Through the India – China Border draws together
original research on imperial history, postwar politics
and culture by utilising rarely used archival
material—British, Chinese and Indian—and sheds new
light on our understandings of the ‘Tibet question’ in
India–China relations.
In its foregrounding of espionage, intrigues and the
interplay of political machinations in the small border
town of Kalimpong in the 1920s up until 1962, this book
challenges the way remote regions, or peripheries, are
typically seen from the ‘centres’ of nations. The
innovative use of postcolonial and transcultural theories
demonstrates how this transdisciplinary framework
enriches our reading and writing of decolonial history. In
its interdisciplinary approach, the book provides insights
into the historical making of India–China relations. It
reveals the motivations of actors who are not necessarily
always tied to statecraft.
Prem Poddar is former Professor in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. He was an Alexander von Humboldt senior fellow in Berlin and is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex, and a Senior Fellow at the University of Manchester. He is the founding vice-chancellor of Darjeeling Hills University, West Bengal, India. His research interests include cultural theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, India–China borders, nationalisms and the politics of the passport.
Lisa Lindkvist Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tohoku University, Sendai, and Analyst at the Swedish National China Centre, Stockholm. She defended her PhD dissertation ‘Rethinking Indian Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century China’ at Heidelberg University in 2023. Her research focuses on philosophy and history in the light of Chinese politics and China–India relations.
