Games With Frontiers

Doko La is one of many places that had fallen off the map of Indian priorities. Now is a good time to remember some history and Geography.

- Kai Friese

The border between India and China is an extreme place. Some 3,500 km where the world’s most populous republics—and the tectonic plates they occupy—grate and gnash against one another on the rim of the world’s highest mountain range. A ‘natural frontier’ if ever there was one, but also an impossible object, depicted in the hallucinatory official maps of India and China that routinely claim enormous tracts of land neither country has ever really held.

For more than half a century now, the 1962 war with China has been remembered in India as a national tragedy—which may be why we seem so eager to see history repeat itself as an almost comical video of unarmed soldiers engaging in dhakka-dhukki in the mists (and the endearing plea, “This is not the way! Don’t use force”). Popularly perceived as footage of the dangal of Doko la, government sources now dismiss this as ‘archival’. Either way, it joins an existing library of popular videos depicting similar confrontations.