ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a mid-19th-century history of a boundary drawn between the princely state of Tripura (Hill Tippera) and its surrounding lowland districts. In doing so it seeks to contribute to the historiography of South Asian borderlands and British colonial governance of frontiers. The two, to state the obvious, are intimately intertwined. The chapter tracks such a twinned history; of a boundary morphing into an ‘imperial’ frontier. The history of this boundary opens up questions of property, law and difference; how colonial governance marked limits in state, legal and cadastral geographies. Through a biography of this boundary, the chapter tracks the different difficulties that constantly crept up in determining its exact contours. These ‘practical’ problems of governance are ciphers from which the essay reads the relationship between lowlands and uplands produced in colonial history. The chapter underlines the protean character of boundaries; how they speak to and of different things, how they signal varied registers of limits simultaneously.
