There is something fitting about the fact that the most revealing account of one of South Asia’s tense regions was written by someone born in Bhadrapur, near the fragile stretch of the Siliguri Corridor. Akhilesh Upadhyay, a veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Kathmandu Post, grew up in a world that the rest of South Asia tends to see only through the reductive lens of threat assessments and troop deployments.

That biographical fact is not incidental; it is the book’s entire justification for existing. ‘In the Margins of Empires’ insists, from its first page to its last, that the 50 million people who live in and around the corridor are not pawns between giants, but rather factors with histories, languages, and strategies of their own.

The Siliguri Corridor, known as the ‘Chicken’s Neck’, is 22 kilometres wide and roughly 60 kilometres long. Though small, it links India’s northeastern states to the mainland. To one side lies Bangladesh; beyond that, Bhutan and Nepal sit nearby, with China in close proximity. In some sectors, Indian and Chinese troops stand just 30 metres apart—the closest proximity anywhere along the entire Sino-Indian border.

Security analysts have long described it in catastrophist terms; a Chinese military advance of well under 200 kilometres would effectively sever India’s northeast, cutting off tens of millions of people. Upadhyay argues, persistently and persuasively, that reducing the corridor to a chokepoint erases centuries of human habitation, cultural exchange, and political negotiation that are essential to understanding what this place actually is and where it might be headed.

The book’s historical reconstruction is organised around a sequence of ruptures. Partition is the first and most decisive; the creation of East Pakistan carved the corridor into existence, transforming fluid Bengali-Nepali-Tibetan trading routes into hard borders requiring papers and permissions. Not long afterwards, China tightened its hold on Tibet during the 1950s, hardening the region’s northern flank and severing trade and monastic connections that communities had maintained for centuries.

The 1962 Sino-Indian War crystallised the border tensions that still animate every significant policy decision regarding the corridor today. Through all of this, Upadhyay’s focus remains on the people absorbing these disruptions at ground level, communities that could “see their livelihoods disrupted by faraway power struggles and land demarcations, with no say in the process.”

What stands out is how sharply the book handles Sikkim’s inclusion into India in 1975, portraying it as a deliberate leveraging of internal instability, where political uncertainty gave New Delhi the opportunity it had long sought. His most valuable insight here is the shadow this event cast over Nepal, a shadow that has not been lifted in fifty years. The existential anxiety in Kathmandu after 1975, the fear that Nepal might become the next Sikkim, is not paranoia but a rational reading of geopolitical precedent.

One of the book’s sections concerns the movement of Khampa guerrillas, the Tibetan resistance fighters who operated from Nepal’s Mustang region with covert CIA backing during the 1960s and 1970s. Upadhyay refuses to romanticise the resistance. He details its failure on multiple fronts: insufficient American support, unrealistic expectations of what a guerrilla campaign could achieve, and the strain placed on local Mustang communities, limited food and medicine, heavy losses and civilian disruption.

After Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China, the operation was abandoned, leaving wreckage rather than liberation. What makes this account valuable is that the writer reads it not simply as a Cold War episode but as a story about Nepal and about what it means for a small state to host a superpower-backed insurgency on its soil, with all the leverage and vulnerability that entails.

The book is equally rich in language and identity. The writer understands that language is not merely a cultural marker but a political technology. In Siliguri, languages mix, Hindi bumps into Nepali, Bengali threads through Maithili, and other languages intersect in everyday transactions, a linguistic plurality that reveals the fundamental incoherence of the nation state’s claim to have cleanly sorted populations on either side of its borders.

When he writes about the Gorkhaland movement, he states it as a demand for institutional survival, the ability to access education, law, and government in one’s own tongue rather than mere ethnic grievance. What stands out most is his idea of the “uneasy space”: people who speak Nepali in Darjeeling and Sikkim often feel culturally separate from India, even though legally they are part of it, while at the same time having no official ties to Nepal. They belong, fully, to nowhere, and Upadhyay uses the novel ‘Fatsung’ by Chuden Kabimo as a literary lens to capture this predicament in ways that statistics simply cannot.

The author looks to the future with measured anxiety in the later chapters. Whether the eastern Himalaya becomes a buffer of peace or a battlefield of proxies, Upadhyay argues, will depend not only on great-power strategies but also on the agency of the smaller states navigating it. The corridor, he warns, could either remain India’s gateway to Southeast Asia or become a chokepoint susceptible to strategic encirclement.

His closing thought reshapes our understanding of how the region works—less like clear alliances or pure conflict, and more like shifting patches of caution and reliance. This stands as the book’s most durable theoretical contribution, offering a formulation richer than the binary frameworks of alliance versus rivalry that dominate most regional analysis.

The ending, however, leaves one wanting just a little more. The author raises the stakes convincingly but stops short of offering even a tentative sense of what responsible stewardship of this corridor might look like for India, for Nepal, and for the smaller states he champions throughout. The book is at its best when it moves between the intimate and the geopolitical, and a closing passage that returned, even briefly, to the ground-level voices that open the narrative would have given the argument an emotional weight to match its analytical one. Instead, the last section reads more like a government memo than the natural close of something so rooted in lived experience.

‘In the Margins of Empires’ is not an exhaustive book, and readers seeking deep dives into battle tactics or hard numbers on trade might notice missing pieces. But it is doing something almost no other book in this space attempts: insisting, at a moment when tensions are high, on the idea that this region’s past centres on people above all else. And that kind of shift matters more than one might think.

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In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck

Author: Akhilesh Upadhyay

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Year: 2025

Pages: 295