Introduction

While territories are socially produced spaces, the role of the environment in their constitution cannot be overlooked. In recent decades an environmentalist paradigm has captured the historical imagination to reveal the mutual transformations that characterize the relationship between the environment and human beings. The varied literature that has developed on this theme of environmental history has restored the environment to the center stage of history. Within the South Asian context, recent studies of the environment have examined the role of climate, health and disease and forests in the social, political and economic history of the subcontinent. This chapter builds on these insights in order to gain a better understanding of the connections between the environment and the socio-political forces acting on them that ultimately mediated the production of territory. In order to better understand the spatial dimensions of processes of state formation on the Anglo–Gorkha frontier, the relationships between the environment, land and labor in the production of territory needs to be emphasized. Interactions between human beings and their environment shaped the cultures of governance on this frontier in important ways, producing fluctuating histories of land control.

Introduction: Indigenous Maps and Representations of Territory

This book has tried to spin a shared spatial thread to join two dispersed narratives. The first examines the spatial substance of the Anglo–Gorkha disputes in order to better understand the organization of territory along that frontier. The defeat of the Gorkhalis by the East India Company meant the gradual insertion of the second narrative, whereby a specific colonial vision of territory gradually overshadowed older ways of organizing state territories in South Asia. This vision found its material expression in modern surveying and mapmaking exercises undertaken initially by the colonial state and then by succeeding postcolonial regimes.

Introduction

In the eighteenth century the Gorakhpur–Butwal frontier, which was formed of a patchy collection of forests, waste lands, marshes and cultivated fields, straddled the kingdoms of Awadh and the hill principalities to its north.

Introduction: The Constitution of Order on the Champaran–Tarriani Frontier, 1765–1814

Between 1765 and 1814, Gorkha and the English East India Company witnessed a phase of territorial expansion which culminated in the outbreak of serious territorial disputes along the Champaran–Tarriani frontier. This section of the Anglo–Gorkha frontier stretched across Gorkha's Eastern Tarai districts and the northern reaches of the district of Champaran (in Bihar) that fell under the jurisdiction of the Company (see Map 3.1). Gorkha's Eastern Tarai, which was made up of the districts of Chitwan (formerly Marjyadpur), Parsa, Bara, Rautahat, Saptari and Mahottari, was placed under the charge of officials who exercised civil, military and judicial powers. During the reign of King Girbana Juddha Bikram Shah (1799–1816), numerous land grants were issued conferring new rights or reconfirming preexisting arrangements that had been instituted by the preceding Sen rulers of Makwanpur, Tanahu, Chaudandi and Bijaypur.

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.

In the eighteenth century modern states in Europe, the Americas and some parts of the “non-Western” world, embarked on a long and sometimes contentious process of demarcating their boundaries, both internal and international. An older spatial regime based on “jurisdictional sovereignty” gradually gave way to one based on the notion of “territorial sovereignty,” and there are many nuances, aporias and variations in how this project unfolded and ultimately transformed the territorial structure of the state. Throughout this process, surveying and mapmaking operations played an important role, initially in an uncoordinated fashion, in excavating the country's older territorial divisions as a prelude to their rearrangement. Within Great Britain, Christopher Saxton's sixteenth-century county maps made possible the assembling of a national map. Even so, Great Britain's administrative geography continued to be characterized by an unwieldy agglomeration of as many as 15 different levels of local authority, involving civil, criminal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.