From frontier-making to world-making: The enduring power of frontiers in South Asia

Abstract

This article examines the social and geopolitical power of frontiers. For some, frontiers are viewed relatively narrowly as markers of physical territory, and as relics of a past imperial age. We build on ‘critical’ or ‘revisionist’ frontier study which sees frontiers as persistent and regenerative forces of social practice that give meaning to the landscape and its inhabitants. With a focus on South Asia, and India's Northeast in particular, we show that while frontiers may appear to have disappeared they can be remade in the interests of modern hegemonic power and neo-colonising policies, sometimes within the territorial borders of nation states but between imagined worlds of civilisation and barbarism which the frontiers themselves help to define and create. This can be achieved through an ‘imperial sleight of hand’, whereby frontiers of history can be co-opted and refashioned including by post-colonial states and institutions in the service of contemporary political practice. Thus, frontiers commonly represent (manufactured) opportunities for the consolidation or advancement of power, more than challenges to be resolved or overcome. In line with the focus of this special issue, we argue that this gives frontiers the contemporary world-making capacity to permit and foreclose particular lives and subjectivities, and that racialising frontier logics play out even within the so-called ‘non-white’ or majority world.