Introduction

The making of borders in once-colonized regions like Africa and South Asia was an arbitrary and tortuous process that disregarded ethnic identities, one of the important bases of the modern nation-state (Hutchinson & Smith 1996: 13). For this arbitrary state and border making, widespread communal riots spread both before and after the Partition of India. Thousands of people were forced to leave their ancestral places; many thousands were killed and raped (Pandey 2001; Chatterji 2007; Zamindar 2007). Apart from the immediate pitfalls of the creation of the border, Partition also ignited the seeds of future clashes, suppression, the marginalization of minority groups, and the further disintegration of these states.

Borderlands are one of the most fertile grounds for researching the process of border-making, cross-border mobility, and its ramifications for states and society, particularly with a focus on indigenous minority groups (eg., Cons 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016; Jones 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2012, 2016; van Schendel 2005; Zamindar 2007). In Border Landscapes, for example, Janet Sturgeon concentrated on the Akha in the borderlands of China and Thailand and their transformation of the border landscape (2005). In the end, she finds that in both China and Thailand the Akha were marginalized and their access to resources and land use shrank due to state policies (Sturgeon 2005: 51-62).