Aditya Kiran Kakati

This book examines World War II and decolonization’s consequences on governance, citizenship, and identity in India and Burma’s highland frontiers. It reveals how wartime globalization, despite expectations of further integration of these frontiers, paradoxically reinforced remoteness after the war, permanently shaping the relationship between upland communities and states. The research explores selective and historically contingent state-making, showing how affective discourses like “loyalty” and “morale” influenced wartime governance, laying foundations for a coercive form of postcolonial governance that misrepresented upland communities. Colonial accounts portray the frontier “Hill-tribes” as “primitive” but loyal subjects. Loyalty and morale evolved into postcolonial discourses of paternalistic relations, eventually leading to armed resistance. The book finds that violence became a leverage for upland communities to negotiate remoteness, often mimicking state rhetoric to assert post-war political-material demands failing which led to the proliferation of armed movements. Linking anthropological “Zomia” debates with mimetic and affective state-making during a global conflict, it sheds novel light on the formation and endurance of violent state-making and the complexities of postcolonial citizenship struggles in the trans-border eastern Himalayas in the 1940s. The study unpacks the foundations of pervasive remoteness, coercion and misleading affective governance discourses that define “unruly” subjects denied equal democratic citizenship.