelands, secessionist cartographies, or contiguous areas, but rather dispersed spaces constituted through shared practices and relational ties.

36Others like Saxer and Zhang (2017) have suggested that people living in regions cut by borders still experience a kind of connectivity that can be called “neighboring.” Here neighboring implies forms of intimacy and proximity that is not territorially circumscribed and remain fragile and ever-changing, from friendship and amity at one moment to hostility and antagonism at others (Saxer and Zhang 2017:15–16). Ghosh (2023) used the Bengali term Simanta Elaka to describe the Bangladesh-India borderlands to reflect a historical sensibility of how it became a connected place through a process of bordering. Bordering according to Ghosh, is neither severing of mobilities nor connection alone, but rather an interplay between the two. Like Ghosh, we connect the two notions of bordering and neighboring, for one, in Bengali, Assamese and related languages spoken in the region, these terms translate to Simanta (border) and Elaka (neighborhood). More significantly, we identify the tensions between imaginative and lived engagements with space, and the historical construction of neighbors and neighborhoods produced by bordering.

37The “alternative” or vernacular geographies thus examined in this special issue recall forms of spatial organization and divides, which do not appear on maps, such as the distinction between highlands and lowlands. Leach ([1954] 1970:20) described it as an ecological contrast, which also marked a cultural contrast. The latter has been developed in terms of “culture areas” and contact zones (Blackburn 2007). More recently, “Highland Asia” has been approached as a conceptual and analytical region grounded in shared ecological, infrastructural, and geopolitical characteristics. Unlike Zomia, which emphasized state evasion, mobility, and cultural autonomy, Highland Asia is defined by integration, intervention, and connectivity (Rippa, Murton, and Rest 2020). It is a heuristic tool that captures a set of ongoing economic and political transformations. Approaching the Himalayas through such a “Highland” perspective highlights the region’s “experience of being connected to the wider world,” and enables deconstructing its representation as a frontier (Saxer 2016:105). It reveals its “socioeconomic constellations inscribed in the particular terrain of the highlands” (Rippa, Murton, and Rest 2020:88).

38The special issue highlights the significance of adopting such a perspective “beyond territory” on the regions under study. Michael’s article examines the spatial inflections in the historical sources surrounding the territorial disputes that broke out between the English East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) in the nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time, the Gorkhalis were willing to reconsider this distinction when they recognized the value of the resource-rich lands of the plains, and made every effort to possess them until they were thwarted in these efforts by the English East India Company (Michael, this issue). While both sides held dissonant views on territorial sovereignty, their communications hid from view messy ground realities. This rendered their borderlands illegible. Michael’s paper suggests that the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814–1816) remains a diagnostic event marking the larger story whereby European colonization attempted to redefine the territorial frame of the state in South Asia.

39Ghosh’s article on the Siang Valley (modern Arunachal Pradesh) shows how colonial imperatives about security and trade reshaped not just the area but also the social lives, relations, and identities of its inhabitants. Between the 1830s and 1870s, colonial encounters with the Abors (Adis) and Miris (Mising)—marked by relocation, negotiation, and conflict—produced a contested frontier. Aimed at strategic and commercial expansion, these efforts ultimately failed to integrate hill tribes into colonial economic systems. This failure led to their marginalization and the region’s economic decline. As trade networks collapsed, colonial discourse recast the tribes as “savage,” reimagining the Siang Valley not as a productive zone but as a remote borderland defined by exclusion and imperial neglect.

40Kakati shows how British colonial state projects since the 19th century intellectually and ideologically produced the Indo-Burma frontier’s highlands as a “remote” and “barbaric” space. He unpacks the archival record to recover imagined trans-imperial connections fostered by a global war like the Second World War where inhabitants of the India-Myanmar colonial frontier sought more intimacy with the British colonial state, and explored alternative territorial orders for themselves aside from an Indian or Burmese nation-state. Yet, the contradictory impulses by state actors reproduced “remoteness” and closure of this region by intellectually and administratively using a trans-imperial circulating concept, namely, the frontier, which had a lasting legacy on postcolonial politics in shaping the region as an increasingly bordered zone.

41Finally, Namchu and Vandenhelsken show how colonial territorialization divided indigenous communities in the Darjeeling region and in Sikkim, short-circuiting older lifeways, patterns, and relationships. Namchu examines the assertions of the Lepcha in West Bengal as lyángdók (proprietors of the land), in relation to the claim for the prospective state of Gorkhaland within the federal structure of the Indian Nation-State in the 1980s and 2000s. He argues that the claims for Gorkhaland have relied on place-making strategies that reconfigured socio-political ordering, erasing indigenous claims, and resulting in the socio-political marginalization of the Lepchas. The demands for Gorkhaland have, in particular, exploited the ambiguous colonial legal and territorial status of the Darjeeling Hills, and recycled its spatial reordering of the region, whereas the Lepcha homeland cut-across regional and national borders. In response, Lepcha mobilizations reassert transborder belonging to Máyel Lyáng—the Lepcha homeland—challenging nation-state boundaries and majoritarian identity politics in the Eastern Himalayas.

42Vandenhelsken examines the long-term effects of the establishment of the Sikkim-Nepal border within the Limbu “native space.” This territorial division, along with the subsequent inclusion of the Limbu into the modern state led to their marginalization. Nevertheless, trans-border connections served as resources for Limbu cultural and political mobilization in Kalimpong in the 1920s. Drawing on the concepts of border “transfer” and “bordering,” Vandenhelsken shows how the border led to a religious division within the Limbu in Nepal and Sikkim as a result of a mobilization aiming at a greater integration of the community in the state apparatus. She analyzes this divide not just as an outcome of border-making but also as a means of territorialization. She argues as well that, despite these divisions, an observation of the spatial imagination of Limbu living in the Nepal-Sikkim borderlands highlights the resilience of their trans-border and “non-territorial” spatial imagination.

43The articles in this special issue also highlight the incomplete quality of colonial and post-colonial reclassifications of territory and people as they additionally unsettle assumptions about border life. In Ghosh’s and Kakati’s contributions, the transformation of spaces into borderlands reveals a story of colonial and post-colonial failures with lasting legacies. Ghosh’s reveals indeed that colonial attempts to classify, reclaim, and render productive the space of the Northeast ended up objectifying communities such as the Abors and Miris into “hill-tribes” and distinct from people living in the plains. The failure of “reclamation,” that is to say, to transform the hill tribes as productive subjects, led to the economic, social, and spatial marginalization of the borderlands: as trade and labor networks were disrupted in the region, colonial authorities portrayed hill tribes as inherently “savage,” ultimately transforming the Siang Valley into a borderland, through a process of imperial exclusion. Such a calculated project of differentiation rearranged the complex social world of the Siang Valley, rendering it into a borderworld still infused with new forms of local agency, resistance, and identity. Kakati shows that, first, the British failed to uphold their promises of self-determination to the borderland communities. Second, postcolonial India failed to integrate equitably what had become a highly globalized frontier, and border-making projects throughout this period continued the logic of keeping the edges of the nation-state remote. Kakati and Ghosh’s contributions ultimately reveal how colonial tropes registered landscapes and peoples on a continuum from primeval and elusive, to civilized and developed. These continued to be retailed by modern states and inform contemporary perceptions of the Northeast. In a similar line, Michael illustrates the incomplete negotiations on how to define territorial sovereignty in the early-colonial period resulted in the outbreak of war and the demarcation and enforcement of linear boundaries. Namchu and Vandenhelsken unpack how the regional campaigns for political representation and visibility pursued by the Gorkhas and Limbus led to the alignment of communities and of their living space within state borders, but also how the Lepchas and Limbus non-territorial imagination still continues to unsettle colonial and state spatial ordering.

44The territorial imagination of the colonial state had enduring legacies and provided powerful blueprints for postcolonial states to emulate and build on. There are teleological assumptions in the pioneering perspective offered by Adelman and Aron, that frontiers evolved into the ordered borderlands of nation-states (Adelman and Aron 1999). We depart from this telos and find that the logic of frontier governance remained open-ended with unpredictable consequences. Consequently, unpacking the contingent processes by which frontiers were imagined and incorporated within the nation-state deserves additional scrutiny. These stories of colonial and postcolonial borderlands remain deeply intertwined with significant consequences for their inhabitants. At the same time the impositions of the state never completely erased local agency and alternative views. They are a reminder that conceptual frameworks, colonial or academic, are invariably refracted through a social terrain that is too complex to contain. They highlight the enduring tensions and ongoing accommodations between competing concepts of space that stretch across the long arc of the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial.