This book has been about the story of the colonial encounter in the Western Himalayas, a region which has mostly remained outside conventional historical accounts of colonialism in India. It has tried to argue that it is not possible to understand the history of the Western Himalayas under British rule as merely a sub-set of the larger story of how India coped with colonialism. Rather than being viewed as a region within the Indian civilisational expanse, this book suggests that the Western Himalayas represented a border region between India and China and it was colonialism which integrated it with the Indian nation. Through its account of the colonialencounter in the Western Himalayas, it has tried to show that there could be an alternative way of studying colonialism and modern Indian history.

It has been a central argument of this book that it is not possible to study the Western Himalayas as a part of the historical processes of the Indian subcontinent till after decades into British rule. The region followed a historical path which was removed from the rhythms of the Indo-Gangetic cultures, though it imbibed some features from the latter – both material and ideological – like it also did from Tibet. The integration of the Himalayas into the Indian nation was a specific feature of colonial rule and it is methodologically impermissible to extrapolate the social features, which are markers of this successful integration, to a period when this process had not even begun.

The predominant tendency in contemporary historiography has been to study colonialism as a pan-Indian phenomenon.