In this incisive and thought-provoking work, authors Prem Poddar and Lisa Lindkvist Zhang explore the history of Kalimpong, a town in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, as an “interface” through which Chinese and Indian perceptions of one another were filtered. The authors use the town’s transnational, transregional, and translocal character to highlight the multivalent lives of its residents, and to demonstrate how it became a metonym—that is, a fragmented, incomplete, or partial representation—of both India and China. The book seeks to better understand how China and India figured in their respective sociopolitical imaginaries, and the impact that this had on people whose subjectivities defied categorizations imposed from on high.

Through the India–China Border explicates a variety of thoughtfully chosen case studies based on novel archival materials. Chapter 1 examines Kalimpong’s historical background, namely its place in British imaginaries of the Sino-Indian frontier. Chapter 2 analyzes evolving Chinese perceptions of Kalimpong via readings of Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily). Chapters 3 and 4 largely deal with how the colonial and postcolonial Indian states tackled the “problem” of ethnically Chinese residents in Kalimpong amidst growing fears of espionage in the wake of Japan’s declaration of war against the Allied Powers in December 1941 and, later, border tensions between India and China in the late 1950s. Chapter 5 elaborates upon these themes by focusing on dual narratives of the famed trader Ma Zhucai. One of these narratives presented Ma as a patriotic overseas Chinese leader who suffered for his loyalty to the PRC; the other cast Ma as a transnational trader and smuggler who did not always conform to such a flattened image. The book ends with a brief reflection on the Kalimpong border region’s continued importance in Sino-Indian relations and the two countries’ mutual misapprehensions.

Through the India–China Border examines a topic that has not been covered extensively in existing literature, and it does an admirable job of putting Chinese and Indian sources in conversation with one another. One of the work’s great strengths is the authors’ self-reflexiveness regarding their engagement with different archives and languages and the ellipses apparent in various types of sources, especially intelligence and surveillance reports. Nor do the authors shy away from trying to theorize Kalimpong beyond characterizations of it as an enigmatic border town. Along with noting similarities between Kalimpong and “Zomia,” the mountainous zone of highlands in Southeast Asia that James Scott and other scholars have theorized as a zone of resistance that complicates understandings of state power and the ubiquity of the nation-state, Poddar and Zhang’s focus on Kalimpong’s role in historical narratives highlights salient concerns regarding sovereignty, trade, and ethnic belonging. Chapter 5’s impressive analysis of Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) files on Ma and his family alongside the lengthy wenshi ziliao volume dedicated to Ma’s life and an ethnographic visit to Ma’s hometown stands out as particularly well done. That chapter will provide excellent reading for anyone interested in questions of statecraft, national memory, and trans-Himalayan trade networks.

There are times, however, when the sources that Poddar and Zhang used may have limited the book’s insights on these themes. Chapter 2 focuses on coverage of Kalimpong in Renmin Ribao to highlight how it “came to play a pivotal role in the border politics of the PRC and ROI” (48). While the authors cite additional published sources, they made no attempt to use other Chinese newspapers to think through this question. Renmin Ribao rarely mentioned Kalimpong before the mid-1950s. But a newspaper like Guangming Ribao (Enlightenment Daily), which had an audience largely composed of educated elites, likely would have had more to say. Indeed, Guangming Ribao offered much more detailed commentary on a variety of exchanges and interactions with India during the 1950s, including tensions along the border, precisely to cater to its more selective audience. One wonders what other widely circulated newspapers and periodicals, including Hongqi (Red Flag), Gongren Ribao (Workers’ Daily), and Shijie Zhishi (World Knowledge), had to say about the border town.

Access to archives in Mainland China, particularly those related to matters as sensitive as border towns, is often restricted. But Poddar and Zhang have largely overlooked another important set of sources: archives held in Taiwan. The National Archives Administration in Taipei, for instance, has multiple files related to the Kuomintang’s activities in Kalimpong and the India–China border region more generally. These archives also contain documents related to tensions between KMT loyalists and those who sided with the PRC after 1949, a subject covered extensively in Chapter 4. Likewise, on the Indian side, Poddar and Zhang have done incredible work with the IB files available at the West Bengal State Archives—access to which is challenging even in the best of times. As the authors acknowledge, however, IB files offer a somewhat skewed perspective. This perspective could have been balanced by other Indian sources.

The National Archives of India, where many sources have been digitized and can be accessed online, are home to a wide variety of material related to Kalimpong, but Poddar and Zhang make few references to files held there. Discussion of important topics such as Sino-Indian-Tibetan trade in Kalimpong and via a variety of trade marts throughout Western Tibet would have been much more substantiated had Through the India–China Border referenced some of this material. The book also has little to say about local voices in Kalimpong outside of the ethnically Chinese community. New insights from archives in India or Taiwan may have helped ameliorate the book’s paucity of local perspectives. Notable exceptions come from the book’s references to the Himalayan Times, a newspaper whose digitization work by Poddar and Zhang helped initiate. Outside of a few large ones, not many Indian newspapers have been digitized. Thanks to the authors’ valiant efforts future researchers will be able to take advantage of this valuable source.

A more significant omission is Poddar and Zhang’s lack of engagement with recent secondary literature. While there have not been many works on Kalimpong specifically, with the exception of an excellent essay on espionage in Kalimpong by Tansen Sen that the authors briefly cite, there has been a great deal of new work on India–China relations more generally, including on the nature of textual representation.Footnote ¹ These works, including new monographs by Adhira Mangalagiri, Gal Gvili, and Sarvani Gooptu, similarly “trace how China figured in the sociopolitical imaginary of the British and thereafter in the postcolonial Indian state, as well as in communist literature in China itself” (218). Engaging this scholarship may have had the benefit of augmenting the book’s archival base, which, while still providing a much-needed analysis of Kalimpong, has certain limitations.Footnote ²

Regardless of these quibbles, I am confident that Through the India–China Border will be of great interest to historians of borderlands in East and South Asia, as well as readers who want to know more about Chinese attitudes towards “diasporic” communities outside of more well-studied locations in Southeast Asia or North America.