Fault Lines of British-Era Boundaries

The colonial approach to administration may have suited the convenience of the British, but they have also left behind festering boundary problems for most postcolonial states. India is no exception.

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

In 1907, two years after his retirement as India's viceroy, George Nathaniel Curzon gave the prestigious Romanes Lecture, and he chose the title Frontier. Among others, in the rather long lecture script, he elaborated on how the idea of the demarcated, delineated and closely guarded national borders was unknown to the world outside of Europe before colonialism arrived.

The boundaries of non-European principalities were amorphous, and they waxed and waned depending on the power of their rulers. Administrative presence also fades out progressively towards the borders until the domain of neighboring principalities begins.

That all of India's modern boundaries are inherited from the British colonial days should serve as a testimony to Curzon's assertions. These include the Radcliffe Line, 1947, the contested McMahon Line, 1914, and even the Durand Line, 1893, the pre-Partition border with Afghanistan. There are more.

The earliest of the British-drawn boundaries is between India and Nepal, drawn by the Treaty of Sugauli, 1816, and after it, the Pemberton-Johnstone-Maxwell Line, 1834, demarcating Manipur's boundary with the Ava Kingdom (Burma), for it to become India's boundary after Manipur's merger in 1949. Even Sikkim, which merged with India as late as 1975, had its boundary with Tibet drawn by the Anglo-Chinese Convention, 1890 (or the Convention of Calcutta), recognizing Sikkim as a British protectorate.

Curzon also explains the idea of natural and artificial boundaries. Nearly all political boundaries are artificial, drawn by agreements between neighboring states or by the conquest of one by the other. Natural boundaries are those determined by natural phenomena such as seas, rivers and deserts. In the modern era, with contests over the jurisdiction of even seas, the idea of the natural boundary is set to become extinct.