Book review: Prem Poddar and Lisa Lindkvist Zhang, Through the India–China Border: Kalimpong in the Himalayas

Two distinct, although related, portrayals have dominated the historical imagination of the eastern Himalayan town of Kalimpong.In the mid-1950s, everyone, it seemed-from Jawaharlal Nehru to his Chinese counterpart Zhou Enlai, to a French ethnologist-agreed that Kalimpong was a hotbed of espionage.Spawned in the years between Tibet's 1949 annexation and 1959 rebellion, Nehru's description of the hill station as a 'nest of spies' has indelibly coloured how Kalimpong is remembered.The other trope is that of the frontier town as a site of intercultural, inter-imperial and international encounters, a Himalayan 'contact zone' tucked between Tibet, Sikkim, Bengal and Nepal, and conveniently close to the relatively mild Jelep La pass heading to Lhasa.Kalimpong was, after all, home not just to covert operatives and 'foreign Kautilyas' (p.125), but also to merchants, missionaries, war-torn refugees and wandering émigrés.In Through the India-China Border, Prem Poddar and Lisa Lindkvist Zhang subordinate these admittedly powerful notions under the rubric of Kalimpong as an 'interface' and a 'metonym'.Drawing on Alexander Galloway's definition, the authors argue that Kalimpong is an interface, which is not simply a political or geographical zone along a transimperial and later a transnational frontier.Instead, it is a dynamic object, in this case, a threshold in the Himalayas from where to view the effects of larger international forces, which also becomes a catalyst informing such forces.One such effect is Kalimpong's emergence as a metonym: it was a convenient index for Chinese political elites to strategically assess late-colonial and independent India, as well as a measure of the China-India