Negotiating (Someone Else’s) Freedom: Crossing between India and Nepal, 1880–1930

British India and Nepal created and maintained a border between them in the nineteenth century, in large part, by negotiating the terms upon which people could pass between the two territories. In a situation of general labor scarcity, with plentiful land available in the border region in the early nineteenth century, both sides tread rather carefully while attempting to attract laborers and peasants. From the 1840s, however, British India began to justify its attempts to draw labor to its side using the language of the “free” market and upholding the freedom of labor to move. This position, however, was not without its contradictions. British India’s increasing reliance on military labor from Nepal in the later nineteenth century, for example, meant that the colonial government had to agree to the Nepali state’s interests in restricting and limiting migration in various ways. Further, the British Government of India was more ambivalent about the freedom of Nepali laborers’ movements once they entered Indian territory.

In this paper, I draw on primary source materials to analyze different types of negotiations between British India and Nepal over border crossing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ranged from closed-door diplomacy over military labor to the Prime Minister of Nepal’s enactment of abolition for an international audience in 1924. Soldiers and their allies in the British imperial army, as well as planters’ organizations, also participated in such negotiations. While the vast majority of migrants were left out of the dialogue, the urgency of discussing their “freedom” takes on a new dimension in light of how little either state was able to control the actual border.  To what extent did attempts to spread “state spaces,” as well as control the meanings of freedom and free labor, affect the lives of those who crossed the border?