Nepal, March 21 -- 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, langu...