This book provides a comprehensive analysis of historical, geo-political and strategic perspectives on the Himalayan Frontiers of India. It explains the developments in and across the Himalayas and their implications for India. Topics such as religious extremism, international and cross border terrorism, insurgency, drugs and arms trafficking are discussed.

The Himalaya, which is a great natural frontier for India, symbolises India’s spiritual and national consciousness. The Himalayan region displays wide diversity of cultural patterns, languages, ethnic identities and religious practices. Along the Himalayas converge the boundaries of South and Central Asian countries, which lend a unique geopolitical and geo-strategic importance to this region. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of historical, geo-political and strategic perspectives on the Himalayan Frontiers of India. Drawing on detailed analyses by academics and area specialists, it explains the developments in and across the Himalayas and their implications for India. Topics such as religious extremism, international and cross border terrorism, insurgency, drugs and arms trafficking are discussed by experts in their respective field. Himalayan Frontiers of India will be of interest to scholars in South and Central Asian studies, International Relations and Security Studies.

Drawing from extensive archival work and long-term ethnographic research, this book focuses on the so-called Bhotiyas, former trans-Himalayan traders and a Scheduled Tribe of India who reside in several high valleys of the Kumaon Himalaya. The area is located in the border triangle between India, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR, People’s Republic of China), and Nepal, where contestations over political boundaries have created multiple challenges as well as opportunities for local mountain communities. Based on an analytical framework that is grounded in and contributes to recent advances in the field of border studies, the author explores how the Bhotiyas have used their agency to develop a flourishing trans-Himalayan trade under British colonial influence; to assert an identity and win legal recognition as a tribal community in the political setup of independent India; and to innovate their pastoral mobility in the context of ongoing state and market reforms. By examining the Bhotiyas’ trade, identity and mobility this book shows how and why the Himalayan border region has evolved as an agentive site of political action for a variety of different actors.

This book explores Sino-Indian tensions from the angle of state-building, showing how they stem from their competition for the Himalayan people's allegiance.

Reveals how British imperial border-making in the Himalayas transformed a crossroads into a borderland and geography into politics.

The collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates 50 million years ago created the Himalaya, along with massive glaciers, intensified monsoon, turbulent rivers, and an efflorescence of ecosystems. Today, the Himalaya is at risk of catastrophic loss of life. Maharaj Pandit outlines the mountain’s past in order to map a way toward a sustainable future.

This is an ethnographic and ecological history of Dolpo, a culturally Tibetan region in western Nepal. Bauer describes Dolpo since the 1950s and traces how pastoralists living in the trans-Himalaya have adapted to sweeping changes in their economic, political and cultural circumstances.

An innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of British India. Thomas Simpson considers the role of frontier officials as surveyors, cartographers and ethnographers, military violence in frontier regions and the impact of the frontier experience on colonial administration.

With original case studies of a more than a dozen countries, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonisation. As colonies became independent states (and European countries, and other colonial powers, lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonisation, republicanism and radicalism. These studies place dynasties – both European and ‘native’ – at the centre of debate about decolonisation and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies and the ‘white rajahs’ of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonisation and of the history of modern monarchy.