Keeping the Edges Near

This article reconceptualizes remoteness in the Indo-Burmese Highland frontiers after a global war. Recent scholarship emphasizes the relational nature of remoteness, proximity and connectivity, highlighting how state interventions have marginalized specific spaces from development and connectivity. I examine how states appropriated longstanding trans-imperial epistemologies of “remote” highland frontiers for governance during the Second World War. War “globalized” these societies through integration into imperial imageries and projects in the mid-1940s, anticipating India and Burma’s impending decolonization. I argue that state actors re-affirmed the remoteness of the region and its inhabitants during this period by withdrawing global integration with material and political resources offered during wartime, once imperial defense was successfully accomplished. British colonial state projects since the 19th century deliberately produced the Indo-Burma frontier’s highlands as a “remote” and “barbaric” space. The war disrupted pre-existing frontier management by increasing global integration and intimacy between so-called Hill Tribes and empires, making peripheries more proximate to states. However, this proximity paradoxically reinforced caricatures of Indo-Burmese frontier tribes as isolated and “uncivilized” and needing state patronage. Soon after the war, the colonial and the early postcolonial states once again reasserted the “remoteness” of the Eastern Himalayas by underscoring their exceptionality, and seeking selective exclusions both territorially and culturally, with lasting implications for ongoing citizenship, identity and resource struggles. I unpack intellectual histories of frontiers and remoteness in the mid-1940s that shaped spatial binaries such as Hill-Valley divides, identity politics, and state interventions today.