Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816) (Anthem Modern South Asian History) - Hardcover

Michael, Bernardo A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 085728519X ISBN 13: 9780857285195

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2012

Synopsis

“Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816)” seeks to understand how European colonization transformed the organization of territory in South Asia through an examination of the territorial disputes that underlay the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816 and subsequent efforts of the colonial state to reorder its territories. The volume argues that these disputes arose out of older tribute, taxation and property relationships that left their territories perpetually intermixed and with ill-defined boundaries. It also seeks to describe the long-drawn-out process of territorial reordering undertaken by the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that set the stage for the creation of a clearly defined geographical template for the modern state in South Asia.

About this title

About the Author

Bernardo A. Michael is an associate professor of history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, where he is also the Special Assistant to the President and Provost, for Diversity Affairs.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Statemaking and Territory in South Asia

Lessons from the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816)

By Bernardo A. Michael

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 Bernardo A. Michael
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-519-5

Contents

List of Maps, Plates and Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Abbreviations, xvii, 
Chapter 1 Statemaking, Cultures of Governance and the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816, 1, 
Chapter 2 The Agrarian Environment and the Production of Space on the Anglon–Gorkha Frontier, 17, 
Chapter 3 The Champarann–Tarriaini Frontier, 31, 
Chapter 4 The Gorakhpurn–Butwal Frontier, 49, 
Chapter 5 The Disjointed Spaces of Precolonial Territorial Divisions, 67, 
Chapter 6 Making States Legible: Maps, Surveys and Boundaries, 87, 
Chapter 7 Conclusion, 123, 
Glossary, 129, 
Notes, 137, 
Archival Sources, 197, 
Bibliography, 201, 
Index, 221, 

CHAPTER 1

STATEMAKING, CULTURES OF GOVERNANCE AND THE ANGLO–GORKHA WAR OF 1814–1816

The word [state] commonly denotes no class of objects that can be identified exactly, and for the same reason it signifies no list of attributes which bears the sanction of common usage.

— George Sabine

[...] we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny.

— Doreen Massey

1. Approaching States and Statemaking

It was the start of a warm day in the month of Jeyt in 2046 BS (May/June 1989 CE) when I awoke at 4.00am to undertake the six-hour trek to the Indian border. I had been living in a small town, in Far Western Nepal, teaching in a public school and now had to travel to Delhi to repair school equipment and purchase textbooks. I trudged along under the weight of a backpack full with nearly thirty mismatched pounds of damaged machine parts, punctured soccer balls and books in need of binding. As the day headed purposefully towards its consummation in a scorching finale of 110 degree Fahrenheit, I broke for a cup of tea along the Mohana River which marked the Indo – Nepal boundary. Always a porous zone of flows, this section of the Indo – Nepal boundary had been a mobile space attracting traders, migrant labor, smugglers and tourists alike. That day, however, the Nepali guards were out, armed, vigilant as they gazed across the river at the outpost of their Indian counterparts. I unpacked my bags for the guards to rummage through. When they discovered I was a teacher, they quickly waved me on. I received the same treatment on the other side of the river where there was an unusual buzz of activity on what should have been a quiet and uneventful day. All of a sudden the border had come alive and the boundary that had been irreverently crossed all these days was now being carefully monitored, especially by the Indian side. This was a tense time in the relations between the two neighbors. The Indo – Nepal Trade and Transit treaties had expired and the Indian government had imposed an economic blockade on Nepal by sealing the borders. At such times a tighter regime of discipline and control ensued with new protocols of crossing, examination, and scrutiny. It felt as if the boundary which had always seemed like an imaginary line on the ground had suddenly been reincarnated into a real wall of separation. Out of all the innumerable boundary crossings I made during my nearly eight year stay in Nepal, these remain most vividly ingrained in my imagination – signifying the boundary as both porous and impermeable.

This book is a historical account of the emergence of the Anglo–Gorkha boundary set against a wider backdrop of colonial territorial formation. It bridges two distinct but dispersed historical junctures where the idea of the modern state as a geographically discernible and territorially circumscribed entity emerged in colonial South Asia. Firstly, it examines the territorial disputes that emerged along the common frontiers of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company that eventually led to the outbreak of the Anglo–Gorkha War in 1814. I suggest that at the heart of these disputes were questions pertaining to the geographical construction of the state, more specifically the precise location and layout of territorial divisions along the shared frontier of the two states. These disputes coalesced around older tribute, taxation and tenurial claims that left their territories perpetually intermixed with ill-defined boundaries. Following the defeat of the Gorkhalis in 1816, the Company's officials surveyed the frontier to establish a linear boundary that would clearly demarcate their respective territories. Secondly, this book also argues that such exercises in colonial boundary formation formed part of a long-drawn process whereby the colonial state, through various cartographic projects and changes in administrative routines, rearranged its internal administrative divisions in an attempt to create the geographical template of the modern state – occupying a definite portion of the earth's surface and divided into non-overlapping divisions and sub-divisions. The Gorkhali state would initiate similar proceedings only in the twentieth century.

The observation of the historical sociologist Michael Mann, that "societies are much messier than our theories of them," could very easily be applied to the study of the state and the messy middle ground that marks state–society relations. It is at this middle ground, where abstractions such as "state" and "society" break down to reveal their form in terms of process rather than some fixed unyielding structure, that the study of statemaking can be located. Consequently, statemaking calls for the study of the complex embroidery of social forces that make up the middle ground between the state and society and the negotiated and contingent manner in which these forces are produced, sustained and transformed through time. Furthermore, and from the standpoint of this study, the role of culture, power, space and history in shaping processes of statemaking is clearly acknowledged. Such an approach to statemaking reveals the finest local details in all their complexity, while balancing them with broad generalizations of dominant trends and patterns.

Within the specific context of South Asian history the state has been an object of scholarly scrutiny. Many studies traversing the length and breadth of the subcontinent's history have generated a rich palette of histories and interpretations of states and statemaking. Here, states and statemaking have been defined and interpreted in terms of an intersecting array of political, economic, ideological, environmental and cultural forces. This has led to the study of military and bureaucratic institutions, agrarian systems, long-distance trade, nationalism, the environment, colonial constructions of knowledge and subaltern life. Given this context, studies on statemaking emerging from South Asia continue to evolve in new and innovative directions – questioning received wisdom on the subject and pursuing interdisciplinary agendas that are sensitive to the socio-cultural complexity expressed through the nuances, vagaries and varieties of human agency. On this point, the state of history writing in modern Nepal deserves special comment. Over the last fifty years or so, scholars have mined archival repositories to produce historical works on the Nepali state that are varying in their range and quality. These mostly nationalist accounts have explored themes of administration, diplomacy, national unification, politics, war and the activities of famous personalities. The pathbreaking work of historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi has yielded rich descriptions of general administration, land distribution and taxation, the nature of the state, trade, production and resource mobilization commencing from the late eighteenth century onwards. However, there have been few attempts to replicate or expand on his work. These scattered and uneven writings on the Nepali state underscore the continuing need for "greater pluralism in history writing practices" and conversations between its practitioners.

2. Statemaking, Cultures of Governance, Space

Recent studies on statemaking have profited immensely from gains made in theorizing the cultural turn in the humanities. These new approaches have called for a processoriented view of the state and statemaking discerned in terms of complex intertwined strands of historically unfolding meanings and practices. Such a view rests on a notion of culture that is structurally implicated yet continually emergent, and simultaneously ordered and disordered, as it incessantly triangulates with forces such as power and history. Taking a process-oriented approach to culture blends the older antinomies of continuity and change to conceive of social reality in terms of finely woven, layered and difficult-to-parse webs of signs and meaningful practices – constituting a blurred and boundless world that is given shape by language, institutions and power. The heuristic ambitions of such a view are balanced by a refusal to reinstate an omnibus notion of culture that can be universally applied over time and space. That is, cultural approaches to statemaking need to be carefully designed and calibrated to engage the questions posed by specific research agendas, which in the case of this book is statemaking and the organization of territory along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier in colonial South Asia (see Map 1.1).

Informed by such a perspective, this book seeks to examine how specific cultures of governance – meanings and practices of rule concerning a range of agrarian entitlements – determined territorial organization along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier. Such cultures of governance crystallized around the complex territorializing strategies individuals and groups employed to "affect, influence and control access to [entitlements involving] people, things, and relationships." These entitlements, when viewed in terms of land tenures, may be provisionally divided into malguzari (arising out of revenue collection arrangements), khidmatguzari (service tenures) and maafi (tax-free) tenures. Intricately woven into such rights to "enjoy" the fruits of the land were whole systems of customary privileges concerning rights to exercise authority, exact fees and services, and bear titles, objects, emblems and honors. It follows that these entitlements, which were simultaneously symbolic and material in their manifestations, found expression in maneuverings over resources such as land, labor, water, forests, markets, commodities and capital. Such rights, which went by various names, were enjoyed on a hereditary basis or bestowed by some superior authority or overlord – such as the Mughal emperor, high-ranking officials, petty chieftains and landlords. This created hierarchies of political relationships that were prone to frequent realignments arising out of the vagaries of statemaking. Such a conflicted structure of entitlements and shifting hierarchical political relationships formed the deep-seated institutional infrastructure of territorial governance and animated the histories of the little kingdoms that straddled the Anglo–Gorkha frontier, such as Gulmi, Argha, Kanchi, Pyuthan, Tanahu, Makwanpur, Palpa and Bettiah. Consequently, when Gorkha and the Company state acquired the territories of these little kingdoms, they also inherited an older history of entitlements and territorial disputes whose significance for our understanding of the Anglo–Gorkha War has never been fully explored. While colonial and postcolonial scholars have written histories of such agrarian rights and privileges, they have rarely examined them for the spatial or territorial implications arising out of the dynamic ways in which they were accessed, maintained, reconfigured and even lost. Consequently, such rights and privileges remained prone to frequent fluctuations in their definitions, terms and territorial extent. These fluctuations triggered commensurate rearrangements and mutations in the boundaries and layout of the parent territorial units they were housed within. These precolonial territorial divisions such as parganas, tappas, tarafs, and mouzas ccame to possess intermixe bodies and discontinuous boundaries. Consequently, in the first half of the book, I seek to trace the connections between such themes and the production of territory along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier.

A crucial dimension of statemaking is manifest in the struggles surrounding the capacity of states and their agents to bind and mark space or territory. Spatiality is the common thread that connects the study of statemaking to cultures of governance and territoriality. In recent years, space, which has for a long time been the compelling object of study for geographers, has witnessed a reassertion in social theory. In this book I define space in terms of the organization and layout of territory, and not some neutral stage or container on or in which life unfolds. Rather, it is a dynamic entity produced out of a shifting ensemble of meanings, practices and interrelationships involving human communities, institutions (such as the state) and struggles to define and control resources. Space is historically produced, being made manifest at distinct times and places by embodied human agents interacting with each other and their environments. Space does not sit apart from and above the local situatedness of place. Rather, the production of space is the history of the thrown-togetherness and interpenetration of space and place. Such a conception of space, as detailed in this book, views the production of territory as a power-laden, culturally determined, contentious process involving access to resources, both material and symbolic, that are derived from agrarian environments. Ultimately, connecting cultures of governance to their agrarian environments through the pursuit of questions of space affords an opportunity to write histories of territory that evade the passive metageographical constructions of area studies approaches.

The existence of this rich body of writing on space has produced a renewed interest in the historical production of territory and especially in the efforts of states to manage, organize and bind territory. Historian Thongchai Winichakul's groundbreaking study of the emergence of Siam as a territorial entity – or "geo-body" – has shown how the Southeast Asian kingdom of Siam completed the colonization of neighboring kingdoms not just through conquest but also by incorporating them into the singular territorial representation of the state on modern maps. This territorial representation became an important symbol of Siamese unity and identity which hid from view its multifarious and contested history of territorial relations with numerous smaller kingdoms, prior to their incorporation into Siam. This book builds on the insights of Thongchai's work, but seeks to go further by taking a closer look at the contested territorial relationships involving various polities along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier. By examining the cultures of governance that produced territory along this frontier, I seek to give greater agency to the local and regional actors who are often lost in the nationalist-driven narratives of the Anglo–Gorkha War or of Siamese state-formation. Such "non-state spaces" – of local power, action and influence – that resisted the centralizing thrust of political elites reveal the highly nuanced and variable character of processes of statemaking. Consequently, the Anglo–Gorkha frontier became a borderland made up of dynamic, shifting and hard-to-govern territories – a fact that has eluded most studies of the war.

To conclude, the notion of cultures of governance was also designed with the intention of creating a framework that would make territorial sense of the structure of entitlements and many multi-cornered contests that took place over agrarian resources along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier. Consequently, the large number of territorial disputes that broke out on this frontier between 1760 and 1814 crystallized mainly around diffuse relationships of power, as they unfolded unevenly across the boundaries of caste, kinship and ethnicity. Numerous agents, located at multiple levels, constantly undertook situational adjustments that produced shifts in existing configurations of culture, power, history and space. Competing agents sought to exploit the indeterminacies of their situations by reinterpreting or redefining the rules that gave them access to and control over agrarian entitlements. Such strategies generated conflict and indeterminacy in social interactions and plasticity in territorial arrangements. They form the subject matter of the next three chapters.

3. Spatiality and the Study of Cartographic History

Ever since the English East India Company acquired territory in 1765, it had been confronted with the persistent puzzle of discovering the layout, internal organization and limits of its territories. Company officials struggled to come to terms with the intermixture, overlaps and fluid boundaries of its territories. Without this territorial knowledge, the colonial state's capacity to tax its subjects, impose law and establish order was severely blunted. This problem was accentuated all along its frontiers with neighboring states, and not just along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier. In 1818, George Dowdeswell, the vice-president of the Company's governing council at Calcutta echoed the sentiments of many Company officials when he observed: "We have almost daily experience of the very defective state of our geographical information in many parts of our own territories and of the serious inconveniences and embarassments arising from this cause in the conduct of ordinary affairs of the administration." Dowdeswell's comment is a reminder of how colonial anxieties about clearly defined territories reflected a wider and more ubiquitous drive to parse, reorder and systematize life in the colony. At the heart of empire lay a tremendous concern for things spatial – in rearranging territory, relationships, objects and bodies. This book seeks to unearth these spatial anxieties to reveal how they nourished processes of statemaking and territorial production along the Anglo–Gorkha frontier.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 085728519X
• ISBN 13: 9780857285195
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 250