Scholarly accounts of the contested borders between India and China are often dominated by either macropolitical nation-statist and security registers, or by the adoption of micropolitical anthropological approaches highlighting the agency of the region’s inhabitants. This book sits somewhere in between the spectrum, as it investigates Kalimpong, West Bengal, as a “unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India” (p. 1). Kalimpong, a hill town in the eastern Himalayas, was in the border zone of Sikkim-Bhutan-Bengal-Tibet; since the mid-20th century, it has been firmly within India but bordering Bhutan and Tibet. The disappearance of the traditional Tibetan state and the significance of this disappearance for the place of Kalimpong and the region surrounding it remains a fertile topic of inquiry.

What this volume does is shift away from the Bhutanese-Sikkimese-Tibetan-[British]Indian matrix to highlight a subject that is generally under-played – the “Chinese presence.” While the number of “Chinese” people was never substantial in the town between the early 20th century and 1962 (the period covered by the accounts in the book), the Chinese presence was conspicuous due to its (hyper)visibility, which had its origins in the frontier anxiety of British India and, later, independent India. This Chinese presence, and how it was read in British and post-colonial India, reflected the shifting contours of India–China relations.

Poddar and Zhang provide a very interesting and rich analysis of the Chinese presence in Kalimpong until the 1960s. Their first substantive chapter highlights that the colonial and postcolonial production of the place was tied to its “translocal and transregional character,” including Tibetan and Chinese presences. They point out that the “Chinese connection” (p. 6) of this hill station started in the early 20th century, once Tibet became de facto independent and Chinese soldiers were expelled from Lhasa, many of whom later settled in the northern borderlands of India. Therefore, Tibet and Sino-Tibetan relations were integral to this Chinese presence. Yet, this is one aspect of the puzzle that is under-examined in the book. The authors acknowledge that one of the “intents here is to write a transposed narrative by putting the ‘Chinese connection’ to Kalimpong in conjunction with an analysis of how ‘Tibet’ and ‘Tibetan(s)’ affected it” (p. 24). Yet, they only do so by adding an explanatory footnote: “While we do not focus on Tibet per se when looking at Kalimpong, as this would entail looking at different sets of sources, it must be made explicit that this could be perceived as a blind spot” (p. 46). Other than this Tibet-related blind spot, what makes the book most interesting is the detailed narrativization of specific ways in which Chinese presence as well as absence came to mark Kalimpong.

Chapter two critically examines the representation of the town in the Chinese communist press and the shifts there that were connected to rapidly changing India–China relations. Chapter three is on modern registration of Chinese and Tibetan subjects in the middle of the 20th century when the postcolonial states were still young; it provides an “account of the various bureaucratic, and ultimately political, contours of arbitrarily articulating meanings invested in the notion of ‘Chinese’ nationality” (p. 87). Chapter four offers a detailed story of Chung Hwa School and its key figures. It warns against a simplistic understanding of “Chineseness,” for that identity was fractured by the conflicts between Communists and Nationalists, and thus between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China. Chapter five is a rich account of a prominent trader, Ma Zhucai, and his shifting fortunes.

What is common to all the different stories that form part of the volume is the fact that in various Chinese narratives, like Indian ones, there was constant anxiety as the plurality of the place was seen as prone to hostility, intrigue and espionage. The Despite this unifying thread, the chapters sometimes read as distinct and discrete articles, which is partly due to their reliance on very different research methods. The concluding chapter, titled “Not the last word: an inconclusion” feels a little rushed.

Overall, Through the India-China Border is an interesting book for scholars of Eastern Himalayas, China–India relations and anthropology of borderlands.