This edited collection explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in 21st-century Asia, it demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political, and economic relations.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1. Why highways remake hierarchies
- Luke Heslop and Galen Murton
- 2. Stuck on the side of the road
- Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal
- Galen Murton and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel
- 3. A road to the ‘hidden place’
- Road building and state formation in Medog, Tibet
- 4. Dhabas, highways, and exclusion
- 5. The edge of Kaladan
- A ‘spectacular’ road through ‘nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar borderlands
- Jasnea Sarma
- 6. The making of a ‘new Dubai’
- Infrastructural rhetoric and development in Pakistan
- 7. Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives
- Gifts, hospitality, and rumours
- Luke Heslop and Laura Jeffery
- 8. Roads and the politics of thought
- Climate in India, democracy in Nepal
- Katharine Rankin and Edward Simpson
- Authors notes
- Index
- List of figures
- Figure 3.1 A crashed vehicle lying in the river valley
- Figure 3.2 Yellow prayer flags standing on the Medog Highway
- Figure 3.3 Medog County seat and the Yalu Zangbu River
- Figure 4.1 Amrik Sukhdev Dhaba, Murthal, NH 1
- Figure 4.2 Anurag Dhaba, Nagaon Bypass, NH 37
- Figure 4.3 Trucks parked outside a line dhaba, NH 37
- Figure 4.4 Inside a line dhaba, NH 1
- Figure 6.1 Pictures of Container Hotel
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