“Where Is Bhutan?” The Production of Bhutan's Asymmetrical Inbetweenness in Geopolitics

Abstract

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

Introduction

The founding of modern Bhutan is traced to Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, who arrived from Tibet in 1616. Bhutan is a country embedded in the histories of early Himalayan Buddhism (Ardussi 1977; Aris 1979; Phuntsho 2013); its ruling Wangchuck dynasty, founded in 1907, challenged the contrast between monarchy and modernity by steering the country through a unique transition to democracy in 2007 (Kaul 2008). The country strongly asserted its distinct sense of national identity in the 1980s to prioritize sovereignty preservation over internal turmoil.¹ Bhutan defies any number of typologies—it is a functioning Asian welfare state, a rare carbon-negative country that prioritizes Gross National Happiness (GNH) over Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and a consolidating democracy that has privileged the empirical indigeneity of political expression.

However, the central way in which outsiders have long perceived and defined Bhutan and its identity has been through its being “inbetween India and China”—so much so that it is often impossible to find references to Bhutan that do not approach it through this “inbetweenness.” This framing, though of course not geographically inaccurate, nonetheless is a powerful imaginary that came into being in particular ways and through specific constellations of motives. Through a critical reading of historical narratives and archival materials, this article uncovers the coming-into-being, the production and naturalization, of this inbetweenness perception of Bhutan through the external discourse on the country up to the early post-colonial years. Because it is not an article about the self-definition of Bhutan, it draws upon work by non-Bhutanese that was influential in framing the inbetweenness discourse; this work has been written overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, in the English language (whether in the published texts or archives) and produced by British, and later Indian, scholars and officials.²

Where a country is located geopolitically is as much a function of its history and politics as it is of geography (Lewis and Wigan 1997, 197–98, 203). I argue that modern Bhutan is widely perceived as a Himalayan kingdom located inbetween China and India; moreover, this inbetweenness is not equidistant but is oriented southward toward India, especially in matters of economy.³ This asymmetrical inbetweenness, which is taken for granted by many, if not most, contemporary writers, is not an inevitable product of geography but a labor of geopolitics in the region. Bhutan's growing economic and political dependence on India, and its distancing from Tibet/China, was the result of conscious British imperial fashioning of the Himalayan region, even before the two developments in the 1950s that (re)confirmed Bhutan's southward orientation—the Chinese annexation of Tibet and the Sino-Indian border dispute.

Thus, this article is a critical analysis of the production of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness with a southward orientation, an asymmetrical inbetweenness that later came to be naturalized and seen as inevitable. I focus on the unfolding of an economic imperative—through exploration, production, cultivation, annexation, monetization, and securitization—that first created, and later naturalized, the asymmetrical inbetweenness of Bhutan, which persists to the present day.

Asymmetrical Inbetweenness as a Given

In the spring of 1947, an Asian Relations Conference was held in New Delhi with the objective of promoting understanding and cooperation among the vastly different nations of a broadly defined Asia. Bhutan's Jigme P. Dorji gave the following brief salutation to the gathered members: “As a representative of Bhutan, a small country perched right up on the Himalayas, I offer you fraternal greetings, cordial and pure like the air of our mountains . . . In the name of Bhutan, I salute you, people of Asia” (Asian Relations Organisation Report 1948, 35–36). The definition of Bhutan offered by its representative at this important turning point, a post-colonial moment in many countries of the region, is crucial: he represents Bhutan as a small country perched right up on the Himalayas. This self-definition is in marked contrast to the way Bhutan is defined by most outsiders, who see it solely in terms of an exhaustive inbetweenness. To emphasize the salience of this dominant geographical imagination and its potential effects, note how Switzerland, in contrast, is never routinely introduced only as a small inbetween country. By ignoring Bhutan's self-definition and prioritizing the defining of Bhutan in terms of its location inbetween two bigger neighbors—India and Tibet/China—Bhutan's geography becomes freeze-framed in strategic terms (as a “buffer state” or “sphere of influence”) in a specific manner in relation to how the external world sees Bhutan.

Consider these examples of writings on Bhutan that begin by describing it in terms of its neighbors:

These commentators (and there are numerous others) are not merely describing Bhutan as being inbetween; they are simultaneously locating it in those terms. Bhutan is—and one can take a pick—wedged, landlocked, nestled, located, stuck, situated between, or a part of a buffer state belt between India and China. This premise is often the first step in a story that reduces Bhutan to only a small country between two big ones. This is also accompanied by lines such as these: “The historical origin of Bhutan is enveloped in obscurity” (Sinha and Dandekar 1998, 59); “Emerging from a static past, after centuries of isolation, into the world of today is the Kingdom of Bhutan, a land of virile people whose origins are lost in obscurity” (Coelho 1970, 55); “The people of Bhutan, as one sees and talks with them, do not appear to have changed all that much since George Bogle wrote about them in 1774” (Inlow 1978, 296).⁴

The next step is the naturalization of Bhutan's southward orientation, to present Indo-Bhutan relations as inevitable because of historical, strategic, cultural, and economic reasons. Bhutan-Tibet linkages, which are a crucial part of the foundational myths of Bhutan, are overlooked in favor of Indo-Bhutan relations. The contemporary story of close India-Bhutan relations is given a historical depth that is based on selective memory and conscious forgetting. While it is acceptable to recognize the complicated nature of Bhutan's historic, religious, political, cultural, and economic ties with its Tibetan neighbor to the north,⁵ it is problematic to reject them outright.⁶

Further, the precise contours of Bhutan's inbetweenness change over the centuries, from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth, as Bhutan is produced as “inbetween” for imperial economic purposes. As I explain later, Bhutan goes from being seen as north of Cooch Behar (for James Rennell), to south of Tibet (for George Bogle), to inbetween Assam and Nepal trade routes to Tibet from Bengal (for Warren Hastings onward), to inbetween British India and an impenetrable Tibet (in the nineteenth century, courtesy of native explorers/spies), to inbetween India and the great game territory of Tibet and beyond (for Francis Younghusband onward, from the start of the twentieth century), to inbetween India and Tibet (until the mid-twentieth century), to inbetween India and China (1950 onward), to being “landlocked” in a belt inbetween a democratic India and a communist China (1960 onward). In each instance, Bhutan is taken as a passive placeholder of an inbetweenness that serves the hegemonic interests at that time by facilitating the self-definition of the imperial maneuvers.

But how did geopolitics fashion Bhutan into a position of asymmetrical inbetweenness over time? What were the strategies through which British India sought to transform Bhutan from a premodern polity to one oriented southward? These strategies included territorial appropriation, treaty making, paternalism in the guise of friendship, assistance, and economic dependence. In common with a standard imperial script, it is possible to trace a definite will to dominate and control, and to legitimize this as a natural state of being.

The Economic Imperative and Asymmetrical Inbetweenness

The British involvement in India was driven by an economic imperative, and much of the territorial and political aggrandizement during the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century has to be understood as resulting significantly from this; what this economic imperative meant to the agents of empire was coherent, even if not a changeless constant. When British East India Company rule became transformed into the British Raj and then into the post-colonial Indian successor state, it was an administrative machinery driven as much by the security, prestige, and paternalism of the empire as by the profit motive. The specific nature of the imperial economic imperative shifted, from one in which commercial interests were paramount in determining the Company's attitude toward Bhutan (in the late eighteenth century), to the ascendance of production interests in which fertile territories were brought under control for the plantation economy (in the late nineteenth century), to one in which overwhelming economic dominance was a tool to keep Bhutan firmly aligned with India (in the twentieth century, accelerating with the closure of Bhutan's trade with Tibet after Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s and the Sino-Indian border conflict in the early 1960s). It is this actuation of the dynamic imperial economic imperative that resulted in the construction and naturalization of an asymmetrical inbetweenness in the identification of Bhutan's location.

Phase I: Commercial Interests—Primacy of the Economic Imperative

The standard story of the first Anglo-Bhutanese interaction dates it to 1772 and presents the East India Company's actions as a response to rivalries between native rulers, and not as a result of the expansionist dimension of the Company. Whether one reads the British or the Indian scholars writing in English—and their narratives proved to be influential in the study of Bhutan—the origin of Anglo-Bhutanese relations is traced to the British becoming aware of Bhutan in 1772.⁷ In the year 1772, they were requested for help against Bhutan by Cooch Behar, which lay to the north of Bengal, where the British East India Company had acquired the diwani (right to collect taxes since 1765). In 1773, the British fought the Bhutanese upon this plea from Cooch Behar. In 1774–75, Warren Hastings sent a jolly George Bogle without a map on a mission to Bhutan and from there to Tibet; a treaty was signed with Bhutan in 1774, but the mission was purely exploratory and economically a failure. Bogle was liked and welcomed by the Bhutanese rulers, and this opened the way to subsequent positive Bhutan-British encounters in which the Bhutanese were left unmolested until they started carrying out border raids and criminal activities on the British border in the nineteenth century. I argue that this is problematic in many ways.

In this, there is little recognition of the economic imperative on the part of the British and how their actions came to structure Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness. In fact, Francis Younghusband ([1910] 2005, 4–5) explicitly absolved the British of any imperial economic interest, emphasizing,

In such accounts, British interest in Tibet is a consequence, not a cause, of Bhutan–Tibet–British India relations and adventures. Bringing together a diverse range of rare scholarly sources that generally are not read together in the same frame or discipline, here I piece together the argument that the origins of Anglo-Bhutanese interaction were part of a process that began in the late eighteenth century when the East India Company became more than a trading company and acquired a political foothold in Bengal.

The British actions were not merely a one-off reaction to a request from a friendly native state of Cooch Behar to help against the arrogant Bhutanese. In fact, they resulted from proactive policies of augmenting and using native rivalries, political intrigues, and superior military might toward the bigger goal of commercial expansionism and profiteering throughout the region. The British in Bengal had a strong constellation of economic motives for trying to push north after 1765. They had become a dominant power in the region and wanted to maximize the commercial advantage of their position; trade needs information and intelligence. They were aware of the economic viability of Cooch Behar. They had prior knowledge of Bhutan (before 1772), both from James Renell having had an injurious encounter with Bhutanese mercenaries in 1766 and from his foray into Bhutan in 1767 (Field 1962, 341–42; this is corroborated in Bishop 1989, 28).⁸

By the late 1760s, the British presence and their repeated attempts to survey the frontiers and explore profit opportunities was coming up against areas that they wanted trading rights in and passage rights through. The British wanted a non-Nepal route (such as via Bhutan) to try to reach Tibet and open commercial relations with that lucrative trade hub that connected to China and to Kashmir and Central Asia (Mosca 2013, 129–30). In addition, the Company was politically dominant in India but financially in a poor state with a desperate desire to find markets and profit (Gilbert 1975, 89, and passim). The financial state was such that even the white officers in Bengal conspired against Robert Clive to resign en masse, in what was termed the “white mutiny of 1766,” when their supplementary payments were cut (Lenman 1968, 40). The Company had “fiddly finances”—a total deficit of more than £5.2 million—in 1767, the year when Parliament in London demanded to see the ledgers annually; it became insolvent in 1771 and survived a “storm of 1771 to 1773” (Mann 2002, 254, 256–57, 268). Its Court of Directors wrote to Bengal in 1768 about peaceful economic penetration and again in 1771 instructed the governor in Bengal to find possible ways of increasing the sales of its European commodities and other staples by appropriate measures including by exploration of the interior parts of Bhutan.⁹ In 1772, Hastings became the governor of Bengal (and in 1773, the governor-general of India). He was keen on “natural boundaries,” expanding commerce with Tibet, and finding a way other than through Nepal to do so. Hastings also had an adequate appreciation for the commercial trade and cultivation value of the Cooch Behar region.

After the turmoil with Tibet, in the 1760s, Bhutan was a strong force in Cooch Behar and had a resident there with some troops and a powerful say. By 1772, Bhutan had become involved in a dispute over succession in Cooch Behar (this was the dispute that supposedly made the British aware of Bhutan when Cooch Behar appealed to the Company, and they subsequently fought the Bhutanese). The Company stood to gain from intervening on behalf of Cooch Behar, as its expenses were paid and it was promised half the state's revenues. Bhutan's aggression in Cooch Behar some years later (after the 1760s) provided the British with a reason to send troops against the Bhutanese to secure an economically viable region (Field 1962, 344), to remove Bhutan's zone of influence (i.e., Cooch Behar) between Company territory and Bhutan, and to explore the eventual possibility of open relations with Tibet by passing through Bhutan. By 1774, the Druk Desi (“Deb Raja”) in Bhutan had changed, and the terms of the 1774 Anglo-Bhutanese Treaty meant that the Company gained possession of Cooch Behar and certain other areas that were under Bhutan, which now had to pay annual tributes to the Company and could not shelter any sanyasis or others who opposed the British.

Also, although the Bhutanese had already solicited peace (by March 20, 1774) before the British received a letter from the Panchen Lama (on March 29, 1774) interceding on Bhutan's behalf, this letter nonetheless became an excuse to try to open communication with Tibet, which was desired for trade purposes (Deb 1973, 82; Field 1962, 344). To follow this up, Bogle was sent on a mission to Bhutan and Tibet (he reached Shigatse but was not allowed to proceed to Lhasa or to China, though the mission was far from unsuccessful). Bogle went through Buxa Duar with map/s of Tibet.¹⁰ He was received without animosity, but certainly not without suspicion, by the Bhutanese. His mission was a mixed economic success.

In the following years, Hastings sent repeated missions to Bhutan (the riches of Tibet were the bigger goal), which tried to get in through different routes in the Duar region and brought back intelligence about the great commercial value of these fertile plains. As Gandolfo's (2004, 118–19) study of European cartography of the Himalayas suggests, by 1774, the Himalayan states had a good idea about the aims of the British in view of their repeated surveying as “a prelude to intrusion and conquest.” Bogle, as he went into Bhutan along the route, planted potatoes along halting places “at the desire of Warren Hastings” (White [1909] 1996, 242). The crop failed, but it makes the intention clear. He insisted upon continuing to Tibet in spite of repeated attempts by the Druk Desi (“Deb Raja”) of Bhutan to dissuade him (this insistence upon routes and territorial incursion is a behavior common to most British Missions to Bhutan).

Bogle proceeded and met the Tashi Lama, whom he claimed to befriend. On his way back from Tibet, he met a much colder reception in Bhutan. His report on the visit—apart from other things, such as an extensive catalogue of Tibet's economic resources, assessment of demand creation, and the economic value of relations with Tibet (for more detail, see Diskalkar 1933)—made it clear that the trade concessions in certain commodities that he could not obtain in Bhutan were impeded by the Bhutanese, who feared their loss of profit and monopoly advantage in dealing with Tibet from their territory. His observations on the tax system in Bhutan would also have impressed upon him the in-kind nature of the taxes in the interior and the lower relative worth of the barter and tax goods when taking into account the transportation cost to trade marts such as those in Tibet or down in the plains. His practical suggestions included the cultivation of tea on British Indian territory, which the Company (instead of China) could supply to Bhutan and Tibet, and holding off on an expedition on Bhutan, instead establishing commercial relations with Assam and conquering it.

Thus, it ought to be clear that the British wanted to push north before the dispute between Bhutan and Cooch Behar, and the Bhutanese had already solicited peace before the British received the letter from Panchen Lama. Between Bogle in 1774–75 and Samuel Turner in 1783, Hastings appointed three more missions to Bhutan—Alexander Hamilton in 1775–76, Hamilton again in 1777, and then Bogle again in 1779.¹¹ These missions pursued commercial advantage by trying to bargain a conciliatory stance on Bhutanese territorial claims for a continuation and extension of British commercial privileges. At every step, these intrusions were assessed and resisted; for example, Hamilton was not allowed to take a new route, which he had demanded. It was only with the appointment of Charles Cornwallis that British policy in the Himalayas took a back seat for a while. But in the nineteenth century, the economic imperative continued to be channeled through the cultivation promise of the fertile lowland areas of Bhutan.

It took some time for these motives to be built upon. There was no direct continuity between Bogle's suggestions and the British takeover of Assam in 1826, or the annexation of the fertile Duar regions of Bhutan in 1865, but the gradual progressive comprehension of geography, economic advantage, and power relations began to take form in a way that located Bhutan as being inbetween the Company and the satisfaction of its desires for commercial expansion in Tibet and through that in China. The needed path to Tibet, China, and elsewhere lay through the territory of Bhutan. In this context, therefore, Bhutan was not automatically inbetween anywhere in the patterns of normal trans-Himalayan trade. The British constructed it as being so through their actions, motivations, and perceptions.

Phase II: Production Interests—Marrying Economic Imperative with Territorial Occupation

The standard story of Bhutan in the nineteenth century consists of the various native and European missions¹²—especially Kishen Kant Bose and Rammohan Ray (original names Krishnakanta Basu and Ram Mohan Roy) in 1815 (Bray 2009), Robert Boileau Pemberton in 1837–38, and Ashley Eden in 1863–64—that were necessitated by Bhutanese misbehavior (cross-border raids, pillaging, and other misdemeanors). By far, the object of most attention was the mission led by Eden ([1865] 1972), since Eden was reportedly mistreated in Bhutan and this moral outrage precipitated the Anglo-Bhutan War of 1864–65, at conclusion of which, the Treaty of Sinchula (also known as the Ten Article Treaty of Rawa Pani; it was updated in 1910 to become the Treaty of Punakha) was signed and the Bhutanese Duars (literally “doors”) were annexed in 1865. Contrary to the standard story that presents the Anglo-Bhutan war and the annexation of the Duars as a punishment meted out for Bhutanese misbehavior, I argue that the British annexation of Duars did not proceed from the Eden Mission, but rather the Eden Mission proceeded from the British desire to annex the Duars, a policy that existed for years before the 1860s. Like the case of the 1772 Bhutan and Cooch Behar episode, Eden's maltreatment¹³ merely became an excuse for what had been long in the making.¹⁴

As the Company gave way to British rule in India, the transition was marked more by continuity than change. After the British discovery of the possibility of tea cultivation in the region in 1823, the commercial interests became predominantly cultivation ones; by 1826, Assam had been annexed. Over the years, fertile land was annexed on one pretext or another. In 1838, Pemberton had already observed that “the Duars were the most valuable of the Bhutan territory” (Das 2005, 27). In the immediate aftermath of the Pemberton Mission in 1837–38, Francis Jenkins actively advocated the annexation of the Duars. The Assam Duars, which were suitable for tea cultivation (recall Bogle's suggestion about cultivating tea), were annexed first by 1841. Then, in the 1850s, there was repeated suggestion that the Bengal Duars also be annexed, even though the frontier troubles were not exclusively due to the Bhutanese.

The British did not wish to recognize or feel comfortable with Bhutan's trade links in the other directions (viz., Tibet, Nepal, Assam, Bengal) that seemed to exhibit baffling patterns of overlapping jurisdictions. They continued surveying and trying to establish stable boundaries based on their own understanding of clearly defined property rights. In this, they demanded paper proof of ownership of land—deeds, contracts, and other modern legalistic instruments of ownership or possession. A telling reply to such a request from the collector of Rungpore about Bhutanese authority over some villages was made by the Deb Raja (Druk Desi) in the later part of the nineteenth century (translated in Misra 2005, 243, letter dated 14 Maung 1193, from Goalpara Papers in Guwahati, 1866–70): “It is not customary for us Bhutias to be regulated by records, but by the custom of possession . . . [T]he English and the Bhutias are very different in their modes of transacting.”

The British policy was also to monetize relations to their advantage wherever possible. They created different standards of value than the ones they inherited from traditionally transacting neighbors such as Assam and Bhutan. As Gupta (1974, 105) explains, unlike the Assam kings, whose tributes from Bhutan they inherited, the British would convert Bhutan's tribute from Deva rupees into Narayani rupees; because the latter was of higher value, the tribute, though it was the same in total as before, was automatically in arrears. Jenkins had been in favor of annexing the Bengal Duars and giving the Bhutanese a share of the revenue. This way of conducting relations was preferable to the British because it meant that revenue could be directed toward factions in the country with the intent of centralizing and consolidating control; revenue could be withheld if there was a problem, or it could be used as a means of furthering strategic imperial aims.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Bhutan was inbetween the growing pincers of certainty creation on two fronts: one, the geographical knowledge explorations that were targeting the region to the north, especially Tibet, and two, the cultivation potential of the areas of its south. While Tibet remained mostly out of bounds of the British Empire, the asymmetry of Bhutan's inbetweenness was consolidated. Bhutan came to be economically dependent on British India through a mix of war, treaty, annexation of its most fertile lands, monetization, and replacement of revenue with subsidy. Bhutan's commercial and trade importance became secondary to the wider territorial and economic interests of British India. Selective territorial annexation became feasible and desirable as the main interest of the British in the region shifted from trading regionally to producing cash crops such as tea and timber that could then be traded globally. The British imperial economic imperative of mid-nineteenth century—desire for fertile land for tea plantation under European settlers with the labor of migrants from the plains of Eastern India and Nepal—played a very important role in orienting Bhutan's economy to the south. Acquisition of fertile land for tea cultivation by British India became a loss of the most fertile lands by Bhutan in return for a cash subsidy.¹⁵ This cash subsidy was fixed at 25,000 rupees from the mid-1860s to 1910. As I will explain, it was not only unreflective of the growing value of the lost land as a result of its increasing productivity, but also an instrument of dominance through manipulation.

I paraphrase Cecil Beadon (HCB 1860–69, microfilm NAI 18), Eden's ally and lieutenant-governor of Bengal in 1864, who spelled out the economic advantages of annexation by stressing the fertility of the land, its potential, and the ethnicity of its dwellers. Beadon was against temporary occupation of the Duars to punish the Bhutanese because the resources could not be fostered properly during a temporary occupation, and occupation might draw the attention of the Bhutanese government to the resource value of the land. He recommended that as the Bengal Duars at that moment were worth 1.5 lakhs, and all management, including policing, was likely to cost less than 1 lakh, they could offer the Bhutanese government 25,000 (one-sixth of the value at the time). Then, they could use the inhabitants of the Duars who are not Bhutanese (in his view) but in the plains “Bengalees,” and in the slopes of the outer hills “Mechis, Gurrows, Cacharees, Purbutteahs, and other tribes,” who are all industrious cultivators of the soil, to break the wastes and clear the jungle. They would be helped by the labor of immigrants from the adjoining British districts and Cooch Behar, the enterprise of European timber merchants, and tea and cotton planters. In this way, the British could reclaim the land as they did in the Terai regions of Darjeeling District. Having annexed Darjeeling in 1850, except for the jungles reserved for the growth of valuable timber, the revenue from the areas cleared had more than doubled in fourteen years. In order to accomplish the annexation, they would use Bengal Native Infantry troops on the front line. If the Bhutanese should fail to negotiate or agree to terms after the British annex the Bengal Duars, or do anything else to remotely annoy the British, they could always be dealt with by sending “force into the country . . . to impose conditions of peace at the seat of the Government.”

Beadon (as paraphrased in the previous paragraph) gives an instructive lesson in imperial economic logic. The frontier land, when cultivable for profit, was annexed; when wasteland, sold off. The cultivators of the land were the native plains and hill people who were moved around for profit-maximization, the enterprise was that of European timber merchants, the armies that fought to annex these lands were made up of native infantry soldiers, and the profits were due to the British. The amount of revenue to the Bhutanese was fixed at an annual sum, not at a proportion, because, as Beadon says, the returns were bound to multiply manifold over the years. Moreover, having deprived the Bhutanese of their most valuable and significant territories, the British could further manipulate their allegiance by withholding the money if they had any cause for complaint.

The gradual and intensive operation of the economic imperative in imperial purposes ensured that Bhutan became dependent on the revenue from the subsidy and also became oriented southward. The subsidy value was increased (this was a crucial weapon in the hands of the British) in 1910 in return for a further compromise on the part of Bhutan—that its external relations would be directed by the British. Bhutan's relations northward had never been entirely smooth, and economic relations with the north had traditionally been significant (Zha and Ao 2017), but the imperial purposes functioned effectively to direct its economy southward. The northern trade with Tibet was almost completely cut off by the mid-twentieth century because of India-China hostility. Bhutan was thus produced as “landlocked” between India and China by this time.

There was nothing necessarily blockaded about Bhutan's relations in any direction—north, south, east, or west. It was its own center in several ways when Rennell went surveying in the 1760s. But as the economic potential of the country was mapped and realized, and the possibilities for its various territories assessed, those territories were gradually bought under British control with a clear policy of imperial economic profit. With the official circumscription of Bhutan's foreign relations, coupled with the dependence on revenue from the south, its asymmetrical inbetweenness was stressed. The myth arose that Bhutan had somehow always been isolated, impenetrable, and hostile and that its natural relations were to the south with India because geography did not permit it any other interaction. In fact, the Himalayas themselves, once a thriving center of various kinds of commercial and other liaisons and activities, became transformed into the symbolic barriers between the big nations. Bhutan became a country seen as trapped between a democratic India and a communist China, when in fact it was a country that had its own sense of identity that was apparent before India and China unified themselves through nationalist political struggles.

Phase III: Security Interests—Economics as Politics through Other Means

The British imperial period until the twentieth century was guided by the economic imperative, which operated on calculations of profit and extraction. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British assessed Bhutan in terms of its natural and mineral resources, cultivation potential, trade produce of other kinds, and trade route access. The imperial economic imperative was one of making more profit by restructuring relations between people and things, by reorienting trade patterns if possible, and by clearly categorizing and monetizing prior relations between governance units to their own advantage. Bhutan's most resource-rich and cultivable areas (the Duars) were annexed over the course of the nineteenth century, the populations of these regions were catalogued as being not really Bhutanese, and other settlers were brought in to increase profit. The point of economic aid or infrastructural development in Bhutan did not arise for the imperial power, even in theory, until the start of the twentieth century.

Following the forceful entry into Tibet, with Bhutanese support, of the Younghusband expedition in 1903–4, Bhutan was recast on the map as a strategic area. It bordered on profitable British-controlled fertile territory, and therefore it was necessary to keep it pacified and under British influence. This was achieved by mentoring and recognizing, through awards and honors, the leadership within Bhutan; by minimizing the rival influence of religion (Lamaism with its Tibetan links worried the British) to centralize political control in the secular sphere; and by taking control of its external relations through the 1910 treaty, generally ensuring that Bhutan remained a stable frontier territory. However, it was also important for the British to provide the Bhutanese with a rationalization for why it was important to function within the imperial sphere of influence in the south rather than in the north. The British sought to achieve this in two ways: first, through the Durbar invitations and other persuasive discourse of the political officers, it was impressed upon Bhutan that the superiority of the British did not come from their use of force but from their status as an important world power that people bowed down to as a result of their accomplishments in diverse fields of development;¹⁶ and second, by attempting to pass on some of this development to Bhutan as an advantage that could be gained by engaging favorably with the British. This is where economic aid and infrastructure development come in.

The standard story is that Bhutan chose to stay in a self-imposed isolation until 1960s, and it was really the Chinese invasion of Tibet that prompted it to reach out for development aid. This is evident in oft-repeated statements such as “emerging out of its centuries old isolation in the late fifties with a socio-economic background relevant only to the 17th century if not earlier” (Das 1986, 83). I argue that while the run-up to the India-China confrontation in 1962 certainly affected Bhutan's trajectory of foreign economic policy, it is not factually correct to say that the Bhutanese leadership chose isolation for its own sake; before India's independence, their appeals for development aid were often rejected, and after 1947, the price of such aid had to be carefully weighed against Bhutan's sovereign status.

For instance, in 1911, the Bhutan Durbar, through Rai Ugyen Kazi Bahadur, applied for the services of a Sikkim Road Pioneer to survey the alignment of a road from Sinchula near Buxa Duar to Paro; it needed a sanction of 150 R,¹⁷ but even this small amount was rejected (HCB 1911, microfilm NAI 38a). This was the case even though the political officer pointed out that the British had given assurance to the Maharaja of Bhutan to assist in developing the resources of his country (something that was a part of 1910 treaty negotiations but not put in writing), and also mentioned that the proposed road might be of benefit to British India as well as to Bhutan, as it would lead from “British India into the heart of Bhutan,” and thus be a good line of road to Tibet. The answer was “no” to the 150 rupees.

Bhutanese leadership might have perceived the significance of education, health, and modernization, but policy implementation required money. Bhutanese taxes were in-kind and inadequate for launching programs of socioeconomic development; Bhutanese trade could not finance modern reform. The amount of the treaty subsidy was grossly inadequate, and the imperial government repeatedly refused to increase it. Contrary to its stated aims, and regardless of its moral claims, the imperial imperative is never to develop another state unless there is a strategic need to do so. In the British case, there was a clear understanding that the policy was to keep the frontier states pacified but in a state of poor infrastructural development as a security measure so as to enable the tenuous equilibrium in those regions to endure. Basu (1996, 48) refers to the statement made by the third King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck to the National Assembly in 1971: “Had they given the assistance that we asked for, Bhutan might have progressed far more than we have progressed today . . . I am prepared to recount how hard we tried for British aid and how reluctant they were to grant that aid.”

With the end of British rule in India, post-colonial Indian leadership was aware of the legacy of the empire and had inherited some of its realpolitik attitudes (occasionally made worse by the euphoria of emergent nationalism and its self-righteousness). This considerably narrowed the real potential for dialogue and understanding in the beginning years. The patronizing treaty relationship was continued with Bhutan, although with new gestures of increased subsidy and return of some territory. This greater subsidy, potential for developing trade connexions, and education and skills training were utilized by Bhutan's leaders alongside a modernization of political structures within the country to make decision-making more consultative and participatory.

But economic aid and infrastructure development in Bhutan could not be conceived without its political consequences. It is worth noting that the human and skills components of strategic assistance—language training, education of Bhutanese in the Indian lingua franca Hindi as a medium of instruction in Indian schools, military training such as that provided by the Indian Military Training Team (IMTRAT), which also set up a permanent base in Haa¹⁸—preceded the infrastructural development assistance. Apart from linking the capital city of Thimphu to the border in the south, the next road network in Bhutan went horizontally and was in line with preventing strategic connectivity to minimize Chinese influence or incursions from the north.

Much more active efforts to orient Bhutan's economy toward India began after 1960, by which time Bhutan's degrees of freedom had been severely curtailed by Chinese control of Tibet and the consequent stopping of trade links with the north. India's understanding of, and influence in, Bhutan increased in the period from 1955 onward. Vohra (1980, 88) refers to the economic development of Bhutan being the main topic of conversation during the 1958 visit of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to Bhutan. He mentions that although India's interest “mainly lay in constructing access roads but apart from the annual subsidy of Rs five lakhs to which Bhutan was entitled under the 1949 Treaty, Bhutan never accepted any aid till 1958.” A tabulation of India's development assistance (Vohra 1980, 91) committed to Bhutan during 1961–79 shows a year-on-year percentage increase (often in the double digits); the only exception is 1970–71, when it registered a 5 percent reduction—this was the year Bhutan became a member of the United Nations on September 21, 1971.

By 1960, it was clear to Indian bureaucrats that there was a need for closer ties with Bhutan and that this would (gradually) mean working with compatible incentives that furthered Bhutan's interests while drawing it within India's economic ambit. This was, at times, a decision with consequences for development patterns within Indian states: for instance, when materials such as minerals for a plant in India could be supplied both from Indian states and from Bhutan, the latter might need to be prioritized. The official discussions and opinions of the various ministries reflect these dilemmas.

To take an example from 1960, on the issue of developing rail links to supply dolomite and limestone from Bhutan to steel plants in India, the request from the Lessee of the Quarries in Bhutan refers to the increased need for dolomite in India and the scope for Bhutan to supply it if the railway siding could be extended (up to the Dolomite Hill in Samchi [Samtse] Bhutan from either Banarhat or Binnaguri station). As the Bhutan government would like this to happen, Political Officer Pant thought “we should give this facility to the Bhutan Government rightaway” (NAI 1960, 18(14)EAD/60). A Deputy Secretary from the Ministry of Steel, Mines, & Fuel (SMF) opposed the plan: “there is not a strong case for moving the Ministry of Railways for allowing a freight concession to Bhutan as dolomite and limestone are available within the country, and even if a concession were given as suggested, the limestone and dolomite from Bhutan would still be very expensive.” The political officer's sentiments (dated July 23, 1960), as conveyed to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), reflected different concerns (emphasis added):

The draft reply of another official (Under Secretary, SMF), in its rough version (on file, but canceled out of the final letter) contained the following remarks (emphasis added): “Bhutan, although a poor country, has been a littlesomewhat touchy about her political position . . . we have decided to afford all possible assistance and concessions which would tend to draw Bhutan into our sphere of influence. The implications of linking Bhutan with the economy of India cannot also be over-emphasized.” Another note in the file (from the MEA) had this observation: “There can be no two opinion [sic] about the fact that the more Bhutan is drawn in the ambit of our economic sphere, the closer would be our ties with her.” This example illustrates how economic and infrastructural assistance was clearly motivated by the political aim of keeping Bhutan securely within India's sphere of influence. In 1961, a year after these deliberations, the first five-year plan was launched in Bhutan, with India financing it almost entirely.

This placing/locating of Bhutan in India's sphere of influence politically and as part of India's security frontier construction strategically was therefore not an automatic or a “natural” development. For all the reference to political diplomacy, these attempts to bring, and keep, Bhutan firmly within post-colonial India's ambit, have relied upon two consistent tropes to facilitate the argument about the natural and inevitable nature of Bhutan's asymmetric orientation—first, to sharpen the contrast with the British relationship to Bhutan (which is emphasized for its domination, in order to highlight a difference in how post-colonial India viewed Bhutan), and second, the nature of Chinese designs on Bhutan (which are presented as uniformly hegemonic). To illustrate with a few examples (all emphases added):

Both these tropes—of always already British hegemony and uniform Chinese hostility—carry a complexity that is denied by much methodologically nationalist outsider scholarship on Bhutan. However, most crucially for my argument here, such discourses deny agency, vitality, and existence to a sovereign country by limiting it within a paradigm of asymmetric inbetweenness that has been constructed for imperial interests over time. India's relationship with Bhutan was never entirely smooth or inevitable; it had several ups and downs, and it has needed work and interaction. Post-imperial India was more successful in its attempts to secure influence in Bhutan through economic aid and infrastructural assistance than in timely understandings of Bhutan's cultural and identitarian aspirations as a sovereign state with a status anxiety stemming from its encounters with different imperial powers.

Conclusion

Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness construction is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. Here, I have focused on three key phases—late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth, mid-nineteenth to early twentieth, and early twentieth to mid-twentieth centuries—to trace the creation of Bhutan's marked economic orientation toward the south; more broadly, this analysis also highlights how apparently apolitical geographical concepts in fact reflect and perpetuate imperialist power relations and how this could justifiably be used as a way of understanding the historical basis of the contemporary geopolitical constraints faced by other small states, including those in the region.

The story of Bhutan's contemporary geopolitical location as inbetween India and China with proximity to the former is often written by scholars and officials who share the dominant ideas of the political machineries that they are a part of. British imperial scholarship has generally been written from the point of view of the imperial missions, and, in line with their tasked objectives, it has not been reflexive about the commercial nature of their imperial projects. Indian scholarship, in line with a nationalist understanding, has by far sought to emphasize the economic assistance and friendship extended by India to Bhutan. Bhutanese scholarship, too, has sometimes uncritically relied upon British and Indian sources. There are a few exceptions, of course, and I have highlighted them in this article. Critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is especially hard in an area in which the approach tends to be hegemonic and big-state downward rather than small-state upward, but this is also what makes it urgent. I see this endeavor as a part of a subalternizing of geopolitics that recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

The endeavor of subaltern geopolitics, as I envision it, is to revisit accepted narratives that create a problematic idea of strategy and zero-sum games. Transborder challenges predominate in the world, and part of changing national honor-based clashes is to change the ideas through which we perceive and understand those encounters. Bhutanese scholars such as Ura (2002) have pointed out the historical vulnerabilities faced by small states.¹⁹ An important instance is the Doklam issue, which nearly brought war to Bhutan in recent years. This has been the result of the strategic perceptions of India and China—perceptions that come about where states construct strategy in rivalrous and possessive terms.²⁰ I hope that by challenging the naturalized inbetweenness as the exhaustive way of framing Bhutan, it becomes possible for other scholars to argue against seeing small boundary states, sovereign or not, merely as real estate, as buffers, as transit routes, for the bigger countries, for a game of power play.

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to the anonymous referees and the editor of the JAS. I would like to acknowledge, with sincere gratitude, the research support I have received at different times for my Bhutan-related work from the University of Westminster, British Academy for South Asian Studies, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I also wish to put on record my appreciation for the librarians and archivists at the University of California, Berkeley (especially Rebecca Darby-Williams), Australia National University, and the National Archives of India. Earlier work relating to this article was presented at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in Delhi, and at the International Society for Bhutan Studies Conference held at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. I remain indebted to numerous colleagues and critically minded peers in Bhutan and around the world for what I learn from their work.

Notes

List of References