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141 CHAPTER SIX Mobility and Fixity . . . What does the body remember at dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map of the world, erased and drawn again and Again, then covered with rivers and earth. Susan Stewart, “The Map of the World Confused with Its Territory” To Cross a Pass I heard the phrase “Delhi doesn’t understand” yet again from a Sikkimese extrader -turned-teacher toward the end of my stay in India. After a long conversation that focused mostly on teaching and education in the region, we moved on to discuss a story he had heard in 2002 about a refugee mother and two children from Tibet who tried to escape to India through the Chorten Nyima mountain pass on the northwest border of Sikkim and Tibet. Apparently, a call went out to the office in Delhi that deals with refugee issues to find out what to do. The authorities in Delhi told the local border guards to send the family back over the pass, and according to the ex-trader, the authorities in Delhi “were not understanding how dangerous the journey was and how tired they were.” On the way back to Tibet, the mother and one of the children died. The ex-trader put his cup of tea down and said very seriously, “Delhi doesn’t understand what it’s like to cross a pass. We have to get these guys in Delhi to understand what it means to cross a pass. Yaks don’t know borders, they cross at will, and when they are restrained, it becomes difficult. Delhi doesn’t understand this whole region, and it doesn’t understand Sikkim. It doesn’t understand the extent of trade that will happen in this region. Border trade has failed everywhere else in India. Someone in Delhi simply thinks, ‘ok, we’ll open the old border with Tibet and they’ll trade salt for grain,’ not realizing the implications, not realizing the extent of trade in the past and the potential for today.” As the ex-trader remarked, “what it actually means to cross a pass”—in this case, pure survival—angrily bumps up against what he thinks the state (as represented by Delhi) deems more important: the pageant of border control, the 142 • Chapter Six Sino-Indian conflict, the political sensitivity of allowing or not allowing Tibetan refugees across the borders, and state-based understandings of the realities of border trade in the region. What Owen Lattimore understood all too well in the mid-twentieth century was that routes and frontiers “are shaped less by geographical conditions than by cultural momentum and the impact of those who created them” (Lattimore 1962: 384). While many narratives of traders who have exchanged goods along routes that cross Tibet, India, and Nepal have been influenced and altered by major economic transformations such as border closings and reopenings or the introduction of new commodities, they in turn shape their own trading geographies, often in uneven and unexpected ways. By paying particular attention to competing ideas of place (actual and metaphorical ), the processes and struggles over making or “fixing” certain places against others are just as important as the narratives of mobility in globalization studies and other fields, if not more so. Lived, everyday experiences and the friction of terrain play an important role in the creation and various representations of routes of trade, whether at the Nathu-la border crossing in the early twentieth century and again at the 2006 reopening, or through the contemporary ordering of shipments of French brie to a supermarket in Kathmandu. The economic and political history of the Himalayan region has always been contingent upon tensions between mobility and fixity, at every scale. The stories of the traders who have exchanged goods along the Lhasa–Kalimpong trade route are simultaneously the stories of the geographical development of Asia. But perhaps it is unsatisfactory to leave our stories at this juncture. I sit here writing this in 2011, and during the past few years, much has been made of the economic rise of China and (to a slightly lesser extent) India. While India has implemented a policy of “Look[ing] East” toward China, China has been putting its “Develop the West” policy into practice since the early years of the twenty-first century. In 2008, China officially became India’s largest partner in trade, prompting policy makers to coin the term “Chindia” to reflect the tightening relationship between the two “rising Asian giants...

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