Cultural flows across a blurred boundary

South Asia's blurred cultural boundaries are being given sharp edges with frontiers full of patrolling soldiers, the raising of border security forces, and even barbed barricades and floodlights. As time passes, the cultural rivers on the two sides find their own separate courses and the divergence begins. Fortunately, there is one frontier of South Asia that has not yet succumbed to this need to irreparably separate, demarcate, define. The thousand-kilometre open frontier between Nepal and India is often decried in both countries as an abomination, for it is said to undercut Nepali sovereignty on the one hand and India's economic and political security on the other. However, this very lack of rigidity of the Nepal-India boundary is what makes it most natural and historically evolved. It reflects and nurtures the cultural sameness across the frontier, and could be a harbinger of the kind of frontier one would hope to see, for example, between India-Pakistan and India-Bangladesh. The story hidden under the topsoil of the Ganga plains is that two countries can have an unbolted border, a peopled frontier where communities are neighbouring and friendly as they were meant to be in this part of the world. The border between the Nepal Tarai and Bihar/Uttar Pradesh provide the prototype for the other land frontiers of South Asia.

For being one of the most densely populated regions of the world, the rectangle which encompasses the northern bank of the Ganga all the way north to the Churay (Shiwalik) hills is the most neglected corner of South Asia. It is a region derided by the New Delhi intelligentsia as an unfathomable basket case and distrusted by Kathmandu's elites as a region that would challenge their national sovereignty. The illustrious history and the current sociology of the Ganga Rectangle is thought to count for nothing, and all South Asia loses as a result. In this essay, a Kathmandu-based columnist who hails from Janakpur in Mithila, emphasises the links between the Nepal Tarai and the rest of the Ganga plains, and proposes that the Nepal Tarai has the cultural dynamism to lead the entire Ganga Rectangle out of its present cul-de-sac.