Borderland City In New India: Frontier To Gateway (asian Borderlands)
by Duncan McDuie-Ra /
2016 / English / PDF
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While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India’s northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, ethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.
"In this outstanding book, McDuie-Ra lays bare the dynamics of Imphal, the capital city of Manipur in North East India. It is a city of contradictions-disturbed, sensitive, fragmented, yet also a nexus of liberalization, a corridor to Southeast Asia, and a locus of development. Through a brilliant spatial ethnography, McDuie-Ra takes us inside this fraught space, outlining the dilemmas and possibilities of everyday life, the contradictions and erosions of rule, and the confused dynamic of transition from unruly frontier to gateway city. In doing so, he offers a theoretically nuanced and empirically dynamic study of urbanization in one of India's most critical yet little-understood borderlands."
(Jason Cons, University of Texas and author of Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border)
