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Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the Geo-Body of India's Northeast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2011

David Vumlallian Zou  and
M. Satish Kumar
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Abstract

India's Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of “mapping” in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the “geo-body” of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 141 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2011

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