The Frontier in British India
Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Borders
1.1 'Rude and complicated': the posa boundary in northern Assam
1.2 'Making outside barbarians': the administrative border in early colonial Punjab
1.3 'Absurd and impossible': bordering the Naga Hills District, 1866–1905
1.4 'Breaking the border rule': Balochistan's boundaries, 1866–1892
1.5 'Substantial pillars': marking the boundary in northern Assam during the 1870s
1.6 'A line shifting': borders in the Chin-Lushai Hills, 1869–1900
1.7 'As if our territory': British India's international boundaries at the turn of the twentieth century
1.8 Conclusion: limits of the colonial state
2. Surveys and maps
2.1 'Getting at the truth': route surveys at nascent frontiers
2.2 'Impossible to level': frontiers and the problem of altitude in the 1850s
2.3 'Rough accurate maps': frontier representations as material objects
2.4 Sites for 'sore-eyes': surveying in frontier regions from the later 1860s
2.5 'A higher land': theorising the unknowable frontier
2.6 Conclusion: 'Clean out of the map'
3. Ethnography
3.1 'Entirely distinct from the ordinary population': ethnographic encounters during the 1810s
3.2 'Raising, not solving, doubts': the advent of Assam's 'mountain tribes', 1820s–1840s
3.3 'Aboriginal remnants': ethnography in the time of war and annexation at the Sind and Punjab frontiers, 1830s–1850s
3.4 'Patient, painstaking care': fragmented ethnography in northeast India during the 1870s
3.5 'Insufficient intimacy and confidence': photographing 'frontier tribes' in the later nineteenth century
3.6 'Purely tribal': frontiers and anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century
3.7 Conclusion: productive problems
4. Violence
4.1 'Terrible to behold': violence on the Upper Sind frontier, 1839–1848
4.2 'Often repeated outrage': state violence and the Nagas, 1838–1900
4.3 'Few permanent results': military expeditions on the Punjab frontier, 1849–1901
4.4 Conclusion: 'Exterminate all the brutes'
5. Administration
5.1 'Strangers and exiles': tribal colonies on the Upper Sind Frontier
5.2 'Made very useful': relocating communities in northeastern Assam
5.3 'Doing nothing but write-write-write': irregular administration at the northeast frontier
5.4 'A rough half-subdued country': administering Balochistan, 1877–1900
5.5 Conclusion: Fashioning fractals
Conclusion: the significance of the frontier in British India.

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