Graduate Student, History
PhD candidate
Trinity College
Thesis Title: Decolonisation and State-Building on India's North-East Frontier, c1942-1962
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Dr Joya Chatterji
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About
THESIS SUMMARY
Decades after the last big wave of decolonisation, the legacy of colonialism remains an enduring source of conflict. Border regions are often at the heart of these challenges. Through the prism of state- and nation-building on one of India’s key frontiers, this thesis interrogates the nature of the post-colonial nation-state and the difficult relationship it entertains with some of its populations. On the eve of independence, India's North-East Frontier Agency (the mountainous borderlands between Bhutan, Tibet, and Burma) was a largely un-administered and in places barely explored territory. This thesis analyses attempts to expand state presence locally and to ensure that the population – whose ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and linguistic affiliations were more with Tibet and Southeast Asia – became “Indian”. It re-assesses World War II as a foundational moment for north-eastern India, and shows that subsequent state-building was a fragmented, contingent, and contradictory process in which local populations played a crucial role. Yet the expansion of the state was not accompanied by a parallel emotional integration into the Indian nation, on the contrary. This thesis therefore cautions against seeing nation-building and state-building as necessarily congruent phenomena.
