Anomalous Borders, Geographical Knowledge, and the Inner Line in India

This article examines the Inner Line system in British India’s northeastern frontier to show how borders are historically produced and dynamic. Introduced through the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873, the Inner Line operated as an internal administrative partition that nonetheless functioned as the practical limit of sovereign authority in a region where the external border remained undefined until 1914. What existed beyond the Inner Line, therefore, was a zone where sovereignty was fragmented and where law remained mired in ambiguity.Over time, the Inner Line was repeatedly redefined, becoming a key element of colonial governance in the region – all the while remaining indefinite, almost by design. It enabled extra-legal colonial interventions and institutionalised a civilizational distinction between the hill and valley populations. The article traces various spatial and ethnological discourses that framed the hills as an unruly frontier. This representation underpinned the Inner Line and was developed over the 19th and 20th centuries through surveying, mapping and ethnological classification to naturalise a new colonial territorial order. It argues that the line was not just a geographical division but a mechanism that reshaped the region’s patterns of mobility and association to fit within the imperial economic and administrative order. Previous studies on northeastern India have analysed how colonial interventions framed the region’s geography, agrarian structure, and security concerns. This article builds on such scholarship, situating the Inner Line within wider discussions on frontiers in British India. By tracing how the Line was repeatedly redrawn, amended, and circumvented, the article emphasises its fluidity and its role as a flexible technology of power that regulated mobility, economic extraction, and administrative reach. Finally, I show how, in post‑colonial India, the Inner Line has acquired new and often competing meanings — becoming at once a security instrument, a mechanism of indigenous protection, and a site of political contestation.