In this deceptively slim but deeply insightful work, Itty Abraham argues that the contemporary world has been in the thrall of a simulacral trinity: nation/territory/state. This ideal has demanded that a people occupy an enclosed territory and should be governed by a state seen as legitimate by all. In no historical instance have nation, territory, and state ever been consonant, and efforts to pulverize recalcitrant reality into conformity with that ideal have eventuated in the incredible violence—physical and epistemic—of the last few centuries. Ethnic cleansing, discrimination against minorities, majoritarian chauvinism, fractured communities, and communal violence are the indices of these vain attempts.
In the postcolonial world, given that inherited borders were often the detritus of polyglot empires, and decolonization was often amid a disorganized retreat by imperial powers after cataclysmic wars, these desired consonances were even more discordant than the flawed “originals” of the Western world. In this context, Abraham argues, the maintenance of territorial integrity became the sine qua non for postcolonial states to first enter as recognized members of the comity of nations, and thereafter preserve that status. Territory comes to mediate the caesura that splits nation from state, and hence the postcolonial world is marked by obsessive anxiety about territorial “integrity” (pp. 11–12 and passim).
Abraham quickly dispels any notion that territory is mere land. Rather, a nationalist poetics of space along a majoritarian cultural ethos endows territory with meaning and it attains an ontological status. Among other things, this means that citizenship is fractured from the very outset, as all too many cannot recognize themselves in the nation that emerges. Moreover, even if two states embroiled in a border dispute can fully see the sense of resolving the matter through compromise or give-and-take, their hands are tied given all the meaning now invested in land. The absurd and macabre standoff between India and Pakistan over the Siachen Glacier is perhaps the emblematic case (or the reductio ad absurdum) of this territorial imperative.
Defining “foreign policy” as a performative and discursive practice that generates the very categories it presupposes (inside/outside, self/other, domestic/foreign), Abraham's work really kicks into its own in discussions of diaspora and geopolitics in the context of India, Pakistan, and China. He argues that diaspora produces “insiders without,” while geopolitics (defined as a process of creating defensible and secure state borders) constitutes various putative citizens as “outsiders within” (pp. 19–45). While it would be impossible in a brief review to convey the richness and acuity of the insights that emerge from this way of framing the issue, two are illustrative.
First, in a contrapuntal analysis of the newfound enthusiasm for the non-resident Indian (NRI) in India (hitherto ignored or even abhorred as “coolies” in places like Guyana and Fiji or more recently the Gulf), Abraham notes that their success in the West is now used to consolidate the hegemony of upper-caste Hindus back home; to argue that caste-based reservations are a bad idea, as they force domestic talent to seek greener “meritocratic” pastures abroad; and to jettison socialistic policies of earlier decades, as NRIs have shown that Indians can win in the neoliberal world. In this instance, diaspora is used to define who is really Indian (upper-caste, educated, successful, and allegedly meritocratic Hindus) and who is not.
Second, geopolitics in the form of a postcolonial territorial imperative to tenaciously hang on to the administrative boundaries inherited from colonial times has rendered the northeast an “outside within.” It is the site of the most egregious state violence and repression, sanitized by the notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act, operational now for over half a century. Abraham argues with conviction that the northeast is the “space of exception,” one that renders the rest of India “normal” or normative by its contrast (p. 130).
One of the more noteworthy features of this work is its extensive drawing on sources from and comparisons with China and Southeast Asia in addition to its surefootedness in Western literatures on geopolitics, critical geography, and international relations. As a result, Abraham is able to view India, Pakistan, and China from an uncommon vantage—and the results are invariably energizing and insightful.
A couple of cavils, one minor and the other not quite. Abraham introduces the idea of “scale” with some fanfare in the introductory chapter only for this methodological principle to fall by the wayside as the book unfolds. More worryingly, he makes such a persuasive case for the territorial impulse that underlies the ontology of postcolonial nations that it is a bit hard to be optimistic about resolving border conflicts or envisage less violent futures in the subcontinent.
Overall, this is a strikingly original and richly multidisciplinary take on issues of national identity, conflict, and territory in India, Pakistan, and China. All the more remarkable, and much needed, given the very well-grooved narratives that dominate much of the extant literature on these issues.
