1st Place — The State in the Salt Marsh: The Conception, Construction, & Conquest of the Rann of Kutch

Introduction

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought a four-day war over a patch of salty, barren territory
populated by greater numbers of wild asses than men. In the historiography of modern South
Asia, that war has been left largely untouched. India and Pakistan have fought longer, blooding
wars over relatively more hospitable bits of territory (as well as a glacier). Those wars—in
Kashmir, in Bengal, in Punjab—have received the bulk of historians’ attention (Gupta 1969;
Grover and Arora 1998; Raghavan 2013).

Despite this historiographic neglect, the 1965 war in the Rann of Kutch was no mere
skirmish. It was the penultimate event in a centuries-long dispute that demonstrates how the
interaction of sovereignty with the natural world has been transformed as the world’s dominant
regimes have moved from kingdoms and empires to the modern nation-state (Scott 1998;
Cederlöf 2013; Gardner 2021). That the long-running dispute over the Rann concerned a strip of
land regarded by many visitors and administrators as an interminable waste, neither land nor sea,
makes its example deeply relevant to a world in which the boundaries between those two realms
are increasingly blurry (Young 1839; Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968).

This thesis traces the history and evolution of the Rann of Kutch dispute over more than
200 years. The dispute traces its genealogy to early modern battles between Sindh and Kutch, the
two political territories adjoining the Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Their animus
was transformed by the bureaucratic apparatus of the British Raj into a decades-long exchange of
maps and memoranda between Sindh and Kutch over where the jurisdictional divide between them lay. The dispute was finally concluded when India and Pakistan, after both diplomacy and war had failed them, accepted an international tribunal’s verdict on the position of the border in
1968 (Khan 1998; Singh 1998).

This paper was prompted by a conundrum: why would India and Pakistan go to war over
a tract of desolate wasteland? Working through archival sources, legal arguments, and a diverse
array of cartographic evidence, I offer an argument in two parts that forms the core of this paper.
First, I contend that the Rann of Kutch dispute endured because the modern nation-state
demands the transformation of fuzzy pre-modern boundaries into hard borders satisfying the
nation-state’s requirement of a well-defined territory (Elden 2013). The final period of the
dispute, which involved contestation between India and Pakistan, was driven by the need of both
to completely constitute themselves as sovereign states.

Second, I argue that border-making was frustrated in the Rann by its amphibious, barren
condition. Border-making, which relied on evidence of state presence, could not be carried out in
the Rann. The tract, with its sparse and transient population, lacked clear and uncontested
evidence of state-imposed taxation, violence, or administrative jurisdictions (Frere 1870;
Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Ibrahim 2004). India, Pakistan, and their predecessors
attempted to escape this problem by imposing a cartographic and bureaucratically-defined reality
on this complex ecological system, reifying it into categories that could be operated on by
border-making practices. The attributes of the Rann that challenged attempts to extend
sovereignty over its alien landscape presage the problems states will be forced to confront as
they strive to preserve the tokens of sovereignty in an increasingly environmentally volatile
world.

My arguments take as their starting point a landmark piece of international arbitration from the 1960s, the award of the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal. I intersect the arguments and claims made in that case with a diverse array of cartographic and qualitative evidence that makes the conceptual visualization of the Rann possible. In combining these disparate kinds of sources, I find that the dispute over the Rann, which was motivated by the most fundamental needs of the nation-state, proceeded inevitably from the environmental confusion that the Rann produces.

I arrive at this conclusion by bringing together legal claim-making, a strong proxy for the
state’s understanding of its own rules and authority, with cartographic depictions. The process of
doing so required the analysis of an archive previously only considered for the tribunal I
reference above, which traces the shifting representations of the Rann over two centuries through
its cartographic and bureaucratic records. In the next section of this introduction, I lay out the
specificities of this singular place to help shape an understanding of what, perhaps, the Rann of
Kutch is, and why it has posed such a challenge to the modern state.

Setting

The Rann of Kutch encompasses two connected but differentiable ecological systems.
The Little Rann of Kutch, a salt flat covering 2,000 square miles, is located entirely within the
Indian state of Gujarat. The Great Rann of Kutch, a salt flat covering 7,500 square miles,
transgresses the India-Pakistan border. The lion’s share, 90%, is in Gujarat. The remaining 10%
lies in the Pakistani state of Sindh (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Raikar 2023). The
Great Rann shares the Kachchh Rift Basin, a seismically active former seafloor, with the Kutch
Peninsula, which bounds it on the south, and with the Little Rann, which bounds it on the
southeast (Sorkhabi 2014; Thakkar and Kar 2017; Chauhan et al. 2021).

This paper is concerned exclusively with territorial disputes in the Great Rann. While disputes over the Little Rann were cited during the arbitration of the Rann of Kutch dispute, Pakistan and India never contested control of the Little Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Whenever I refer to “the Rann” in this account, I am referring to the Great Rann.

The Rann is a flooded grassland biome covered mostly by sabkhas, alluvial salt, and mud
flats(Glennie and Evans 1976; Olson et al. 2001). On account of its extreme salinity and seasonal
inundation it is often described as a salt marsh. The salt flats are most expansive in the central
and western Rann, often called the “white desert” in contemporary travel stories (Springer 2018;
Patel 2021). The flat terrain is intermittently interrupted by bets or dhools, upraised “islands”
where pasture and occasionally freshwater may be found (Burnes 1829; 1834; Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Four large bets cross the southern Rann from west to east: Pachham,
Khadir, Beyla, and Chorar. A chain of small bets runs north from Pachham to the part of Sindh
called Pirol Valo Kun.

Every year, during the monsoon, the Rann is inundated by rainfall, inflow from rivers,
and, in places, seawater (Glennie and Evans 1976; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968)3. The
waters, which may be a foot or more deep, are shallower at the center of the Rann and deeper at
the edges (Frere 1870). The largest river flowing into the Rann is the brackish Luni, which
evaporates in the northeastern Rann after picking up salt and silt in the Thar Desert, which is also
the Rann’s northern border.

One genre of descriptions of the Rann focuses on its aridity and salinity, calling it a “barren waste, sandy desert, vast salt flats, salt desert, salt waste, salt impregnated alluvial tract.” But the Rann, inundated for a large chunk of the year, is not a typical salt pan. A second genre calls the Rann a seabed, inland sea, lake, or gulf, emphasizing its aquatic qualities. Unlike any of these features, though, the Rann is arid for most of the year. A final genre characterizes the Rann as amphibious: “swamp, marsh, morass, salt marsh, salt water waste, mud and sand, marsh of alluvium.” This category is closest to capturing the extreme duality of the Rann, but even then, the Rann lacks the clusters of low-lying vegetation typical of salt marshes (Tremenheere 1867; Frere 1870; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). It is, as the British adventurer Alexander Burnes said, “a tract without a counterpart in the globe.”

Theory: Borders and Barriers

My argument for the close and intricate relationship between the state and its borders is
founded on an expansive literature dealing with the emergence of the modern nation-state and its
territory. In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott writes that:

“State power, in this conception [of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive
unit of sovereignty], is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be
fully projected to the very edge of its territory, where it meets, again in principle, another
sovereign power projecting its command to its own adjacent frontier. Gone, in principle,
are the large areas of no sovereignty or mutually canceling weak sovereignties” (Scott
2009).

The period I study, from the 18th century into the late 20th, nearly traces the global transition
from empires and kingdoms to nation-states. During this period, the overlapping legal and
territorial landscapes associated with empire—characterized by a plurality of asymmetric
relations between the sovereign and the governed—were replaced by relationships between the
governed and the state that were defined in terms of an impersonal, not personal, sovereign state.
That state was necessarily defined by its group (national) identity and its borders, which marked
the limits of its territorial control. Elden describes the conception of territory that was born out of
this transition into modernity as “a bounded space under the control of a group of people, usually
a state” (Elden 2013).

The conception of sovereignty, specifically territorial sovereignty, articulated by Scott
and Elden has manifested itself repeatedly in South Asia. During the colonial period, the East
India Company and the British Raj both created the conditions for the rise of the modern
nation-state, in their attempts to define the boundaries of their rule, and permitted the persistence
of older forms of overlapping territorial and popular sovereignty (Cederlöf 2013; Chatterjee
2020). A close analogue to my work is Gardner’s research on Ladakh, which traces the uneven
march of a border across the Ladakh-Tibet frontier from the late 19th century through the 20th.
Gardner argues in The Frontier Complex that:

“The colonial state’s use of geography became intimately tied to the particular demands of
security and to the general process of making legible political territory. This increasingly
close relationship between geography and the state reveals a major spatial reorientation of
the modern period: a geopolitical vision that conceived of the world as a set of
coterminous territories tied to, and dependent upon, geographical features. While the
British Empire would ultimately fail to define its territorial borders in the northwestern
Himalaya, it bequeathed to its successor nation-states a conception of political space that
made borders objects of existential significance” (Gardner 2021).

Gardner’s exhaustive analysis of border-making in Ladakh, and the tension between the
ambiguities permitted under empire and the imperatives of postcolonial nation-states, maps
closely to the process I describe in Kutch in this essay.

As in Ladakh, India and Pakistan found themselves the unhappy possessors of a
territorially ambiguous situation in one of the least hospitable places in the world. From the
British Raj into the post-independence period, all parties attempted to use the tools of geographic
sciences to transfer the uncertain volatility of the Rann into forms of representation and data that could be understood and interpreted by the state. But even as British imperium and imperial science sought to make the Rann legible, the Rann frustrated their efforts through the simple fact of its environmental volatility. As was true in other shifting landscapes, like the delta of Bengal, it could not be easily categorized by the systems of territorial control to which the Raj or its successor states would be accustomed, and any attempt to reify the ecological system and place through maps, reports, or surveys was at odds with its shifting complexity (Bhattacharyya 2018; Dewan 2021).

This is not to say that the colonial project in the Rann was fully intentional. As Cederlöf
notes, “There is a tendency at times to ascribe far more coherence of interest and institutions to a
state in its daily practice than can be justified” (Cederlöf 2013). Rather, the everyday attempts by
agents of the Raj and of the precolonial kingdoms they succeeded to govern the Rann would be
ultimately interpreted by India and Pakistan as attempts at imposing governance on an
ungovernable place, largely by creating a vision of its reality that fit neatly on a map but did not
necessarily fit neatly onto the ground. As Cederlöf outlines in 18th century Bengal, well into the
19th century, out of a combination of the permissiveness of empire and technological limitations
to the assertion of control, a boundary in the Rann could be “a set of points… marking out
territorial claims meant fortifying strategic strongholds such as heights or rivers bifurcations, or
exercising authority by taxing market places” (Cederlöf 2013). My research demonstrates how,
as they grew increasingly uneasy with their frictional frontier, the component parts of the Raj as
well as the Raj’s postcolonial successor states clung to such points and markers of authority in
order to achieve broader control over an uncontrollable place.

While the purposes for which borders were sought in the Rann were complex and multi-layered, they came over time, even during the Raj, to be regarded as essential to the functioning of the imperial components adjacent to the tract. Neither Sindh nor Kutch, nor Pakistan and India after them, could permanently tolerate a wide, liminal boundary between them. In pursuit of a border, “geographical science was employed to determine territory by attempting to rationalize and standardize boundary-making principles and practices… the resulting frontiers and borders were simultaneously physical spaces and spatial ideals that reflected a host of aspirations and anxieties of the state” (Gardner 2021).

The following thesis brings together a host of archival sources and materials to show that the process of border-making and the anxieties that accompanied it were an essential part of the historical transition into modernity. But these processes relied on ecological and geographical fantasies sustained only by the relative stability of the last three centuries. As we transition into a new age of widespread climatic volatility, the underpinnings of the modern nation-state, especially its requirement for a clearly defined territory, will be called into question.

The Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal, 1965–1968

In 1948, newly-independent Pakistan sent a diplomatic correspondence to newly-independent India complaining of hardship to Pakistani pastoralists as a consequence of uncertainty over the boundary between India and Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch. In 1949, India responded with the assertion that there was no dispute and that the Rann fell firmly under Indian control. In 1954, shortly after it signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States, Pakistan responded. Saying that “the boundary between Sind and Cutch from Sir Creek onwards has always been in dispute,” Pakistan proposed that the boundary be demarcated, either by a conference, an arbitration, or India’s acceptance of Pakistan’s claim to the Rann north of the 24th parallel. India, in its 1955 reply, said that it would not accept a border anywhere besides the northern edge of the Rann (Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Munshi 1998).

After half a decade of further disagreement, the two disputants agreed to the Sheikh-Swaran
Singh Agreement in January 1960. The Agreement provided a nebulous framework for the
peaceful settlement of the border problem, saying that “detailed ground rules for the guidance of
the Border Security forces along the Indo-West Pakistan frontier… will be put into force by both
sides immediately” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Gupta 1969). Despite the Agreement,
clashes intensified in the Rann after 1960, culminating in Pakistan’s Operation Desert Hawk, a
series of strikes on Indian military installations in the Rann, on 24 April, 1965. A ceasefire was
declared on 28 April, but the conflict was not officially concluded until 30 June, 1965, when
both parties agreed to submit the dispute for arbitration after the intervention of Harold Wilson,
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Ahmad 1973).

The dispute was arbitrated by the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal, which
operated from 1966–1968. The Tribunal was constituted by three judges: one nominated by
India, one by Pakistan, and a chairman, after India and Pakistan could not agree on a candidate,
nominated by the Secretary General of the United Nations. Prior to the start of hearings,
delegations from India and Pakistan were permitted two months to visit each others’ archives to
collect evidence. Hearings before the Tribunal ran from 15 September, 1966 until 14 July, 1967.
A draft award was proposed by the Tribunal in October 1967. The award was finalized on 19
February, 1968 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The Tribunal found itself fully in favor of neither India nor Pakistan. It awarded ninety
percent of the Rann to India—all areas where the Raj had, affirmatively or by omission, accepted
Kutch’s claim. Ten percent, the areas where Pakistan had demonstrated sustained state activity originating from Sindh, was allotted to Pakistan. The verdict written by Gunnar Lagergren, Chairman, said:

“A recognised and well-established boundary did not exist in the disputed region east of
the Western Trijunction on the eve of Independence… Since the Rann until recently has
been deemed incapable of permanent occupation, the requirement of possession cannot
play the same important role in determining sovereign rights therein as it would have
done otherwise. Therefore, special significance must be accorded to display of other State
activities and to attitudes expressed or implied by one or several of the sovereign entities
abutting upon the Rann in regard to the actual extension of their respective dominions”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

In Lagergren’s verdict, we see the problem at the root of the dispute exposed: without evidence
of state presence, jurisdiction could not be determined in any conventional way. As I argue above
and throughout the rest of this paper, the reason for this absence lies in the Rann’s ecological
complexity. To simplify it, India and Pakistan both conceived of and presented competing
cartographic, bureaucratic, and ecological visions of the Rann from 1947–1968.

Pakistan’s Conception of the Rann

In publicity documents, published works, and its arguments to the Tribunal, Pakistan articulated a vision of the Rann that emphasized the ways in which it met the conditions of being a marine space. This conception was premised on the geomorphological reality that the Rann was a former seabed disconnected from the Arabian Sea by tectonic uplift and seismic activity (Thakkar and Kar 2017). It was supported by an outdated claim that the major source of the Rann’s seasonal inundation was monsoon winds blowing seawater across the length of the Rann. In Pakistani documents, the Rann was described as an “inland sea,” in some cases with the caveat “now dead” (Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Ahmad 1973).

In addition to drawing on scientific knowledge about the Rann, Pakistan drew on the
ways in which movement across the Rann resembled navigating marine spaces. These arguments
drew on statements like that of the Acting Commissioner in Sindh, who said in 1856 that:

“This district [Thar Parkar] is in fact… as much separated from Kutch by the Runn as if
the sea there still covered its former bed. In fact it is even more completely separated
from Kutch than if the Runn were still covered by the ocean, for in that case the
communication by boat would assuredly… be more than it now is across the salt swamp
of the Runn” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Descriptions like these emphasized the idea of the Rann as a barrier, a concept that implied
comparisons to seas and other water bodies are seen as barriers that must be traversed, rather
than inhabited. The claim that the Rann was in many respects a sea—uninhabited, difficult to
cross, often watery—and therefore a barrier supported the Pakistani contention that the Rann was
a bounding area, a peripheral and perhaps liminal space, rather than a place in and of itself. This
sense of the Rann as “belt of boundary” could be neatly aligned with legal conceptions of
transboundary bodies of water, but had far fewer modern legal precedents for terrestrial areas
(Gardner 2021).

Categorizing the Rann as a marine space rendered an alien landscape familiar, making it conform to the existent principles of the nearness of shores and the median line. Doing so achieved two objectives. It reduced the need for special categorization of the Rann, which could be understood as a marine feature and subsequently divided and demarcated using pre-existing frameworks. Without the need for greater and more specialized site-specific knowledge, further knowledge production was unnecessary (Bhattacharyya 2018). The complexity of the Rann as a temporarily inundated landscape could be replaced with the fiction of the Rann as a permanent body of water, cartographically and bureaucratically imposed on the landscape. Second, once the Rann was defined as a marine feature, it was subject to different standards for sovereignty. It could be demarcated using a simple and single line, and disputes over islands were washed away.

In its effort to place the Rann firmly in the legal category of the marine, Pakistan sought to effect a reclassification of space that suited its political objectives (Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1965). Classifying the Rann as a sea opened up the category of marine features to the possibility of including a space like the Rann, and it applied existing rules to a confusing place in a way that made its administration simpler and advantageous to Pakistan. Choosing one aspect of the often-confused British categorizing project, Pakistan solidified its terms and then redoubled its application to the Rann in order to construct a space over which it had an undeniable and persuasive claim.

India’s Conception of the Rann

In its claims to the Rann between 1947–68, India emphasizes that the Rann should be
understood as a complicated salt marsh within its territory. Defining the Rann as a wetland
allowed India to push for a context-driven understanding of the space as one that was terrestrial
but prone to frequent and violent change. India supported its argument with statements like a 2
November, 1906 Foreign Department letter saying, “It does not appear to be correct to show the
Rann of Kutch as though it were all water. The symbol for a swamp might be used”
(Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Understanding that India saw the Rann as a marsh is essential to understanding India’s
perspective on border-making in and around the tract. If the Rann were categorized as aquatic or marine, it would be subjected to the rigid and pre-existing rules governing aquatic features.
While a wetland is both soaked and fluid, unlike non-fluvial and non-soaked land, it is still
ultimately more governable by the context-driven rules of terrestrial law than the standards of
maritime law (Bhattacharyya 2018). India’s contentions rendered the Rann as an anomalous but
not totally alien place, a space integral to the whole of Kutch and therefore subject to the same
exercise of sovereignty. The Rann could experience change or shifting within its cartographically
outlined borders, but that change was constrained by lines on a map. Having been defined as a
wetland, the Rann was tethered to a very specific piece of land in the Indian imagination, as an
auxiliary but integral part of Kutch.

Before and after 1968, India was deeply concerned about what the liminality of this
auxiliary, integral space meant for its functional coherence with the body of Kutch. Despite its
physical and bureaucratic taming, the fear went, the Rann might still serve as a place of
disorientating crossing, as an ungovernable periphery. Imagining the Rann as a landform and the
border as being at the edges of the Rann, rather than anywhere within it, gave India room to
remake the Rann as a militarized frontier, on the edges of society but central to its security, rather
than letting it remain a place of marginality and liminality (Ibrahim 2004; 2017; 2018). To
borrow from Benjamin D. Hopkins, the Rann was constructed in the Indian imagination as one
of a number of “forgotten peripheries—the edges of empire” built, often intentionally, by
colonial states and their successors (Hopkins 2020).

Constructing a Peripheral Space

This section chronicles the construction of the Rann as a peripheral space in the period before 1857, when The British Raj assumed paramountcy in South Asia. The Rann’s peripherality was premised, in part, on a geopolitical reality. It was not part of any state in a way that would be contemporarily recognizable. And it could not be an effective component of any state because no state could maintain an effective presence within it (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). But the Rann’s peripherality was also the reflection of an effort to make it definable, a process that began with informal documents and accounts that reified conceptions of the Rann as a periphery to state entities. This process began with documents and observers that emphasized the ways in which the Rann was alien to familiar life and neglected by or outside of
the state.

Dams and Earthquakes

Before the weakening of Mughal power in the 1700s, Sindh was a part of the Thatta
Subah, an administrative division of the Mughal Empire (Ansari 1992). Kutch was the core
territory of Cutch State, a Mughal client. From the 1730s until at least 1741, Kutch maintained
thanas (outposts) in Sindh at Rahim ki Bazar, Virawah, and possibly the nearby towns of Baliari
and Badin. Sindh achieved de facto independence from Mughal rule in the 1730s. By the
mid-1700s, the Kutch thanas appear to have been abandoned (Burnes 1829; 1834).

The armies of the Kalhora mians (princes) of Sindh crossed the Rann along different
routes to raid Kutch in 1762, 1764, 1775, and 1776 (Burnes 1834). In 1762, the most devastating
invasion, Sindh and Kutch met in the Battle of Jara, an inconclusive Sindh victory. Afterward,
Sindh stationed a garrison at Lakhpat and built a bund across the Puran at Mora, a few miles
north of the Rann. The building of the dam marked the beginning of the desertification of Sayra,
which began to lose the waters that sustained its rice paddies. The Sindh garrison at Lakhpat was
withdrawn in the 1770s, but Sindh again built a dam across the Puran in 1802. The dam this time
was at Ali Bunder, near Mora (Burnes 1829; 1834).

In the early part of the 19th century, Kutch was riven by internal strife that weakened its
ability to project power in and across the Rann. In 1809 and again in 1815, the East India
Company concluded treaties with representatives of the Kutch darbar, or court (Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968). In 1819, a final treaty, the Treaty of Alliance, was signed by
representatives of the Jadeja bhayad, Kutch’s regnal council of noblemen. Article 5 of the Treaty
of Alliance stated, “The Honourable Company engages to guarantee the power of his Highness
the Rao Dessul, his heirs and successors, and the integrity of his dominions, from foreign or
domestic enemies” (Aitchison 1909).

Though not apparent at the time, it would emerge over the course of the 19th century that
the boundaries of the dominion of Kutch were functionally unknown. They were further
complicated a few months before the signing of the Treaty of Alliance when the Rann of Kutch
earthquake occurred. The earthquake flooded Sayra, leaving behind only a lone tower peeking
out of the lake covering Sindri’s former location (Burnes 1834; Lewis 1873). A 16-mile-long
natural dam on the Puran, Allah Bund, formed five miles north of Sindri, erasing evidence of the
customs post at Kaeera Nullah from the landscape (Raikes 1855; Frere 1870; Athavale 2013).
When Kutch attempted to establish a customs post on Allah Bund, it was forced to withdraw its
officers in the face of opposition from Sindh.

Both the destruction of Sindri and the earthquake of 1819 would be cited in the ensuing decades as evidence of Kutch’s lack of effective presence in the Rann. Alexander Burnes, who was stationed in Kutch in the 1820s, implied that in some respects state failure was a cause of the expansion of the Rann, and that the Rann and the state could not therefore coexist. Burnes wrote that Kutch had tolerated repeated dam construction on the Puran for so many decades that the flooding of Sayra “passed unheeded, for it had become a matter of indifference to Cutch whether the tract which had been a desert since the battle of Jharra [sic] continued so, or became an inland lake, as in either state it had ceased to yield those advantages to the people which they had once enjoyed” (Burnes 1834).

Burnes’ writing suggests that Sayra and Sindri were seen as peripheral to Kutch even
before they were functionally a part of the Rann. Having become part of the Rann after many
years of desertification and the 1819 inundation, they were truly peripheral to the core territory
of the state, and so did not merit attention or a state presence. While Burnes’ narratives include
mentions of Kutch attempting to assert its presence in the tract, it is essential to note that this
presence was temporary and rebuffed; Kutch could not sustain a customs post, the fertility of the
landscape, or its interests writ large. That was because the landscape, due to its inherent volatility
as well as human action, was now part of the Rann. And the Rann could not be controlled
because it was inherently hostile to the people and the presence of the state.

Writers and Mapmakers

Several accounts similar to Burnes’ were written during and shortly after the Company
Raj. These include the memoirs of Marianne Postans (Young), who lived in Kutch in the 1830s
as the wife of the Political Agent; Henry Bartle Frere, Chief Commissioner in Sindh in the 1850s
and later Governor of Bombay; William Pottinger, who traveled to Sindh in the 1830s; and C.W.
Tremenheere, an officer in the Royal Engineers. These accounts describe a remarkable place.
Postans says, “nothing could, perhaps, be found more worthy the observation of the traveller”
(Young 1839) But it is remarkable in part because of its desolation and alienness. Frere says,
“There is a total absence of any sign of animal or vegetable life which could break the uniformity
of the surface. There are no trees, no tufts of grass; and the bones of a dead camel are visible for miles, whether seen in their actual form or size, or drawn up into the likeness of towers, rocks, and houses by mirage” (Frere 1870).

Mirages appear repeatedly in travel writing about the Rann (Burnes 1834; Young 1839;
Frere 1870). Mentioning them served to emphasize the ways in which the Rann was distinct from
the typical human existence. The fact that the only indicators of human presence to be found in
the Rann were illusory emphasized its desolation and hostility to human life. And the presence of
these illusions reinforced the unreality of the Rann; rather than being tangible, firm, and real, like
the world of the state, it was cloudy and intangible—at the margins of the known world. Through
these descriptions, the Rann was constituted as a place that could be seen but not inhabited, a
space rather than a place in its own right. At best, in these narratives, it can only be an alien
periphery, undergoing such frequent tumult and subject to such hostile conditions that it is not
worth the effort or the time of the state to establish a presence in the first place.

There are occasional exceptions to this picture, but where they disrupt the idea that the
Rann is totally hostile to human life, they entrench the idea that it is not inhabitable. Burnes
writes that “the traffic across is considerable” on the direct military and trade route from Bhuj to
Rahim ki Bazar, despite “an inhospitable tract of forty-eight miles without a drop of fresh water,
on leaving Luna” (Burnes 1834). But this piece of evidence, as well as descriptions of river
traffic in the decade after the 1819 earthquake, are always contrasted with the Rann’s
inhospitality otherwise (Burnes 1834; Holland 1855). Trade can only take place through it, not in
it; there are not, as there are in the settled places of the world, points of state presence in the
Rann. It is a tenuous bridge between two areas of state control, liminal and peripheral.
The extent to which the Rann was seen as a periphery is reaffirmed in the pre-survey
maps, the earliest of which dates to 1788 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Dossal 2019).

These maps were prepared by a range of creators with an equally varied range of familiarity with
the Rann. Perhaps as a consequence, it is difficult to extract a sense of what the Rann is from the
maps. It is a marsh in some, a desert in others, a sea in a third fraction. There is no standard
depiction of the space (Pottinger 1814; Arrowsmith 1822; Walker and Walker 1833; Zimmerman
1851; Wynne 1872a; Risley et al. 1909; Indian Information Service 1965). In Fig. 1, I show a
section of Burnes’ 1829 map of Kutch, which ambiguously depicts the Rann.

In Burnes’ map, which influenced depictions of Kutch and its environs for decades, and which was used to represent landholdings in the Rann, the Rann is personally knowable through Burnes’ recollections of his travel (Burnes 1829; Lumsden 1855). But this information is of limited use to the state, which cannot use a map like Burnes’ to govern. This is in spite of its detail and fairly careful measurement; without a standard of systematization, it does not serve the key function of cartography to the state, which is to simplify an unsimple space into a visual language that is codified and can be used to exert power and control.

The irregularity of the Rann was later communicated through the range of ribands, demarcating ribbons of color, used to separate the Rann from Sindh and Kutch on maps. The Tribunal’s award notes that “In these maps Sind and Kutch are either represented in different colour washes or they are bounded off by coloured ribands. In between is the Rann, coloured either blue, white, or light brown, with the addition, sometimes, of swamp or marsh symbols” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Indian Information Service 1965; High Commission of India 1965). I show an example of one kind of boundary marker in Fig. 2.

The confusion over how to depict the Rann, and the ways in which it was occasionally
merged with the Thar and at other points rendered as a sea, contributed to the sense of its
peripherality (Wynne 1872a; 1872b; Risley et al. 1909). The lack of clarity reinforced the sense
that the Rann was beyond the ken of the state. No standard border could be drawn around or
through it because it was not a knowable place. On the basis of hearsay, assumption, or first-hand
knowledge, it might be assigned to one mainland, the other, or left uncategorized. The
ambiguousness of its depiction contributed to the peripheralization of the Rann: it was not
knowable through maps, could not be known, and therefore existed firmly at the margins of the
state until it could, by means of state presence, state-generated knowledge, and growing state
capacity, be brought in from the hazy margins of early cartographic efforts.

Searching for a Legible Rann

As Scott uses it, legibility describes a state’s efforts to order society in such a way that it
is knowable, controllable, and extractable by the state (Scott 1998; Lee and Zhang 2017).
Compared to the complexity and specificity of local and particular knowledge, legibility is an
abstraction that simplifies knowledge in order to make it manipulable. A range of projects
undertaken by states can contribute to making a place and its people legible; surveys, censuses,
and standardized units are archetypal examples (Hopkins 2020).

The British Raj replaced the East India Company as the paramount power in the Rann
after 1857. Over the course of its rule, it engaged in a series of occasional efforts to make the
Rann more controllable by the organs of the state. As I outline in this section, that program
involved first making the Rann knowable. Through decades of surveys, maps, and administration
reports, the Raj, Sindh, and Kutch worked to simplify the complexity of the Rann until it could
be both a target of state presence and a component of states.

The urge to do this was driven by a fact of modernity: the rise of the modern nation-state
erased the possibility of a geopolitical no man’s land or space of ambiguous borders. A space
was required to be a place, and a place was required to belong to a party. Every border needed to
be coterminous, rather than a borderland. The Rann, which had occupied a peripheral position
during the era of pre-modern states, therefore needed to be made fully a part of one or both of the
adjoining mainlands. This need grew more pronounced with the end of the Raj. An empire could
accommodate the fuzziness of a borderland, but the postcolonial state could not.

In response to these pressures, both Kutch and Sindh sought to create and co-opt standardized knowledge about the Rann into their claims to and about the space. Pakistan and India, in turn, sought to draw stronger claims out of these legible-making processes. In this analysis, I consider two mechanisms of legibility: surveying efforts and documentary evidence, and illustrate how legibility was used to support assertions of the Rann’s integrality to state spaces and of their presence within it.

Surveying

Four surveys took place in and around the Rann between 1857–1947. The first, lasting
from 1855–1870, was a Survey of India survey of Sindh. From 1866–1870, the survey, under the
leadership of Donald MacDonald, concerned itself with Thar Parkar, Mohamed Khan’s Tanda,
and Shahbunder Districts. The survey maps from Mohamed Khan’s Tanda included a “Runn
Sub-Circuit” outside of any village dehs, or revenue collection areas (Gastrell 1867; 1868; 1870;
High Commission of India 1965). The reasons for this decision are unclear. In 1968, India
claimed that the survey, a revenue survey, was meant to survey the political and topographical
landscape of a region, meaning that the omission of most of the Rann was evidence that it was
really a part of Kutch. The parts of the Rann so included were included because of instructions to the surveying party to survey adjacent areas to the areas they were tasked with surveying. Pakistan, on the other hand, argued that revenue surveys were meant to capture only the revenue-producing parts of a place, and so the Rann, a barren waste, would not have been included (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

There is no record of a dispute at the time between Sindh and Kutch over the surveying
boundaries. But it seems clear that the survey was not viewed as the final word in the boundary
question because in 1875, the mukhtiarkar, or revenue-collector, of Diplo Taluka responded to a
query from the Political Superintendent of Thar Parkar about the location of the border between
Thar Parkar and Kutch with a message that:

“In the midst of Kutch Bhuj and Taluka Diplo, District Tharparkar, from the Rann, from
Rahimki [Bazar] coming in the north of Allah Bund, Mian ji Sari, the distance of which
from Rahimki will be 24 miles, is the settled boundary, and from Vingar and Balyari,
Gaind ji Chhan, where Dharamsala is built, the distance of which, from Balyari will be 24
miles, from where towards the north, at a distance of half a mile, the boundary of Diplo,
and towards the south, boundary of Kutch Bhuj territory. On these boundaries, there is no
boundary mark” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

On the basis of the mukhtiarkar’s report, the Political Superintendent informed the
Commissioner in Sindh that there was no demarcated boundary between Sindh and Kutch, but
that customary points indicated the border. He recommended that the boundary be demarcated
with the assistance of the Political Agent in Kutch, who asked the Dewan of Kutch whether the
border had ever been demarcated and what Kutch’s border claim was.

The Rao of Kutch died that year, and the Government of Bombay passed an 1876 Resolution postponing border demarcation. The question of where the border fell spurred the Dewan to ask three vahivatdars, or leaseholders, to “collect evidence relating to the boundaries of Kutch in the direction of Sind[h] and Thar Parkar” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

This new interest in the Rann would be encouraged by the 1879–1886 Survey of Kutch,
led by Major A. Pullan. This survey mapped the whole of the Rann. When questioned as to why
after Sindh raised objections, Pullan wrote “I surveyed the Runn because it is intimately
connected with the country of Cutch and it was an absolute geographical necessity that it should
be surveyed. I have carefully abstained from laying down or even suggesting any boundary
between Cutch and Sind” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Before asking Pullan to answer to it, the Government of Bombay had already resolved
that the dispute over the location of the border be suppressed. It sent a Resolution titled
“Boundary Disputes: Claim of Cutch Darbar to the Sind side of the Runn,” and took no further
action. But the border remained undefined (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Pullan’s attitude that it was “an absolute geographical necessity” to have the Rann
surveyed and mapped speaks to the unacceptability of the informational lacuna embodied by the
Rann. Though it was a hinterland, it was essential that the Rann be understood in order to fix its
position relative to its settled state neighbors. Without a knowledge of the geographic and
ecological characteristics of the Rann, there was no way to begin the process of reifying the
Rann into a simplified form that suited Kutch’s claims to the Rann.

In this respect, Pullan’s notes from the survey are contradictory. He claimed to the Government of Bombay that he did not recognize Kutch’s claim to the whole Rann. But in a letter to the Surveyor-General dated 9 August, 1880, he wrote that “the survey when completed will be of the greatest use to the Durbar who are very desirous to obtain a reliable map of the Country.” In his 1880–1881 Survey Report, Pullan adds that “The part of Cutch surveyed during the past field Season comprised firstly a portion of the Great ‘Rann’ and the widespreading grass land known as ‘Bani” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Pullan’s writing makes explicit the way in which Kutch saw accurate information about
its erstwhile hinterland as a necessary ingredient in the process of transforming the Rann from a
periphery into an essential component of the state. It also suggests that Kutch saw patronizing
information creation by an organ of the paramount power as a way of creating usable knowledge
about a place that would be seen as Kutch knowledge about a place that was a part of Kutch.
Using standardized information, Kutch began to seek to freeze the Rann as a static entity in maps
and to use evidence from surveys to substantiate its claims to the Rann.

Compared to Kutch, Sindh did less during the colonial period to make the Rann legible to
it; it was largely content to assume that it had a legitimate claim to the northern half of the Rann.
Where there were efforts to render the Rann legible, these were at its edges, in places where
human activity was semi-permanent, and therefore more within the traditional realm of the state
and knowable through information already possessed by Sindh. For Sindh, the Rann did not
demand the level of legibility that Kutch sought to create and enforce.

The third major surveying effort in the Rann was that of Erskine in 1904–1905, which sought to resolve territorial disputes between Kutch, Wav, Suigam, and Sindh. This led to a complaint in 1907–1908 from the Commissioner in Sindh of encroachments by Kutch on Sindh territory. The Government of Bombay, writing to the Kutch darbar, said: “If the Darbar had reason to think this boundary was inaccurate — the Government was perfectly willing to consider any representation it might have to make and that, in that case, the Darbar should state precisely and with an accurate map the boundary which it claimed, specifying the grounds on which its claim was based” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). The conditions of this letter emphasize the importance of legibility—in this case represented by an accurate, survey-derived map—to control.

Both the darbar and the Collector of Karachi District submitted maps with boundary
claims on them to the Government of Bombay. The Kutch map showed a diagonal border
running from the top of Sir Creek, a tidal creek west of Kori Creek, to the junction of the Rann
with the Jati and Badin talukas, both in Karachi District. Sindh claimed a vertical boundary
running due north from the top of Kori Creek to the junction point. The compromise
promulgated by the Government of Bombay was for the boundary between the two jurisdictions
to run from the top of Sir Creek until it met Sindh’s proposed border, then north to the junction
point (High Commission of India 1965). In Fig. 3, I show the relevant map.

In a letter from 20 September, 1913, the Secretary to the Government, Bombay wrote to
the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, that the compromise had been
suggested to and approved by both parties to the dispute. In the Resolution of 23 February, 1914,
the Bombay Government mandated that the letter of 20 September, 1913, be circulated to the
Commissioner in Sindh, Political Agent in Kutch, and the Rao of Kutch (Krishnamurthy Rao
1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The last of the surveying efforts was that of Gordon Osmaston in 1937–38, which was
prompted by the creation of Sindh as a Governor’s Province in 1935. The creation of Sindh
created a demand for demarcated borders from the bureaucracy, and these could not be found
along its southern edge. This last effort was unsuccessful in settling the jurisdictional conflicts
between Sindh, Kutch, Wav, and Suigam that had necessitated Erskine’s earlier survey
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The surveying efforts in the Rann began as efforts to render the region legible, and they
culminated in two efforts to make border-drawing within it feasible. While these are different
kinds of legibility, they both reflect the importance placed on having abstract knowledge about a
place in order to make it governable (Dossal 2019). The problem faced by these surveys was that
while they allowed Sindh and Kutch to make their respective attempts at reifying the landscape
and imposing their respective categorical ecological visions on it, they captured only a slice of
reality. Given the volatility of the Rann, they did not even fully succeed at rendering it permanently abstracted; the Rann could change from season to season, and surveys were unable to capture this dynamism. As a consequence, surveying efforts, while useful, were frustrated in their efforts to unite visions of the Rann with knowledge about it by the complexity of the ecological system in question.

Documentary Legibility

Kutch (later India) was the main party attempting to establish the legibility of the Rann
through non-survey means, which it did through three channels: pre-survey maps, local
knowledge, and administration reports. The 1844 map of Kutch witnessed by J.G. Lumsden,
Political Agent, enabled this process. The map depicted feudal land ownership among the royalty
and nobility of Kutch using 35 colors of washes and ribands (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968). On this map, the area formerly called Sayra is occupied by a lake with the note, “this
colour lake of his Highness the Rao.” Describing this map in 1968, India added:

“The northern limit of the Rao’s possessions in the Sayra District is approximately the
northern edge of the Rann. Besides the mainland of Kutch, the Banni (spelt Bunnee) and
the three large bets of Pachham, Khurir and Beyla as well as a group of four more bets
are shown as belonging to the Kutch Bhayad. The group of four bets is situated to the
north of Pachham. The first is called Koosree, the second Gainda, the third Horonto. The
fourth has no name but has the notice: “attached to mainland before earthquake of 1819.”
This notice and the place on the map where the bet is situated permits the hypothesis that
it is Dhara Banni… The Rann was so well protected that feudal ownership over bets on
its extreme northern edge made some sense and was worthwhile recording and depicting”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

This map indicates legibility by means of property rights and ownership; with specific demarcations of land titles and demesnes, it was possible to make the claim that Kutch both knew the Rann well and could lay meaningful claim to it. By pointing to the evidence of royal and noble titles, Kutch could argue that the Rann was an integral component of its territory about which it knew governance-supporting knowledge.

Later in the 19th century, Kutch sought to demonstrate its knowledge of the Rann and its
ability to make the space legible by drawing on the testimony of the Bhuj vahivatdar, who wrote
in 1885 that the Rann had historically been in the possession of Kutch. The vahivatdar wrote, “At
present the entire Rann is in our vahivat and there is ample evidence for this… from the village
Dhrobana in Pachham up to the limit of the Rann in the north… guide stones have been fixed…
at the Kutch Darbar’s expense” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

While they are an untraditional means of indicating legibility, the ability to fix guide
stones in the Rann indicated that the darbar had the information and the capability to order an
unsettled landscape. Through guidestones, Kutch could make the Rann legible to travelers, and
therefore somewhat closer to being a productive part of the state. The capability described by the
vahivatdar meets the key legibility-related need for the state to be able to order the world in a
way that is conducive to its needs. Without the guidestones, the navigators of the Rann would
still have been capable of crossing. But the guide stones indicated the supremacy of the state
over the landscape and the people participating in it—a feat achieved through a knowledge of the
land itself in terms that could be reported and repeated in other media.

Finally, from 1855–1945, Kutch sent annual Administration Reports detailing the
condition of the State to the Government of Bombay. Fifty of these reports touched on the Rann.
Of these, 47 describe the area of Kutch as “6,500 square miles exclusive of the Rann,” “7,616
square miles exclusive of the Rann,” or some other variation (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968). The Rann is described as spanning 9,000 square miles and belonging either directly to the
State or to the Rao. Rather than rendering the Rann governable to Kutch, these reports sought to make the idea of a Kutch in which both the Kutch Peninsula and the Rann were included legible to the Raj. The Administration Reports abstracted these two distinct geomorphological regions into a single entity that could be communicated to the empire’s bureaucracy. In doing so, they created the appearance of the Rann’s essentiality to Kutch, and asserted that Kutch found the Rann legible, even when and where it did not.

The way Kutch presented the Rann in its Administration Reports shows how Kutch sidestepped the challenges posed by Kutch’s ecological understanding of the Rann. Kutch recognized the ecological ambiguity of the Rann and the hazards of applying typical border-making principles to it. By placing the border it claimed at the edge of the Rann, and denoting the Rann as a core component of Kutch, Kutch placed literal solid land underneath its claims and bureaucratically began to integrate the Rann into its dominion.

The representations Kutch made to the Government of Bombay of its relationship with
the Rann were largely accepted. From 1871–1924, the Government of Bombay in turn prepared
its own Administration Reports on the agencies and territories within its ambit. Of the 31 of
these reports touching on the Rann, 30 describe the area of Kutch as “exclusive,” “besides,” or
“independent” of the Rann. These reports show the way in which legibility was communicated
successfully by Kutch, to the Government of Bombay, which ignored Sindh claims in favor of
Kutch, which seemed to have made the Rann legible and therefore controllable (Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968; “Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency” 1915).

In the following chapter of this thesis, I expand on the ways in which legibility, or the perception of legibility, enabled attempts at control. I further discuss how those attempts at control were inconclusive as a result of the inherent reductiveness of simplifying attempts to make the Rann legible. As I note in my introduction, attempts to assert control over the Rann failed to overcome the fundamental mismatch between reality’s ambiguities and the state’s imagination (Scott 1998; Cederlöf 2013; Dossal 2019; Gardner 2021).

Controlling the Rann

A claim on territory is most often premised on a state’s successful occupation of that
territory. What is de facto true becomes the de jure reality over time. Once a territory is claimed
effectively, borders can be drawn around it. The challenge faced by India, Pakistan, and their
predecessors in the Rann was the difficulty of demonstrating occupation within the Rann. For
most of history, there was little reason to station military forces within the Rann, a hard-to-cross
wasteland. Because of its salinity, the Rann lacked a population through which evidence of
occupation could be demonstrated using consistent tax payments, among other things.

In response to the challenges created by the Rann’s environmental condition, Sindh,
Kutch, India, and Pakistan sought avenues through which they could substantiate their claims of
control over the Rann. In the colonial era, these avenues took the form of citing and investing in
indicators of state capacity: fiscal instruments such as indirect taxes and customs taxes. Where
evidence of the state did not previously exist, parties to the Rann of Kutch dispute worked to
produce it. And in the decades leading up to and immediately after independence, India and
Pakistan introduced law enforcement and armed occupation as a third indicator of state presence
(and, eventually, of state capacity).

In all cases, the object of state capacity-building exercises and substantiation was to support the boundary claims made by the states adjoining the Rann. Rather than being understood as evidence of true state capacity, they should be understood as attempts to underwrite territorial claims that both sides knew would not be decided on the basis of functional capacity or the fiscal and infrastructural integration of the Rann with a mainland, but on the basis of textual evidence that matched the location of boots on the ground.

Fiscal Capacity

The essential indicator of a state’s fiscal capacity and presence is its ability to raise taxes.
Kutch and Sindh provided their respective evidence of this capacity by indicating the range of
tax levies and customs duties they imposed within the Rann and at its edges. In the case of taxes,
the types of taxes relied upon were indirect taxes that demonstrated the state’s purported ability
to extract revenue but lacked the complexity of direct taxation or the systematic frameworks for
payment. These were the best evidence of state presence on offer in the Rann, which lacked the
population or wealth needed to drive the construction of complex tax systems.

In the 1876 report from the Bhuj vahivatdar to the Dewan of Kutch, the vahivatdar wrote,
“In the Rann, sale of cattle from Sind and other places takes place. On that sale the Darbari
Officer collects levy on sale of animals and also ‘Ukaru Dan’ on the same animal is payable”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). He also says that on the bet of Sindhdi, fewer than 15
miles from Rahim ki Bazar, Kutch levied a duty called ukrau until the 1819 earthquake, after
which the customs post had to be moved to Luna, on Banni. On the islet, the jamadar, or officer,
who was from Luna, had the right to levy chowki and tansri duties on the goods that passed
through.

Kutch pointed to these statements from the vahivatdar as evidence of its historical and persistent presence in the Rann, but they also expose the challenges of asserting state presence in this dynamic space. Sindhdi is not mentioned in any other accounts of the Rann, and it is possible that it was erased or reformed by the 1819 earthquake that shook the Rann. The ability of any state to maintain a presence and build capacity in the Rann was highly contingent on the temporary environmental conditions of the space, suggesting that no power could truly claim to control it because they could not sustain a permanent presence within it in the face of natural changes. Without evidence of a permanent presence and the limits of state power—which customs posts helpfully evince—coterminous boundaries were extremely challenging to draw.

In order to assert state presence, Kutch in particular turned to levying taxes on
pastoralists. Pastoralists are often a challenge for the state, but in this case, Kutch worked to
demonstrate its ability to impose taxes on graziers in order to substantiate its claims of state
presence. In 1926, the thanedar, a kind of police officer, of Khavda, a town in Pachham, was
permitted to levy a panchari grazing tax on graziers from Thar Parkar who grazed their cattle in
Chhad Bet (Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Chhad Bet, which
is included in the 1876 note of the Bhuj vahivatdar as part of a bet called Dhera (likely another
name for Dhara Banni), is close to Thar Parkar and the Sindh mainland. Sindh considered Chhad
Bet a part of its territory, although Kutch acknowledged no dispute (Lagergren, Entezam, and
Bebler 1968).

The graziers’ headmen petitioned the Commissioner in Sindh for a stoppage of the tax,
which they accused of exacerbating their poverty and violating their customary rights to the
Rann. When they investigated the matter, British officials in Sindh found that the border in the
Rann had never been demarcated, and that panchari had not been levied before 1926. The
graziers were told that they did not need to pay panchari, and the dispute lay dormant for about a
decade. Kutch began to assert itself more in 1938, around the time of Osmaston’s surveying
efforts in the northeastern Rann, and the question of whether Nagar Parkar graziers were
obligated to pay panchari became a recurring issue. Throughout the 1940s, officers including a
tajvijdar, or revenue officers, were sent to Chhad Bet. In 1945, 13 officers and peons from Khavda traveled to Chhad Bet to ensure compliance with panchari, but were confronted and confined for a day by more than 200 armed men from Nagar Parkar. This confrontation indicates that while Kutch worked to project authority and control in the northern Rann, it was not always successful; it did not have a monopoly on coercion in the area and indeed had limited power projection capabilities.

By 1947, Kutch had licensed the rights to graze cattle and collect panchari in Chhad Bet
and the nearby areas of Dhara Banni and Pirol Vala Kun to Node Sadi Rau, a Kutchi, and his
sons. When Rau’s license expired, the thanedar in Khavda re-leased the territory to Sama
Ibrahim Suleman and Sama Jusal Kesar, two other Kutchis from Pachham, for at least
1955–1957, after which the leases were discontinued due to increased military presence in the
Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

It is more likely than not that Kutch only began to impose panchari in Chhad Bet in 1926
because it realized that Sindh was not effectively exercising its authority in the area and because
it recognized that in order for it to make a claim to the whole Rann, it needed to particularly
make its presence in the region where human activity took place. But the environmental
condition of the Rann was such that there was a significant cost for Kutch to project its presence
into the Rann, and it could not do so often. Border-making could not proceed on the basis of
these tenuous and disputed assertions of sovereignty, and Kutch would ultimately fail to
transform these measures on the ground into a compelling conceptual vision of how the Rann fell
entirely within its dominion.

Sindh took much less care to issue licenses or tax local pastoralists around the Rann,
though it did earn revenue off of fishing licenses issued for dhandhs and lakes west of the Puran.
There is evidence from both 1926 and 1954 that Sindh earned thousands of rupees through licensing fishing rights, a practice which Kutch could or would not contest. But the main evidence of fiscal capacity on Sindh’s part comes through customs. In 1968, Pakistan demonstrated that officers of the Central British Customs Organisation patrolled the Rann on 53 occasions between 1945–1946. Pakistan pointed to this practice as evidence of British presence and effective control of the Rann, which in turn meant that Sindh, as a direct component of the British Raj, was the party to whom control of the Rann ought to be assigned. But Sindh itself did not exercise a right to taxation on salt or grazing, and the extent to which it can be said to have projected a state presence in the Rann on the basis of fiscal capacity is also extremely dubious
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Coercion and Occupation

A second and essential dimension of state capacity is the state’s coercive capacity. In the case of
the pre-independence Rann, this can be analyzed through the ability of each state to maintain law
and order in the Rann and the extent to which each state actually did so. Both Kutch and Sindh
acted as though they held police authority in the Rann, though Sindh often did so to a greater
extent. Sindh claimed patrolling, arresting, and inquiry rights for offenses in at least the northern
half of the Rann, and it additionally reserved the privilege to try cases in Sindh’s courts. In 1892
and 1923, Sindh police assisted Kutch police in combating dacoity even on the Kutch mainland.
The extent to which this was a function of Sindh’s jurisdiction rather than that of the Imperial
Police, which belonged originally to the Central Service, is uncertain (Lagergren, Entezam, and
Bebler 1968).

In several cases during the immediate decade preceding independence, “offences allegedly committed by persons assumed to be citizens or residents of Kutch, purportedly committed outside the boundary of Sind as conceived by India, were registered at Sind police stations and investigated by Sind police.” Some offenses of this nature were also tried in Sindh courts. These collected incidents took place in 1939, 1940, and four times in 1945 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). India rejected these citations of Pakistani jurisdictional authority in the Rann as evidence specifically of British authority over British subjects, rather than as evidence of any territorial authority in the region. It also pointed to Kutch investigations of
offenses committed in the Rann as evidence of Kutch’s police jurisdiction in the tract.

In the post-independence era, both India and Pakistan sought ways to translate their
claims about the Rann into tangible evidence of occupation. This was enabled by the advance of
modern technology, which transformed the nature of state presence in the Rann. The state was no
longer totally subject to the environmental condition of a complex, hostile ecological space.
Instead, it could sustain a presence in the Rann, albeit at cost and only, at first, on the bets, for a
much longer period. This was most clearly demonstrated in the 1950s, when military patrols
from both India and Pakistan traversed the Rann north of the 24th parallel, especially around
Karim Shahi Bet (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Gupta 1969).

On 19 February, 1956, India realized that Pakistan had established its presence
sufficiently to occupy Chhad Bet when an Indian patrol near the bet was fired on by Pakistani
troops. In response, India sent back its forces on 25 February, 1956 to occupy Chhad Bet
themselves. They found the site deserted and established a border outpost there that was visited
biweekly by deployments of the Rajkot Rangers. Pakistan’s protests were dismissed by India
(Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Gupta 1969; Ahmad 1973).

Neither state could keep its forces in the Rann forever. Even with cartographic reification
in play for decades, the volatile, seasonally-inundated salt flats could not be physically reified in
the 1950s and 1960s. But India’s decade-long occupation of Chhad Bet demonstrates how the nature of state presence in the Rann began to change in the modern era. No longer were the states
competing for control of the Rann mostly dependent on conceptual redefinition of the space.
With improved military technology and more sophisticated logistical networks, it was possible to
make the redefinition of space and control of space a physical, tangible project supported by
boots on the ground.

The military patrols and occupations of the 1950s and 1960s marked the penultimate
stage in the evolution of the Rann from peripheral boundary space into a state-claimed and
state-defined frontier. In the final stage of that evolution—the stage we are currently in—India
and Pakistan have used technology and the concept of the nation-state to physically alter the
Rann into a militarized frontier. In this new ecosystem, the state must always be vigilant against
forms of transgression—border-crossing, unmonitored movement, environmental volatility—that
could harken back to the Rann’s history as a place outside the state (Ibrahim 2017; Hopkins
2020; Gardner 2021). While volatility continues to threaten the stability of state control, there is
no longer any risk that the Rann could exist beyond the state. The arms of the state, and its
borders now stretch too far for such a possibility. Through the cooperation of technologies of
knowledge—mapping, documentation, and surveying—and tools of occupation, the Rann’s
ecological complexity and amphibious ambiguity have been subdued. In spite of this, the Rann
as a place of imagined transgression continues to survive. And, importantly, many more places
around the world are being driven by environmental change to become like the Rann—outside
the ordinary realm of the state’s governmentality, if not totally out of its reach (Bhattacharyya
2018; Hopkins 2020; Gardner 2021).

Conclusion

One of the few Indian films to prominently feature the Rann is the 2000 Bollywood
movie Refugee, which marked the debut of both Abhishek Bachchan and Kareena Kapoor.
Refugee dramatizes the saga of crossing the Rann in the decades after independence. The picture
it paints of a radically transgressive landscape that must be patrolled by state actors to prevent
offenses against the authority of the state, namely terrorism, accurately depicts the Rann in the
state’s imagination and begins to capture how its harshness enabled its frustration of
state-making objectives. The movie ends with a state victorious over terrorism, and by
implication, over the transgressive environment of the Rann that has stalled the state’s progress
towards asserting its authority (Dutta and Mahadev 2000).

As in the film, in the last three centuries, the Rann of Kutch has been radically
transformed, physically and conceptually, by an unprecedented level of attention from state
actors. Until the 19th century, the Rann existed only at the margins of the state; it was a space
apart from state control and beyond the incentives for state control. Over the course of the 19th
century, the Rann was constructed as a peripheral space through the production of written and
cartographic knowledge that described the Rann—and, in doing so, sought to make it both
knowable and categorizable. This effort was advanced by the efforts of surveyors and
bureaucrats, who worked to place the Rann into defined categories that would facilitate the
tract’s governance and control through a legibility-making process. Their efforts were made
necessary by the driving need of modern states to constitute themselves as discrete territorial
entities with sharply defined borders, rather than fuzzy boundaries (Scott 1998; Cederlöf 2013;
Gardner 2021).

From the late 19th century onwards, the states adjacent to the Rann began translating
their reconstructions of the Rann from an elusive but increasingly knowable periphery into an
integral component of the state by working along axes of state capacity: fiscal capacity, public
services, and coercive capacity. In some sense, this effort has succeeded. The Rann’s ecological
complexity has been trampled by the imperatives of the modern state, which has militarized
much of the tract and laid concrete over salt pans.

Today, the Rann is traversed by wire and sentry posts (Ibrahim 2021). But the long-term
viability of the modern state’s foundations—absolute control over a discrete and defined
territory—are in serious doubt. The states of the future will struggle to reconceptualize and
reshape ecological systems and landscapes to the extent that has been achieved in the
post-colonial Rann by India and Pakistan, who have succeeded in part because of relative
environmental stability in the rest of their territories. The frustrations faced by those states in
claiming the Rann will pale in comparison to the problems posed by new forms of
environmentally dynamic and ambiguous spaces that continuously challenge the
governmentalities of yesteryear (Bhattacharyya 2018; Dewan 2021).

In the last three decades, global weather patterns have grown increasingly erratic.
Extreme weather events have grown more common, with South Asia bearing a particularly heavy
burden of storms, floods, and droughts (Guhathakurta, Sreejith, and Menon 2011; Roxy et al.
2017). In the decades to come, persistent sea level rise will threaten coastlines around the world,
including the densely-populated shores of the subcontinent, which are already maladapted to the
environmental conditions in which they exist (Bhattacharyya 2018; Pasricha 2021; Dewan 2021).

A world of increasingly volatile environmental conditions will be one that increasingly
resembles the Rann. This is not necessarily a function of inhospitality, but of the weak link between the governmental approaches to territory that have characterized the modern nation-state and the kinds of territories—soaked, amphibious, or barren—that states will begin to grapple with governing (Bhattacharyya 2018; Gardner 2021). The Rann has been, in some ways, successfully “tamed.” It has been integrated into the state’s imagination and its territory, even if it continues to persist as a wasteland of imagined transgressions. But as work on the amphibious regions of Bengal and Northeast India has shown, such state successes are almost invariably temporary (Saikia 2019; Dewan 2021).

The greater the volatility that manifests, the greater the need for the state to create, or
recreate, new conceptions of territoriality and governmentality in order to justify its continued
existence. This will be doubly true in the populous coastlines of the world, where cities like
Karachi, Mumbai, and Dhaka will wrestle with questions of their continued existence. The Rann
contains lessons for states on the frustrations of complex ecological systems and the technologies
and imaginations needed to conquer them. But its most important lesson may be that its
conception, construction, and conquest will not be repeated.

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