Where National and International Meet: Borders and Border Regions in Postcolonial India

Upon achieving independence, India’s borders had to be institutionalized – given meaning and made visible – in order to make clear the state’s power to its neighbours, the international community, and its own citizens. But institutionalizing border regions proved far more complicated. Following independence, Indian leaders continued to rely on imperial practices to subdue and integrate border communities, claiming these communities as subjects yet often treating them as outsiders who needed to be forcibly incorporated. This article specifically examines the political reorganization of northeastern India, during the first three decades of independence, to consider the interrelationship between India’s foreign and domestic policies – its ‘intermestic’ affairs. The top-down creation of a unique regional governing structure reflected, on one hand, the exigencies of India’s foreign relations – tensions with China, Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Burma – and, on the other, the perceived otherness of the region’s inhabitants. While establishing the bureaucratic structures that officially linked the northeast to India’s heartland, Indian leaders also institutionalized mechanisms that continued to treat the region as a space apart, a space not entirely Indian but not entirely foreign. Ultimately, this paper interrogates the boundaries between the national and the international, the colonial and the postcolonial, in post-1947 India.