Ladakh’s Transformation from a Connecting Bridge to a Borderland

In this edition of Sambandh Scholars Speak, Antara Ghosal Singh interviews Dr. Kyle Gardner on his book, “The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846-1962,” published by Cambridge University Press, 2021.

The book provides a comprehensive history of Ladakh’s encounter with the British Empire and describes the process of transformation of this “historical entrepôt” (p. 25), wherein the former “crossroads of commerce and cultural exchange” (p. 20) have been reduced to a modern, disputed borderland. It examines how the pre-colonial understandings of space and territory differed from the colonial state’s geopolitical vision of the world, where geography played the key role in state formation, rationalizing natural objects like mountains and rivers and using them as political tools (p. 5). It further narrates how the imperial state’s failure to demarcate the border became a troubled legacy for post-colonial nation-states, in this case India and China, which inherited the ideas of territory, border security and transformed the borders into “objects of existential significance” (p. 3).

At a time when India and China are locked in critical political and military stand-offs in Eastern Ladakh, the book is a must read to understand the complex history of Ladakh and its transformation from being a bridge between the plains of India and Central Asia, to becoming a deeply contested and heavily guarded territory between China and India.

Antara Ghosal Singh: In the book you have explored the idea of “multiple modes of seeing space for the precolonial inhabitants of Ladakh…” (p. 27) – like material, cosmological, political, and linguistic – and have argued that the “pre-colonial conception of space was more pluralistic than the subsequent political conception of space” (p. 28). How did you develop this “modes of seeing” concept?

Kyle Gardner: One of the aims of the book is to show how the colonial British encounter with the Himalayas brought about dramatic changes in conceptions of political space, not just in terms of Ladakh, but across South Asia and the broader postcolonial world. When the British created the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir in 1846, they set about attempting to define its territorial limits. In so doing, the boundary-making principles and practices they developed and applied were often at odds with local understandings of space, political or otherwise.

Having studied Ladakh’s history and lived there prior to delving into the colonial archives, I had a general sense of the lenses through which Ladakhis had historically conceived of the space they inhabited. These historical conceptions of space included, for instance, cosmological aspects tying together local deities and the landscape (mountains, streams, glaciers, or even trees). The spaces produced by these cosmological dimensions could overlap with, but remained distinct from, political conceptions of space tied to local rulers or monasteries and to tributary or customary relations between neighbouring polities.

I detailed four “modes of seeing” in my first chapter. Cosmological, material, political, and linguistic ties connected precolonial Ladakh to the broader Himalayan world, to Tibet, Central Asia, and the plains of India. I decided to focus specifically on the spatial aspect of these categories because, at its most abstract, the book examines the transformation of political space through colonial frontier and border making practices and ideas. This schema is, of course, not to say that precolonial Ladakhis didn’t see what we might see today in Ladakh (i.e. a mountain), but to suggest that the colonial encounter was – among many things – a conflict between different ways of conceiving of space and that the colonial “vision” was often at odds with a more complex Ladakhi one.

AGS: You discussed local challenges to the colonial state’s “static and enclosed vision of territory” (p. 158) in Ladakh, where “borderlines drawn on paper were often irrelevant to the lived experience of moving populations” (p. 177). Despite local opposition, the colonial map-making project succeeded eventually. What were its implications for local communities living in the borderlands and how did they respond to its impact?

KG: I’m not sure I would describe colonial map-making, at least in Ladakh, as having been particularly successful. The dispute between India and China today over the Aksai Chin is at least in part a result of incomplete and contradictory attempts by the British to survey and map the arid, uninhabited region now bisected by the Line of Actual Control. When, in 1954, Jawaharlal Nehru unilaterally decided to have India’s Himalayan borders marked as definite, he was enshrining a territorial claim that rested on limited surveys, most prominently a single “traverse survey” by William Johnson in 1865 that depicted a neat crescent of mountains that satellite images would later show does not exist. But in a practical sense the British attempts to define a border mattered very little for those who lived in the region or traversed the would-be frontier.

While the triennial trade mission from Leh to Lhasa known as the ‘Lopchak’ continued past 1947, the last trip, in 1950, consisted of only 4 people—a sign that the trade between Ladakh and Tibet was dying even before the Chinese occupation of Tibet severed ties.

British aspirations to cultivate trade through Ladakh to Central Asia and Tibet were eventually replaced with fears about unwanted “trans-frontier men” crossing into India, although they weren’t particularly effective at deterring local traffic. Trade declined in the first half of the 20^th century, but this was driven by changing economic relations within Central Asia and the opening of new routes to Tibet as much as by limited policing of the imperial frontier. While the triennial trade mission from Leh to Lhasa known as the ‘Lopchak’ continued past 1947, the last trip, in 1950, consisted of only 4 people—a sign that the trade between Ladakh and Tibet was dying even before the Chinese occupation of Tibet severed ties.

Colonial policies rarely interfered in the everyday lives of Ladakhis. When they did, it was often in the form of disputes over where taxes were owed. This was most evident among those who moved between Ladakh and Tibet, usually pastoralists or traders who were sought by one local governor or another for unpaid taxes or duties. There are a number of these cases in the colonial record, which provide a window into the problem of defining the frontier in eastern Ladakh. There, on the high-altitude Changthang Plateau, the geographical border-making principles used by the British in much of the Himalaya could not be effectively applied. But apart from those instances of jurisdictional uncertainty, the full impact of the colonial map-making project was only felt after 1947, when the government of India inherited maps that were in some cases literally borderless. But this did not affect border communities until a de facto borderline was imposed on the region after 1962.

AGS: Do you think the present state of the border between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China is more a result of actions taken by these two states in the last 70 years, or due to actions by the 19^th and 20^th century Englishmen in the subcontinent and Tibet?

KG: This is a difficult question because both sets of actors had major, but very different, roles to play. The current state of tensions along the disputed border is most directly the result of actions taken on the part of the leaders of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China in the decade or so that preceded the 1962 war. Those decisions, by Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai, and their many subordinates, have ossified in subsequent decades. But many of the conditions for those actions taken between Indian independence and the 1962 war stretch back into the colonial era.

Historians love counterfactuals, and in one scenario or another it is quite possible to imagine Zhou and Nehru agreeing to jointly demarcate the border in the 1950s, particularly in the aftermath of the agreement on Tibet signed in 1954 and the resulting goodwill that it generated. Ambassador Nirupama Rao’s recent book vividly highlights the degree to which India had leverage over China in the early 1950s and it might have been possible for Nehru and Zhou to agree to mutually define the shared border. But Nehru chose not to raise the issue forcefully, in part because India inherited a set of assumptions about its territory from the British, whether outlined in treaty, marked on maps, or assumed “by custom.” By taking Tibet by force, China had a weaker claim to its political legitimacy in the Himalayas than India did, but that also pushed China to exert more aggressive administrative control, which proved militarily advantageous for them.

But your question also raises that quintessential historical debate: what drives history – people or processes? And, of course, the simple answer is both. But on balance, I’d say that processes and structures have more durable effects. On the Indian side, the decisions that Nehru took towards China rested on certain structural assumptions about the territorial and legal claims that India inherited form the British. The actions taken by the British in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries constrained the actions that the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China could take post-1947, but did not wholly determine them.  Nehru and Zhou, and subsequent leaders, could have pushed to mutually demarcate the border. And the choice to do so remains, even if the historical inertia now in place does make that choice significantly harder.

AGS: The India-China border crisis of 2020 is playing out in Ladakh. You bring out vividly how the securitisation of the frontier that the British began has been continued incessantly by both India and China leading to a crisis situation. How can policy-makers course correct and reverse these trends set in motion by the colonial government? Can India leverage its relations with local communities living in the borderlands to counter China in the current context?

KG: The securitization of the frontier that began during the colonial period certainly was accelerated after independence, and particularly after the war in 1962. However, even before 1962, India and China were jockeying for influence among Himalayan borderland communities, a process described as “shadowing” by the historian Bérénice Guyot-Réchard. She used the term, drawn from the parliamentary system practice of having “shadow” governments, to describe the historical dynamics between India and China along the northeastern border in present-day Arunachal Pradesh. Once it consolidated power in Tibet, China had certain advantages over India, both infrastructurally and geographically—holding the high ground of the Tibetan Plateau.

India’s democratic values are its greatest policy asset when it comes to better incorporating borderland communities into its body politic.

In general, India has treated the Himalayan populations it governs far better than China has treated those within Tibet. But India continues to struggle in the northeast, as we’ve recently witnessed in Nagaland. From a policy perspective, Delhi should be wary of continuing to apply laws, such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), that promote the image of the Indian military as occupiers. Even if India continues to secure its territory, if borderland communities come to see Delhi as essentially an occupying or otherwise oppressive force, it will have failed to bring these communities into the fold of the republic. That is China’s great policy failure in Tibet: it controls the territory, but it has turned the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) into a deeply repressive police state in order to do so. India’s democratic values are, frankly, its greatest policy asset when it comes to better incorporating borderland communities into its body politic.

AGS: Your research makes use of distinct local and linguistic sources from pre-colonial Ladakhi archives. How significant are these regional archives to improve our understanding of Ladakh and move beyond the conventional, security-driven narratives on borderlands?

If we want to better understand the histories of India’s borderlands, we need to encourage local scholarship and ensure that local archives are funded, preserved, and kept accessible for scholars.

KG: The short answer is that local archives and local scholars are essential to understanding the histories of borderlands. Given that the focus of much of my book was on the colonial period, I necessarily drew heavily from the British colonial archive, which is voluminous and relatively well preserved in both the National Archives of India in Delhi and various state archives. Sources from the erstwhile princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, many in Persian and Urdu, also exist in archives in Jammu, Srinagar, and Leh, though in smaller volumes than the British records. Local Ladakhi sources are even less plentiful, especially when compared to the mountains of English-language sources. But they are extremely important. These include monastery records, documented oral traditions, religious biographies (rnam thar), and of course the royal chronicles of Ladakh – the la dwags rgyal rabs. If we want to better understand the histories of India’s borderlands, we need to encourage local scholarship and ensure that local archives are funded, preserved, and kept accessible to scholars. As you rightly note, we need to go deeper than the standard narratives on borderlands, which too often ignore the rich, varied, and complex histories of these communities.

About the author:

Dr. Kyle Gardner is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University. His first book, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846-1962, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2021.