Transborder People, Connected History: Border and Relationships in the Indo-Burma Borderlands

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the perspective of “transborder peoples” who constitute the minority in the states in which they live but have “connected history.” It probes how indigenous notions of space, territory, and identity had been displaced, reconfigured and fragmented by colonial map-making, territoriality, and classifications in the Indo-Burma borderlands, a less known “peripheral” area which has for far too long been only seen from the perspective of the colonial and postcolonial states. The paper examines to what extent are the Indo-Burma borderlands a space where one can see decay and revival of relationships among the transborder people. Moving beyond state-centric conceptions of the border as “fixed lines,” the paper gives emphasis on the “duality” or “paradoxical character” of the borderlands. It argues that while colonial and postcolonial borders divided indigenous communities thereby creating “difference” or “otherness,” it also “unifies” and facilitates revival of relationships among the “transborder peoples” through dialogue, interaction and exchange across the border. It is a case study of the Zo people of the Indo-Burma borderlands.

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this paper. This paper is part of my Post-Doctoral research project titled Transborder community: History and future possibility of dialogue beyond borders. I am grateful to the University Grants Commission, New Delhi for granting me the Raman Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Indian Scholars in the United States (2014–15) to pursue a year-long research at Arizona State University (ASU), Arizona, USA. I must thank Yasmin Saikia, my mentor in ASU, for her able guidance, selfless encouragement and continuing support during my research and stay in Arizona. To Juliane Schober, Chad Haines, Mark Woodward and Kham Khan Suan Hausing, I owe them a great debt of gratitude for helping me in various ways. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at various international conferences such as the Annual Conference on South Asia, 2016, Madison, International Conferences on Northeast India at Gangtok (Sikkim, India) in 2016 and at Tezpur (Assam, India) in 2018 respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.