In the southern lowlands region of the Himalayas known as Monyul, near present-day west Arunachal Pradesh of India, Monpa(s) have been carrying out an autonomy movement under the leadership of Buddhist monks since 2003. How do Monpa demands for autonomy intersect with colonial demarcations, nation-state border disputes, and larger global connections? More broadly, how are the Himalayas reimagined and Himalayan identities reshaped in the circuits of networks, belonging, and memory that transcend regional and national boundaries? Swargajyoti Gohain's Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place addresses these questions. Based on her ethnographic work and drawing on an anthropological understanding of space, place, actor-network theory, and borderland, Gohain examines the contested reconfiguration of the region of Monyul as a Tibetan Buddhist space in the Indo-Tibetan borderland. She indicates that this reconfiguration is not strictly territorial but rests on cultural alliances among geographically dispersed Himalayan communities within and outside of India. In so doing, Gohain demonstrates how the politics of the borderland are situated within webs of highly active translocal connections, which have and will continue to give rise to the making of new identities, places, and connections. As she puts it, Monpas’ “demand for local autonomy is overlaid by transregional imaginations that are pan-Himalayan in nature” (p. 14).

This book comprises five chapters, an introduction and conclusion, and nineteen ethnographic photos taken by Gohain. Organized around the themes of locality, spatial imagination, and connections, the chapters, taken together, reveal the “emergent Himalayan geography” in Monyul (p. 37). Chapter 1 situates Monyul and its dominant group, Monpa, within historical and ethnographic contexts. Gohain illustrates how Monyul, a former trans-Himalayan trade corridor connecting Tibet and Bhutan, had been politically and religiously subordinated to Tibet since the seventeenth century. Starting in the twentieth century, the British colonial Indo-Tibetan border demarcation in 1914 and the India-China war in 1962 made Monyul a de facto part of the Indian state. Correspondingly, Monpa are identified as a Scheduled Tribe. Tracing the political, religious, and cultural histories of Monyul, Gohain states that Monpas’ present imagination of Monyul as a Buddhist space is underpinned by their historical ties with Tibet and current marginalization in India. She shows that the peculiar history of Monyul “has returned to influence its present politics” (p. 45). For example, “the large-scale settlement of [Indian] military forces” and immigrants (p. 58) in Monyul following the India-China war in 1962 has resulted in the growing marginalization of Monpa in the Indian state-led sociopolitical and economic development. This long-standing sense of exclusion is one of the key impetuses for Monpas’ current demand for autonomy.

Chapters 2 and 4 examine the major practices that Monpa have engaged in to help materialize this imagined geography and realize local autonomy from 2003 onward. On the one hand, by situating their demands in the discourse of development, Monpa have united with other marginalized minorities in Monyul to voice their sense of exclusion. They have inscribed Monyul as a periphery waiting for state intervention and incorporation (pp. 80–83). On the other hand, Gohain details how, in drawing on their rich linguistic and cultural heritage, Monpa have uplifted the Bhoti language (Tibetan language) and Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine), renovated sacred sites, and restored Indigenous place-names, helping to reclaim and imbue the space with their newly formed imagination since the autonomy movement. In these cultural practices, the modifier “Tibetan” is either erased or substituted with “Himalayan,” which works not only to tie the geographically distinct yet culturally connected Tibetan Buddhist communities across the Himalayan region under one discursive umbrella term, but also to avoid “political overtones” (p. 99), given the entanglement of the Tibet question in India-China relations and its ramifications for a disputed border such as Monyul.

According to Gohain, the articulation of the Himalayan imagined geography in Monyul is complicated by the issue of temporality, especially a temporality that is confined to clear-cut, territorial-based national boundaries, and that conflicts with the borderland experience (pp. 22–24, 108–9). Thus, she says, Monpa need to carefully maneuver between the past and present, intentionally and selectively draw on or reject certain connections depending on the contemporary situation and maintain an “ambiguity” that is constituted in the liminal borderland (p. 127). Chapter 3 addresses how Monpa maintain strategic ambiguity in narratives about their transnational origins as they acknowledge their historical and kinship ties with a Tibetan past while advocating for an Indigenous Monpa present. In a similar vein, chapter 5 examines how Monpa navigate themselves between a regional political identity that excludes the foreign Tibetan refugees in the present, and a religious identity that was and will be closely tied with Tibetans in the past and future (pp. 198–99). This sense of ambivalence, which is articulated through time, enables Monpa to create a sense of connectedness and disconnectedness to Tibetans so as to respond to the increasing presence and penetration of the Indian state in Monyul.

In sum, instead of simply understanding the Himalayas as a monolithic geographical entity, Gohain conceptualizes it as “an imagined space of belonging” (p. 17) and reveals the collaborative production of the pan-Himalayan spatial identity that is not based on territorial proximity, but a cultural alliance that transgresses multilayered boundaries. For borderland studies scholars, this book offers a close reading of how the borderland, with its evolving relations, can be an active space where new identities, social relationships, and political stances are constantly being produced. Scholars of Tibetan studies will find this book valuable for its insights on the production, mediation, and rejection of Tibetan national identity and “civilizing projects”—both in the past and present—on the borderland of cultural Tibet in the southern Himalayas. Lastly, scholars engaged in Indigenous studies will appreciate Gohain's examination of contested indigeneity in the “postcolonial Indian state” in Asia (p. 62), which shares similarities with, yet has significant differences from, indigeneity in the settler colonial state. Beyond these specific fields, this book will be a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the anthropology of development and mobility.