The Historical India–Nepal Borderland Economy

Detailed chapter description

The India–Nepal boundary across Mithila and the wider eastern Tarai/Madhesh did not create two self-contained economies. It cut across an older lowland–foothill–valley system in which cultivators, pastoralists, merchants, pilgrims, craftsmen, revenue farmers, carriers and state agents moved through linked markets and seasonal routes. From the late eighteenth century onward, Gorkha consolidation, Company expansion, the Anglo–Gorkha War, boundary demarcation, customs administration and railway construction altered the terms of movement without abolishing the economic continuities of the plains. This chapter therefore treats the border as an institution embedded in a corridor: politically real, fiscally consequential and increasingly surveyed, yet continually crossed by commodities, labour, credit, kinship and pilgrimage. The historical economy joining north Bihar to the Nepal Tarai and the Himalayan interior was older than the modern boundary. River systems, alluvial plains, forest belts and foothill passes produced a north–south gradient of exchange. Grain, livestock, cloth and manufactured goods moved toward the hills; forest products and highland commodities moved toward low-country markets. Political jurisdictions changed repeatedly, but the commercial logic of short-haul movement from village to hat, hat to customs point, and customs point to a long-distance route remained durable. The term borderland is therefore more accurate than frontier only if it does not imply political vagueness. States claimed revenue and sovereignty here, yet their lines intersected economic fields whose scale was set by ecology, transport cost and social networks as much as by jurisdiction.