The Himalayas as a Spatial Imaginary

Presenter:

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Abstract

The logic of the nation naturalises the imagined landscape of the Himalayas in India as a border. However, the Himalayas have always transcended territoriality and has been a locale for cross cultural exchanges, with religious, spiritual, educational and economic significances. I will study the transformation of this landscape under the British colonial regime in creating a borderland, later readily accepted by the post colonial nation state. The British looked at the Indian landscape through a rigid disciplinary gaze, which subjected its society, time and space to rigorous and hierarchical re-structuring. European methods are applied to both England’s first colony nearer home, comprising of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and then overseas. While the oppositional binary of the home state and the empire stands unaltered, it is important to view the emergence of both the geographies as constructions of the same gaze. Fashioning of both geographies happened to be acts born out of identical cartographic impulse that shaped both the nation state of Great Britain and the British empire. Remarkably, major contributors in this were Scots, and most influential hubs were universities in Scotland. Significantly, the mapping of the Scottish Highlands had a bearing on the charting of the Himalayas. Scientific expeditions by Hooker, Fraser and Buchanan-Hamilton in these terrains were expressed in strikingly similar terms. The Himalayas became a vast canvas for testing out Scottish Enlightenment’s ideals and sciences. The objective is to understand the colonial cartographic exchanges in this region which culminated in drawing the boundary, which Chad Haines would call ‘undefined border’.