Indexing Space in the Anglo-Gorkha Borderland Disputes of the Early Nineteenth Century
This paper examines the questions of spatiality that lay at the heart of the territorial disputes that broke out between the English East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) in the early nineteenth century. It draws on evidence from the tangled histories of their bo...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud
2024-12-01
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| Series: | South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/9871 |
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| Summary: | This paper examines the questions of spatiality that lay at the heart of the territorial disputes that broke out between the English East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) in the early nineteenth century. It draws on evidence from the tangled histories of their borderlands to examine how the spatially freighted language of the disputants concerning territory, boundaries, and entitlements eluded easy comprehension, even as they couched their arguments in terms of the ideals of maintaining friendship and the justice of their claims. Ultimately, both sides expressed discordant territorial visions of a state’s sovereignty that were difficult to index in language, rendering their borderlands an illegible space. When the war ended in 1816 with Gorkha’s defeat, the British imposed a linear boundary to separate the territories of the two states leaving them increasingly easy to represent on maps. |
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| ISSN: | 1960-6060 |