Revisiting Himalayan Borderlands: A Bridge between India and Central Asia (2025)

The Himalayan borderlands are one of the richest and fertile areas for the study of distinct landforms, environment, cultures, language groups, religion and so forth. Various cultural groups co-exist and are settled within this vast mountainous region with links to each other through numerous routes. Its peculiar geographical location has allowed transit for cultures, trade and movement of people from plains of India to the trans-Himalayas and from Tibet, China and Central Asia to India. The many distinct cultures of this region have ancient roots such as the Northern Neolithic people of Kashmir, Swat, Tibet, China and Mongolia; the Indus valley civilisation at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. This region has successfully assimilated many religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam along with indigenous cultures, languages, dialects and ethnicities. For thousands of years this region has held a profound significance for the peoples of South and Central Asia, as their literature, mythologies, and religions reflect. In contemporary times, the Himalayan borderlands have not only witnessed cultural or physiographic upheavels but have also seen a different kind of change – redrawing of political landscapes. It is said that politics changes the history of nation but it has also led changes to its geography. The redrawing of the political landscapes has bearing on the geo-politics of the region as well. Himalayan Borderlands thus was neither a backwater nor a borderland but an area of distinctive physical environment connected with surrounding regions and nearby centres of civilizations through easily accessible routes.The present volume is a collection of papers that refreshes our understanding of shared religions, disparate identities and cultures, trade and commerce and so forth of the Himalayan region. It is a herculean task to cover each and every aspect of the social, political, cultural aspect of many nations that constitute the Himalayan Borderlands within this volume. However, a sincere attempt was made to give space to such relevant papers that broadly encompass syncretic themes from prehistory to modern times of this vast region. This edited volume, therefore, has a special focus on history, art, religion and commerce.

Review of Himalayan Histories: Economy, Polity, Religious Traditions

Contemporary South Asia, 2023

Throughout the book, Singh suggests that the region’s religious culture and physical geography form an enduring structure over which Sikh rule, Mughal invasion, British colonial rule, nineteenth century Gorkha conquests and Indian independence were overlaid. Numerous pieces of information are taken from British gazetteers and other historical works. With technology and tourism, recent history is changing rapidly. This might have been explored further. The book is valuable for students, readers, and scholars of the western and central Himalayas, South Asian religions, and Hindu studies.

Himalayan Borders and Borderlands : Mobility, State Building, and Identity

2020

This review article engages with recent ethnographic research on 'borders' and 'borderlands' in the Himalayan region. We examine how recent scholarship published primarily between 2012-2018 engages with borderland theory as it intersects with issues of state building, ethnicity, language, religion, and tourism. As the scholarly canon moves away from disparate areas studies approaches, this paper investigates how Himalayan scholarship views borders as comprising a multivariate geographical, cultural, and political network of history and relationships undergoing continual transformation. As emerging scholars from both within and outside the Himalaya, we separate the article into four sub-sections that each connect to our respective interests. Our intention is not to propose an alternative conceptual framework or set of terminologies to borderland studies, but to bring together various inter-disciplinary approaches that view borders as sites of continuity and discontinu...

Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland

Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia-the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra-and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities.

Book review of 'Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities' (edited by Dan Smyer-Yü and Jean Michaud; Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

European Bulletin of Himalayan Research , 2020

Published in 2017, this volume, an anthology of twelve essays by Chinese, European and North American social scientists, is an inaugural, multinational, collaborative project run by the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies (CTHS) at China's Yunnan Minzu University (YMU). Its genealogy includes conferences and workshops held between 2013 and 2015 by The New School, The Yale Himalaya Initiative and lastly yMU. These events all explored new ground in Himalayan studies by focusing on connectivity, inclusion and new voices in the region from a transboundary perspective. The first thing that might catch the eye of many a reader on first seeing this volume is its title, 'Trans-Himalayan Borderlands', a seemingly questionable nomenclature once one goes through the Table of Contents. A cursory glance shows that of the twelve studies presented in this book, at best only four-the chapters by Sara Schneiderman, Dan Smyer Yü, Hildegard Diemberger and Brendan Galipeau-relate to sites in the 'Trans-Himalayas', if this term is to be understood according to its widespread conventional usage in ecology (eg Shrestha 2000: 1-2) and geology (eg Sorkhabi 2010). This conventional scientific usage traces its etymology to Cunningham (1854) and Hedin (1909-1913), and signifies the region of high-altitude ranges, valleys and plateaus with generally arid or semi-arid biomes that starts immediately north of the Great Himalayan Range, is bound in the north by the rough continuum of Kailas and Nyechenthangla ranges, and in the east extends beyond Lhasa. The other chapters represent studies conducted in regions that are rather distant and eco-geologically very distinct from the Trans-Himalayas as understood in the above-mentioned sense, such as the

Forming Communities and Negotiating Power on the Himalayan Borders

Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia ( Ed) , 2023

This paper explores the Central Himalayan region as a continuous political entity in spite of forming the borders of several independent nations. The region has a ecological identity and has interacting communities that are dependent on trade and exchange of material goods to survive and prosper. The ecological variations make the sub-regions dependent on each other and cross-border trade has been an established feature of this region. Here the example is of the Bhotiya Community, a generic name for small enclaves of pastoral and trading communities that dot the entire length of the upper Himalayan region. The focus here is on the Tibetan Salt trade and its history in the backdrop of the fluid political arena of the Himalayan region and beyond.

Himalayan Religions in Comparative Perspective: Considerations Regarding Buddhism and Hinduism across their Indic Frontiers

… , the Journal of the Association for …, 1994

Himalayan Connections: Disciplines, Geographies, Trajectories: A Workshop Report

‘The Himalaya’ has been invoked as an analytical category by a range of actors over time, from scientific, social scientific, humanities, and applied backgrounds. A ‘Himalayan’ framing has long served as a valuable heuristic for understanding the sweep of histories, societies, and environments that connect the region. Yet that same framing has recently emerged as a problem of scale: focusing on commonalities obscures difference, and thus diversity; focusing on difference obscures commonalities, and thus region-wide affinities. Does using ‘Himalaya’ as a broad regional signifier invoke an ecological or cultural determinism that deemphasizes the specificity of political history? Or does it legitimately recognize the webs of ecological, economic and cultural connectivity that have bound together complex entities over time? New Himalayan scholarship, oriented toward connectivity and inclusion, empowered by new collaborations and analytical tools, might learn from its past legacy and ultimately move beyond it. How can new voices thus be included to express greater diversity in Himalayan Studies?

Introduction-Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands

Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place, 2020

Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities, edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud

2020

Published in 2017, this volume, an anthology of twelve essays by Chinese, European and North American social scientists, is an inaugural, multinational, collaborative project run by the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies (CTHS) at China's Yunnan Minzu University (YMU). Its genealogy includes conferences and workshops held between 2013 and 2015 by The New School, The Yale Himalaya Initiative and lastly YMU. These events all explored new ground in Himalayan studies by focusing on connectivity, inclusion and new voices in the region from a transboundary perspective. The first thing that might catch the eye of many a reader on first seeing this volume is its title, 'Trans-Himalayan Borderlands', a seemingly questionable nomenclature once one goes through the Table of Contents. A cursory glance shows that of the twelve studies presented in this book, at best only four-the chapters by Sara Schneiderman, Dan Smyer Yü, Hildegard Diemberger and Brendan Galipeau-relate to sites in the 'Trans-Himalayas', if this term is to be understood according to its widespread conventional usage in ecology (eg Shrestha 2000: 1-2) and geology (eg Sorkhabi 2010). This conventional scientific usage traces its etymology to Cunningham (1854) and Hedin (1909-1913), and signifies the region of high-altitude ranges, valleys and plateaus with generally arid or semi-arid biomes that starts immediately north of the Great Himalayan Range, is bound in the north by the rough continuum of Kailas and Nyechenthangla ranges, and in the east extends beyond Lhasa. The other chapters represent studies conducted in regions that are rather distant and eco-geologically very distinct from the Trans-Himalayas as understood in the above-mentioned sense, such as the lower Himalayas of Uttarakhand and Nepal, the Thai-Myanmar border and China's borderlands with Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos.

Review of: Routledge Companion to Northeast India, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 61 - by Majeet Baruah

Edited by Jelle J P Wouters and Tanka B Subba, The Routledge Companion to Northeast India (Routledge, 2022) is an important work on Northeast India. The Companion has 81 entries. Written insightfully, each entry is thematically distinct. The entries cover a range of themes, from questions of history, culture, ethnicity, politics, space, geomorphology, archæology to those of language, religion, nature, agriculture, identity, migration, urbanism and governance. Barring a few exceptions, the entries mainly deal with the colonial and the post-Independence period. The contributors to the Companion are scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, located in different institutions throughout the world. They belong to different generations of scholars. It is to the credit of the editors and the contributors that such a Companion is now available.