Prof Prem Poddar – China in India: from Shangri-La to Kalimpong

The talk will go though some of the pivotal moments in my book just released from Cambridge University Press. Through the India-China Border: Kalimpong in the Himalayas mobilizes rarely used documentary material from British, Chinese and Indian archives to shed new light on our understanding of the ‘Tibet Question’ in China-India relations. Focused on the Himalayan border town of Kalimpong from the 1920s to 1962, it unearths a history of espionage and political intrigue that challenges the way that remote peripheries are seen from the ‘centres’ of nations. The use of postcolonial and transcultural theory demonstrates how a multidisciplinary framework augments our reading of imperial histories, postwar politics and frontier cultures. Kalimpong emerges from this analysis as a key node in Himalayan history and in the mid-century fashioning of India-China relations.