Spectres of agrarian territory in southern India

Abstract

The national imagination has had a long, productive career as our guide to historical research, but other modes of thought now need more nurturing. National maps mechanise research by putting all our data in their pre-assigned place. Spaces that elude the national sensibility disappear when scholars heap data from all times and places into national containers. All histories of the peoples in the world currently appear in the cage of some national past or another, but some need their own space. It is a pressing challenge to imagine at least some history in nonnational terms, particularly for scholars who want to write about old geographies that became spectres in a world of nations. These old geographies are spectral in several senses. Archaic and out of place in the present, they seem imaginary and only make sense inside routines of national mapping. Some are quaint and benign but others are scary spooks that conjure up places outside the national order of things. Eerie ghosts emerge when old geographies refuse to die yet resist substantiation. Some old and barely visible regions of human activity remain vital for people inside them. Spaces that offend national sensibilities stimulate intense cartographic anxiety, as for example among the Indian officials who censor and regulate the circulation of maps depicting ’border areas’ and ’sensitive regions’. Pakhtun territory, Bengali Assam, and Tamil IndoLanka are but three of the many old historical spaces whose living legacies haunt nations in South Asia.