Linear Borders, Partition and Identity in Postcolonial South Asia

ABSTRACT

This paper critiques the legitimisation of linear borders in mainstream international relations (IR) through a focus on postcolonial South Asia. It brings insights from political geography in conversation with IR, making three key arguments: 1. The knowledge production on bordering in postcolonial South Asia remains trapped within the cognitive confines of linear bordering 2. Problematising linear bordering can therefore lead to newer critical questions about partition/bordering in South Asia, such as: is there a way to delink democracy and political independence from linear and precisely defined territorial borders? 3. Linear bordering in South Asia has been constitutive of the identities it aimed to isolate. The paper builds its arguments from an IR perspective and relies on IR’s treatment of borders, and scholarship on state formation and partition in postcolonial South Asia, to make its case. The paper understands linear borders as straight lines connecting a series of dots on a map in a way that one territory can only fall into one polity. This linear bordering was first attempted by colonial powers in Africa and then transported to other parts of the world. In South Asia, it produced reification of identities thus making divisions of territories appear as simple solutions to vastly complex challenges of identity formation.

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous peer-reviewers and the editor Reece Jones at Geopolitics, all of whom gave kind, valuable and detailed feedback that helped me improve this paper. Many thanks to Anne Mishkind who read multiple drafts of the paper and helped me at various stages of writing. I thank Julia Adams and Jayati Srivastava, my advisers at Yale University and Jawaharlal Nehru University respectively, who have always provided kind words of encouragement. Thank you to Steven Wilkinson, Emily Erikson, Brent J. Steele, Rey Koslowski, Felix Pal, Paolo Sosa Villagarcia, Joy Wang, Nica Siegel, Viet Trinh, Fleachta Phelan, Iffat Rashid, Isha Sharma, Anna Kim and Hanan Qureshi who provided help, comments and suggestions at various stages.

Notes

1. This paper uses O’Leary’s (2007) definitions for the concepts partition and secession. He defines the term partition as ‘a fresh border cut through at least one community’s national homeland, creating at least two separate political units under different sovereigns or authorities.’ He proceeds to argue that partition involves border adjustment while secession involves border transformation (emphases original). He defines secession as ‘the breakup of the prior sovereign entity and the conversion of the previously agreed (internal) border to a sovereign demarcation.’

2. See Lapid (2001) for outline of a research agenda that aims to link the concepts of identity, borders and order in IR research.

3. My use of ‘natural borders’ is different from what is understood from the ‘natural borders thesis’. This thesis was an outcome of the rise of modernity in the colonial period and argued that the ‘natural’ borders of nations must be scientifically determined and demarcated. For more on this, see Popescu (2012). This idea, now debunked in political geography, still persists in other fields of scholarship. See Fall (2010) for a refutation of the ‘natural borders thesis’.

4. To see what maps of colonised Africa drawn by European colonizers looked like in the absence of linear borders, see figures 1–3 in Goettlich (2019, 204). These include colonial maps of Africa from 1853, 1875 and 1893.

5. See Butalia (2000) for a compilation of oral-histories of the partition.

6. ‘Panchayati raj’ refers to administration by village-level governing bodies.

7. ‘Panchayat’ refers to village level governing body.

8. For more information on these alternative imaginaries of independent India, see Austin (1966); Jalal and Seal (1981); Jalal (Jalal 1985, 1995); Corbridge and Harriss (2000); Jodhka (2012).

9. The term ‘communal’ in Indian usage carries a negative meaning, and refers to tensions and hostility between communities, usually those of different religions.

10. See Chatterji (1999) for a detailed account of how Hindu and Muslim identities and the partition interacted during the Bengal provincial assembly vote on partition in June 1947.

11. See Fall (2010) for a rebuttal to contemporary research in some disciplines that continues to employ this flawed logic of nations and territories being coterminous.

12. See Table 4.1 in Van Schendel (2005) for information on the slow demarcation of the Bengal border from 1947–2003. Border stones were first laid in the Bengal borderland in 1950 (Jones 2014).

13. ‘Bihari’ refers to a person from Bihar, a state in India which borders the Indian state of West Bengal.

14. See Jones (2009) for a detailed account of the complicated history of Cooch Behar and the enclaves.

15. See Ferdoush (2019b) for a detailed analysis of the symbolic value the enclaves held in the nationalistic discourses of India and Bangladesh, despite the fact that they did not hold much economic value for these two states.

16. For more on the complexity of the identity question facing postcolonial India and Pakistan, see Hasan (2000a), Austin (2003) and Bhalla (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Fox Fellowship at Yale University 2019-20.