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Tangled Lands: Burma and India's Unfinished Separation, 1937–1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2020

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard Open the ORCID record for Bérénice Guyot-Réchard [Opens in a new window]
Bérénice Guyot-Réchard*
Affiliation:
Bérénice Guyot-Réchard ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the History Department at King's College London.
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Abstract

In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.

Keywords

borderlandsBurmacolonialismdecolonizationIndiaintra-imperial relationsmapsPatkaiterritory
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 293 - 315
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2020

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