Chapter 1 - Statemaking, Cultures of Governance and the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816

Summary

The word [state] commonly denotes no class of objects that can be identified exactly, and for the same reason it signifies no list of attributes which bears the sanction of common usage.

—George Sabine

[…] we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny.

—Doreen Massey

Approaching States and Statemaking

It was the start of a warm day in the month of Jeyt in 2046 BS (May/June 1989 CE) when I awoke at 4.00am to undertake the six-hour trek to the Indian border. I had been living in a small town, in Far Western Nepal, teaching in a public school and now had to travel to Delhi to repair school equipment and purchase textbooks. I trudged along under the weight of a backpack full with nearly thirty mismatched pounds of damaged machine parts, punctured soccer balls and books in need of binding. As the day headed purposefully towards its consummation in a scorching finale of 110 degree Fahrenheit, I broke for a cup of tea along the Mohana River which marked the Indo–Nepal boundary. Always a porous zone of flows, this section of the Indo–Nepal boundary had been a mobile space attracting traders, migrant labor, smugglers and tourists alike.