ABSTRACT
While George Dunbar – the British administrator – was at great pains to determine during his expedition where exactly India came to an end and Tibet/China began sometime in the early-1910s, the killing of Nido Tania in the heart of New Delhi in 2014, allegedly on the grounds that he sported ‘a Chinese hairstyle,’ points out at one level that China is no longer located at a distant border, but is fast becoming part of us, which at another level is considered a threat to be combated by all means. In other words, much of India's relations with China is shaped by the aporia of our being impossible neighbours to each other. This paper dwells on a few dense ethnographies conducted recently in India's northeast in order to discover, if possible, a few rules of neighbourhood. The paper concludes with the argument that neighbourhood has a dynamic of its own that cannot be reduced to a “great power game” otherwise occupying much of the existing literature on the subject.
