Mobile Subjects, Markets, and Sovereignty in the India-Nepal Borderland, 1780-1930
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Shifting States: Mobile Subjects, Markets, and Sovereignty in the India-Nepal Borderland, 1780-1930 Catherine Warner A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Committee: Anand Yang, Chair Purnima Dhavan Priti Ramamurthy Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History © Copyright 2014 Catherine Warner University of Washington Abstract Shifting States: Mobile Subjects, Markets, and Sovereignty in the India-Nepal Borderland, 1780-1930 Catherine Warner Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Anand Yang International Studies and History This dissertation analyzes the creation of the India-Nepal borderland and changing terms of sovereignty, subjectivity and political belonging from the margins of empire in South Asia from 1780 to 1930. I focus on particular instances of border crossing in each chapter, beginning with the exile of deposed sovereigns of small states that spanned the interface of the lower Himalayan foothills and Gangetic plains in the late eighteenth century. The flight of exiled sovereigns and the varied terms of their resettlement around the border region—a process spread over several decades—proved as significant in defining the new borderland between the East India Company and Nepal as the treaty penned after the Anglo-Nepal War of 1814 to 1816. Subsequent chapters consider cross-border movements of bandits, shifting cultivators, soldiers, gendered subjects, laborers, and, later, a developing professional class who became early Nepali nationalist spokesmen. Given that the India-Nepal border remained open without a significant military presence throughout the colonial and even into the contemporary period, I argue that ordinary people engaged with and shaped forms of political belonging and subject status through the always present option of mobility. While excluded from formal politics in Nepal and India, non- elites used mobility as an effective threat and practice when petitioning various intermediaries and government officers for limited rights. These claims structured a different relationship between sovereign and subject than found in the developing liberal tradition in the west—such claims rested upon mobility (or self-governance of the body as migrant and entrepreneurial political subject often with supposed connections to a real or potential non-state community) rather than the supposed autonomy of individual property owners. My interdisciplinary analysis rests on a thick engagement with colonial and Nepali state archives as well as Nepali literature to illuminate a history of empire from below in South Asia. Acknowledgements This is likely the most difficult part of my dissertation to write. So much goes into completing a PhD and so many people have generously offered help and encouragement along the way that I cannot express my appreciation properly in this brief acknowledgement. I am grateful to everyone who has helped me to reach this final page of my manuscript. My advisors at the University of Washington deserve top billing. I would like to thank my three reading committee members: Anand Yang, the chair of my committee, for his consistent and steady support during my entire program at UW, his kind mentorship, great conversations, and insightful questions about my work; Purnima Dhavan, for her detailed and sophisticated reading of my written work and general guidance in the History program; and Priti Ramamurthy, for her intellectual energy and multiple interventions at key moments. I am lucky to have had such a brilliant and interested Reading Committee. I would also like to thank Ileana Rodgriguez-Silva and Jordanna Bailkin for guiding my reading exams on the history of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean and Comparative Gender. Ileana Rodriguez-Silva’s mentorship, in particular, expanded my thinking on race, social history and gender in ways that continue to inform my work. I completed this dissertation with support from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, and benefitted from the support of the organization in India and Nepal. During my time in the field, many people helped me to locate various resources and made my stay enjoyable—a special thanks to Lucinda and Ravi Dhavan, Smarajit Triambak, Aruni Mohapatra, Neeti Anand, Subodh Mishra, Auntie and Uncle ji Shrestha, Ram Kumar Bhaukaji, and all of the staff at Rashtriya Abhilekhalaya in Kathmandu. Thank you also to colleagues at the University of Washington, especially Shruti Patel. I also really appreciate the generosity of scholars who have offered helpful comments and questions on my work at various points: first and foremost, Indrani Chatterjee, who kindly read several chapters, Emma Alexander, Leah Koskimaki, Karen Leonard, Arik Moran, Sara Shneiderman, Jayeeta Sharma, and Gautam Vajracharya. I would also like to thank the wonderful scholars at the University of Virginia who generously welcomed me for a semester: Richard Barnett, Mehr Farooqi, Neeti Nair, and Phil McEldowney. Also I am grateful for the friendship of Swati Chawla at UVA; Christina Caparas in Seattle; and Leah Koskimaki, whose intellectual and moral support has meant a great deal. I would like to thank my family members who have done much to bear with me in all circumstances: my dear parents, Amy and Steve Warner, my sister, Sarah Warner Mays, and her husband, Justin Mays, my grandparents, Phyllis Hoecker and James and Martha Warner. I dedicate this dissertation to my mom, Amy, who listened and made me laugh. And, finally, to my partner and best friend, Pradeep Singh, who finished his PhD only a few months ahead of me, thank you for making this such a wonderful journey. Contents 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………….. 1 2. Sovereigns in Exile, 1780 to 1820……………………………………………... 53 3. The Bandit Borderland, 1800 to 1840………………………………………….. 111 4. Cultivating Subjects: The East India Company in Darjeeling, 1800 to 1850….. 154 5. Ethnicity, Markets, and Money: Migration to Darjeeling Tea Plantations from Nepal, 1860 to 1930........................................................... 194 6. Patriarchal Dramas: The Boundaries of Sexuality, 1800 to 1930……………... 245 7. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………… 301 Chapter 1: Introduction “We should have built a Great Wall along our border [with India] when we had the chance.” As I conducted research for this dissertation, on sovereignty, space, society and the shaping of the India-Nepal borderland, a highly-placed bureaucrat in Kathmandu, obviously bemused at my project description, thus summarized his views on the topic. I was not particularly surprised at the evocative statement: many in the Kathmandu establishment view the open border as unbalanced in favor of India’s strategic interests. Special vitriol is often reserved for the bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1950 with India which had effectively frozen the colonial-era soft border in place.1 Even as the treaty provided for the mutual recognition of “the complete sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence” of both countries, it also set a rather unusual precedent: “to give to the nationals of the other, in its territory, national treatment” in respect of “the matter of residence, ownership of property, participation in trade and commerce, movement and other privileges of a similar nature.”2 Several generations of Nepali politicians have bristled at the endurance of a treaty signed in the final year of hereditary Prime Minister, Mohan Shamsher Rana’s unpopular rule, following which the nationalist movement successfully restored the Shah monarchy.3 For the next sixty years, the open border, an unexamined relic of British rule in the subcontinent, seemed unfairly left in place. Clearly, multiple colonial legacies and anxieties are bound up with the open border. 1 In August 2014, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Nepal, as a gesture of good will, he agreed to revise the unpopular, bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1950 and, in turn, extracted agreements to push forward several stalled hydropower projects on trans-border rivers. Prashant Jha, “After Modi’s Visit, What Changed and What did Not,” Hindustan Times, August 13, 2014. http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/analysis/what-changed-and-what-did-not-post-modi-s-nepal-visit/article1- 1251690.aspx. 2 Emphasis added. I have combined language from Articles 6 and 7, which overlap in their stipulations. Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the Government of India and the Government of Nepal, Commonwealth Legal Information Institute, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.commonlii.org/in/other/treaties/INTSer/1950/12.html. 3 B. C. Upreti, “The India-Nepal Open Border: Nature, Issues and Problems,” Himalayan Frontiers of India: Historical, Geo-political, and Strategic Perspectives, ed. K. Warikoo (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2008),122-135. 1 Yet, it is only toward the latter part of the twentieth century that the border began to seem untenable. At mid-century, India’s foreign policy-makers viewed the soft border as necessary for maintaining an imperial-style frontier to buffer communist China’s unknown future role in the trans-region, especially after the occupation of Tibet. Nepal’s Rana Prime Minister saw such an arrangement as useful for maintaining his exclusive (albeit failing) grip on his state. Hence, both India’s and Nepal’s leaders make a calculation in 1950 that the open border enhanced their sovereign power over their respective territories.4 In contrast, by the end