Yunnan–Burma–Bengal Corridor Geographies

Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires

Dan Smyer Yü, Karin Dean, Dan Smyer Yü, Karin Dean

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367528683
• eBook ISBN: 9781000458428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book explores the historical interconnections between Bengal, Burma, and Yunnan (China), and views the corridor as a transregion that exhibits mobility, connectivity and diversity as well as place-based ecogeological uniqueness. With a focus on the concept of corridor geographies that have shared human and environmental histories beyond sharply demarcated territorial sovereignties of modern individual nation-states, it presents the variety and complexity of premodern and modern pathways, corridors, borders, and networks of livelihood-making, local political alliances, trade and commerce, religions, political systems, and colonial encounters. The book discusses crucial themes including environmental edgings of human-nonhuman habitats, transregional migratory routes and habitats of megafauna, elephant corridors in Yunnan–Myanmar–Bengal landscape, framing spaces between India and China, Tibetan–Myanmar corridors, transboundary river systems, narratives of a Rohingya jade trader, cross-border flow of De'ang's fermented tea, householding in upland Laos, cultural identities, and trans-border livelihoods.

Comprehensive and topical, with its wide-ranging case studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of history, routes and border studies, sociology and social anthropology, South East Asian history, South Asian history, Chinese studies, environmental history, human geography, international relations, ecology, and cultural studies.

PART I
Conceptual thoughts

1
FRAMING SPACES BETWEEN INDIA AND CHINA

Willem van Schendel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094364-3

How can we think productively about the sweep of land connecting China’s southwest, Myanmar’s north, India’s northeast, Bangladesh, and the Bay of Bengal? In its entirety, this region is rarely the focus of academic inquiry, even though the production of knowledge about some parts has been increasing rapidly. Stretching from the waterlogged environment of the world’s largest river delta to the snow-topped slopes of the world’s highest mountain range, and from the exceptionally heavy monsoons in the west to much lower—and long-term declining (Tan et al. 2017)—rainfall in the east, it is the home of a range of agro-ecological topographies and the meeting point of three of the earth’s biodiversity hotspots.¹

So what is the point of considering this physically and environmentally varied zone as a single region, tentatively referred to as the “India–China corridor”?²

Paradoxically, it is its persistent diversity that sets it apart from surrounding regions. First, the region’s environmental variety has contributed to its always having been politically fractured. It was never under single common rule—although, for a short while, British imperial designs came close.³ As a result, local forms of sovereignty and territoriality developed out of long histories of political fragmentation and cultural variation, and these persist today. Second, the post-colonial states—India, Bangladesh,⁴ Burma/Myanmar, and China—view their sections of it primarily in terms of security. After the mid–twentieth century, they interdicted economic connections across their borders, thwarting infrastructural upgrading and regional growth.⁵ And third, the region has long been marginalized geopolitically. State elites considered it to be a problematic and unmanageable periphery in which local wars, ethnic confrontations, and drug lords flourished; where resources were hard to exploit; and where state control was haphazard and expensive. As a result, it turned into a political geography of silence and erasure (Grundy-Warr and Sidaway 2006).

In recent years, however, many policy makers have stopped framing these spaces as backwaters. Strategic planning and unprecedented engineering feats have begun to transform the region, and even greater plans are on the drawing board.⁶ These initiatives follow on earlier ones, but the latest, the “New Silk Road,” promises to pack an altogether more forceful punch. This clearly indicates that the region may see a sea change. Therefore, its discursive construction—as the “India–China corridor” or otherwise—links up with an ongoing geopolitical shift. There is a growing awareness that such a construction—however tentative, temporary, and pragmatic—may assist in overcoming generations of academic neglect, not just in terms of the conceptual marginalization of the region and the disjointedness of empirical knowledge production about it, but also in terms of how best to imagine this entity in historical and social terms.⁷

In other words, how can we think with these spaces? Which approaches can scholars offer to understanding processes of human life on this slice of the earth’s surface? How can we make these spaces contribute to scholarly critiques of state centrism and methodological nationalism? To be effective, we need to undo much of what we have learned about them, both in classrooms and in everyday life, but especially as a result of being trained in academic conventions that drive home the primacy of bounded states, societies, cultures, and histories. Decades ago anthropologist Eric R. Wolf made this point forcefully:

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.

(Wolf 1982, 6)

Weaning ourselves off a billiard-ball perception of these spaces is difficult but essential. Social theorists have developed a plethora of concepts to help us do just that. But which ones are the most helpful? Replacing the billiard balls with celebratory globalism is not the answer. And Wolf’s warning that turning names (such as “India,” “China,” and “India–China corridor”) into things creates false models of reality is well taken. We also have to guard against what Mandy Sadan has called “historical ventriloquism”—imposing ideological and political perspectives on communities whose internal discourses seem to be “impervious to traditional historical enquiry” (Sadan 2013, 459). The only way to dodge such ventriloquism is to opt for approaches that combine local sources of knowledge, different ethnographic styles, and sustained dialogue between insiders and outsiders. At the same time, such approaches should be sensitive to the “extralocal” and the larger intersections of space, subjectivity, and agency (Anderson 2012).

In this chapter, I survey a few selected approaches to spatial imagination that have been applied to the region and might, in some measure, serve as antidotes to billiard-ball fragmentation. As in so much theorizing in the social sciences, these approaches rely on metaphors from the material world to frame social processes.⁸ By way of shorthand, I call these metaphors structured, liquid, spatial, and sensory.

Structured metaphors

A popular way of conceptualizing human activities across space is to frame them as constituting networks. Social networks are assumed to have structure (even though this structure is mutable and may be short lived) and to consist of interconnected units. These units can be persons but also localities, nodes, hubs, or organizations. The interlinkages are often imagined as resembling biological systems. Parallels with the human body (the capillary system, the nervous system, and synaptic connections in the brain) are common, and so are parallels with plants (rhizomes and ramified and dendritic forms). Other natural patterns (webs, geometrical patterns, and fractals) can also help in thinking about human activities across space.

What such metaphors allow us to see is the architecture of connections that the billiard-ball perception obscures. They make it easier to understand cross-border connections and the social, cultural, and economic links that transcend national territories and sovereign control. Not surprisingly, scholars working on the spaces between India and China often use this approach. It is important to realize, however, that they have studied cross-border connections more extensively for the eastern end (China–Myanmar) than for the western reaches (Myanmar-India and India-Bangladesh). Thus, Ma Jianxiong applies a network perspective to secret societies, Wen-chin Chang to the jade trade, Karin Dean to kinship ties, Li Yunxia to rubber planting, Pum Khan Pau to ethnic identities, and Alexander Horstmann to ritual geographies (Ma 2011; Chang 2004; Dean 2005; Li 2017; Pau 2018; Horstmann 2012). Gunnel Cederlöf surveys “multiple layered networks” linking colonial Northeast India to wider commercial circulations (Cederlöf 2015). The network metaphor also structures Adam Simpson’s study of cross-border activism, Chyvette Williams et al.’s study of drug use, and studies by Sang Kook Lee and Sahana Ghosh on communication among refugees and migrants (Simpson 2013; Williams et al. 2011; Lee 2012; Ghosh 2015). Research on the region’s economy sometimes foregrounds the value chain, a widely used network image that highlights how natural resources get transformed into manufactured commodities (Dong and He 2018). Other currently popular structured imagery among social theorists—such as “assemblage,” “collage,” “bricolage”—does not figure prominently in writings on the spaces between India and China (but see Dean 2020).

Liquid metaphors

Occasionally, social scientists use another image to capture human activities that involve movement. It is the image of fluidity or liquidity. They speak of streams of migrants, a trickle of investments, goods flooding a market, or a supply of labor that has dried up (van Schendel 2005, 39–40). Fluidity is associated with spatial elusiveness, improvisation, and tactical maneuvering, and it is often juxtaposed with social structure, order, and territorial control. In this approach, it is not so much the architecture and geometry of network nodes as the dynamic connections themselves that are foregrounded. These are harder to grasp because of their volatility, but the strength of this approach is that it helps us “go with the flow” and that it invites us to consider the direction of physical movement across space in tandem with the meanings attached to that movement. This does not imply that social relations are seen as entirely liquid or disembodied but that the focus is on momentum and tempo rather than on structural design and how flows are moored to infrastructure. In other words, liquid metaphors are more about melody and rhythm than about grammar and syntax. They embrace moments of turbulence and flux as well as moments of stillness and stasis.⁹

Liquid metaphors have not been as popular as structured metaphors in the study of the spaces between India and China, but they can be elucidating. Thus, Gunnel Cederlöf, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, and Debjani Bhattacharyya apply them to the study of environments, describing these as “fluid landscapes” (Cederlöf 2009; Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Bhattacharyya 2018). Jason Cons and Rajib Nandi provide case studies of upstream-downstream politics.¹⁰ A study of the timber trade between Myanmar and China portrays logs in liquid terms.¹¹ And Liu et al. speak of the coupling of “multiple streams” in their analysis of policy making with regard to the Myanmar-China energy pipeline (Liu et al. 2017).

Spatial metaphors

In contemporary social science, one of the most popular new ways of framing human activities is to insist on “process geographies” (Appadurai 2000, 6–7). Scholars imagine regions afresh by abandoning what they describe as relatively immobile, essentializing “trait geographies”—“values, languages, material practices, ecological adaptations, marriage patterns, and the like” (Vink 2007, 52)—and by replacing them with process geographies characterized by “various kinds of action, interaction, and motion (travel, trade, marriage, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization, colonization, exile, and so on), in which regions can be conceptualized as both dynamic and interconnected” (Vink 2007, 52; Appadurai 1999, 232). Such mental remapping has created whole new fields of inquiry: for example, Indian Ocean studies and trans-Himalaya studies. Historians Patterson Giersch and Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, working on spaces between India and China, have found the concept of process geographies a useful tool (Giersch 2010; Guyot-Réchard 2017).

But spatial metaphors take other forms as well. These are often based on the example of the landscape: for example, the “fluid landscape” that we encountered earlier (Cederlöf 2009; Lahiri-Dutt 2014), the “sovereigntyscape,”¹² the “sutured landscape” (Sen 2018), the “liminal landscape” (Wittekind 2016), the “crescent,”¹³ the “bridgehead” (Marshall 1988; Su 2013), the “gateway” (McDuie-Ra 2016), the “remote” (Harms et al. 2014), or the “contact zone.”¹⁴ Studies that apply the lens of “borderlands,” “border space,” or “borderworlds” also make use of the landscape metaphor (Sadan 2013; Smyer Yü and Michaud 2017; Jackson 2016; Misra 2011; Ghosh 2015; Guyot-Réchard 2015; Sturgeon 2005). The same is true of studies on the spaces between India and China that frame this expanse in terms of “frontiers.” For example, Xiaobo Su describes Yunnan as a military, economic, and cultural frontier (Su 2013; also Steinberg and Fan 2012). Arupjyoti Saikia employs the term in the same way, as an unfixed zone of encounter, antagonism, and exchange, to analyze land reclamation (Saikia 2008). A recent repackaging of the frontier concept as the “resource frontier” is overtaking this more conventional understanding. Resource frontiers are frontiers to capitalism: Rainer Einzenberger understands resource frontiers in Northern Myanmar as capitalist state spaces formed by land enclosure and resource extraction, which, in turn, stimulate discourses of indigeneity (Einzenberger 2016; also Imamura 2015b; Cons and Eilenberg 2019). In the same vein, Aparajita Majumdar uses “resource frontier” to demonstrate how, in Northeast India, the colonial state’s appropriation of rubber involved both disruption and dialogue (Majumdar 2016).

In recent years, socio-spatial theory has influenced conceptualizations of the region in many ways. For example, Jason Cons speaks of “sensitive space,” Iftekhar Iqbal of “crossroads,” Karin Dean of “Thirdspace” and “territorialities,” Patterson Giersch of “geographical scales,” Willem van Schendel of “place-making,” and Galen Murton of a “spatial fix” (Cons 2016; Iqbal 2014; Dean 2005; Giersch 2010; van Schendel 2015; Murton 2013). Such attempts share a concern about space and place as social concepts, as human constructions rather than as physical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Perpendicular geospatiality of corridors and borderlands: an introduction
• PART I Conceptual thoughts
• PART II Human-nonhuman corridors and commons
• PART III Imperial frontiers, ethnopolitics, and borderland livelihoods
• Conclusion: corridor geographies
• Index