142157 SE Mapping the Nation: Colonial and Postcolonial Geography in South Asia (2025S)

This course aims to examine the cartography of South Asian states through the perspectives of anthropology and post-colonial studies. While the borders of South Asian nations are often considered as natural, following for example mountains and rivers, most of them are, in fact, recent constructs, established during the colonial ear. Historical studies of Indian geography, in particular, reveal that present day South Asian borders emerged from colonial reorganisation of space driven by administrative, political, and trade imperatives. Through selected readings, the course will explore the following topics:
• The colonial history of borders: How administrative centres and borderlands were defined during colonisation, shaped through colonial expansion and the needs of protecting, dividing, or uniting regions.
• Various means of border construction: The methods used to redefine certain regions as frontiers or borderlands, including the displacement of populations.
• New approaches to borders as performance: Exploring the idea that borders are categories of difference, and “performed.”
• Impact on borderland communities: The impact of defining regions as borders on the lives of borderland people, including examples of resistance to colonial and state-centric geography.
• Alternative representations of territory by borderland communities: Exploring how these populations envision and represent their spaces beyond state-imposed cartographies.