Sir Cyril Radcliffe himself left India the day after his work was done; he burned all of his papers and, in dismay and disgust, returned the fee of some five thousand dollars that he had been promised. Most biographical mentions of him minimize mention of his work in the subcontinent, even though it remains the Radcliffe Line—This Bloody Line, he called it—for which he is best known.

  It may be easy to blame the outrage over the drawing of the Radcliffe Line on the plain fact that it was British inspired, its twists and turns drawn with a British fountain pen by one of the British empire’s architects. But that would be too simplistic. Over at the Khyber Pass the Durand Line, also a relic of the empire, drawn half a century before, confirms a natural division between empires and civilizations that is in most places marked organically, by ranges of mountains.

  It is notable that the Durand line had been formally surveyed and marked by a succession of joint Afghan-British teams, working under the superintendence of the British civil servant after which the line is named, Sir Mortimer Durand. Moreover, the positioning of the marker stones—of which there are hundreds, found today in some of the wildest and most lonely landscapes in the world—was agreed to by Afghans and Britons working together. And although the current Afghan government rejects the line’s legitimacy, and while many local tribes through whose lands it has occasionally sliced in an arbitrary manner squabble over it as well, it has remained stable and intact for more than a century. Since by and large it confirmed most existing ethnic divisions, it never quite excited the kind of passions that enfolded the Radcliffe Line some few hundred miles away to the east. In summary: the Durand Line enjoys a stability because it reflects, by and large, an existing physical reality. The Radcliffe Line, by contrast, defines only the randomly and hurriedly decided pair of eastern and western borders of today’s India.

  Insofar as both these latter borders are artificial, made along lines drawn along historically administrative rather than physical divisions, drawn with unreasonable swiftness and cavalier thoughtlessness, and contrived by a foreign-decided partition and thus in no sense as a reflection of any settled order of local history or geography, they are dangerously unstable—as most of the world’s partitions are. Sir Cyril never spoke in detail of what he had done, steered all conversations away from his eponymous creation—achieved, for better or worse, by his patiently examining old survey maps, drawing lines as best he could through regions which out-of-date statistical data suggested were majority-this or majority-that, and by doing so helping, if inadvertently, to create mayhem as he went and a legacy of bitterness and anger and on occasion, farce, which continues to this day.

  As mentioned above, there is effectively only one border crossing on the India-Pakistan border today, only one formal breach in the barbed-wire jungle that now marches along Radcliffe’s elegantly drawn line from the Rann of Kutch up to the Himalayan snowfields. On large-scale maps the opening stands between the two large cities of Lahore and Amritsar; on more detailed charts, the border is breached between a pair of nondescript Punjabi villages, five miles apart—the one named Attari, which ended up on the Indian side; the other Wagah, which is now Pakistan. The crossing place is generally now known as Attari.

  Attari used to be an easy enough crossing—providing, when you were leaving India, there was no alcohol in the car. In the early days one would import half a dozen bottles of whisky to give to Pakistani friends, by dint of giving one of them to the customs officers. That all changed in the late 1970s, when it became well-nigh impossible to get any strong drink across the frontier. The bottles were then either confiscated or smashed.

  Today the border is a much more fiercely guarded affair, all-but impenetrable. It is something of a challenge to remember that this demarcation of land in the Punjab should in principle be very little different from the separation of the furrows and fields back in Deverel-Rimbury England, four thousand years before. Farmers had drawn furrows in the Punjab for centuries, and boundaries between their farms, between their villages, between their towns, had once been informal affairs. But here and now, politics has intruded. As has empire, and geopolitics, and argument, and, on many occasions, war. Very much more is at stake in this imperially delineated stretch of land than ever was the rivalry between wheat-and einkorn-growing farmers. Those on either side of the line between Attari and Wagah today are heavily armed, and with an arsenal of atomic weapons, too. The land border here has the future of much of humankind enfolded into the security of its own existence.

  The evening gate-closing ceremony at Wagah, the only crossing-point between India and Pakistan, has assumed the role of a bizarre theatrical performance, with soldiers from each side trying to impress rival crowds and whip them up into frenzies of mutual hostility.

  And so there are huge numbers of heavily militarized sentries—Pakistan Rangers and the Indian Border Security Force on each side of the double rows of razor wire, with thousands of mines planted in the space between the fences. There are powerful arc lights along the entire length of this national border, from Kutch to Kashmir, making the line entirely visible from the International Space Station, a thin line of orange tracing its way between the glows of the big cities of the Punjab. From space it mimics Cyril Radcliffe’s fountain-pen line, tracing its black ink across the coordinates of his inexact map. The land beyond the cities is black in the NASA images, especially on the Pakistani side of the fence: the farms of the Indian Punjab, so often managed by Sikhs, are rather more productive, and they have electricity, in the main, giving the land on the Indian side a faint glimmer of illumination, an impression of the existence of rather more economic vibrancy here than in the fields around Lahore.

  The ideological chasm and the deep political differences and religious hostility between the two neighbor-nations have been turned into a bizarre theatrical performance, staged each evening with a formal ceremony that culminates in the slamming shut of the iron border gates. Soldiers from both sides, selected for their height and their balletic marching skills and ability to kick their legs high into the air, march fiercely toward one another, stopping fast at the painted line on the road so they are almost moustache to moustache, breathing hard and angrily into each other’s faces, while the crowds on bleachers on each side cheer lustily and, just being able to see one another, roar insults into the gloaming. Flags are lowered, inch by inch, gates are opened and closed and opened again, until, with a final perfunctory handshake across the line—the Radcliffe Line, This Bloody Line—that suggests the whole thing is a grand joke, the gates are banged shut and locked, the soldiers march away and the crowds go back to their mosques and temples and gurdwaras in Lahore and Amritsar and Wagah and Attari, and the border falls quiet, just a line of orange lights and a million land mines and thousands of soldiers on perpetual alert, waiting for the next outbreak of unpleasantness along a line said to be even more dangerous—as President Clinton once remarked—than any other border in the world.

  A thousand miles to the east, across in the northern part of Bengal, Sir Cyril was active too, and so there is yet another set of fences and there are lights and more soldiers and all the usual paraphernalia of this unhappy division of British India’s myriad spoils. But there is also the existence, or its relics, of a curious cartographic eccentricity—a large number of complicated parcels of land that are defined as exclaves, in which until recently tens of thousands of people were stranded and trapped inside what in technical were islets of countries not their own, with their inhabitants never able to get out and return home.

  This is land demarcation made insane. It has all to do with the existence of the once princely state of Cooch Behar—landlocked and nestling to the south of Bhutan, to the northwest of the tea-growing countryside of Meghalaya, and close to the slow-flowing and miles-wide Brahmaputra river. Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists all contested or passed through what was a strategically significant land corridor here, a passage that linked India to Burma and beyond. In the early eighteenth century a large number of clashes broke out between Mughal rulers on the one hand—this was before the British had seized India, and when the Mughals were in the dying days of their rule—and on the other hand the soldiers of the maharajah in Cooch Behar. At the conclusion of each skirmish, a peace treaty was signed, giving this village to the Mughals, that village to the maharajah, and other smaller pieces of land to the various chieftains who served at the maharajah’s pleasure. It happened again and again. Every fight ended with a treaty; every treaty apportioned some land to a winner, some to a loser. The consequences of three centuries worth of defiance, magnanimity, and goodwill left a cartographic and humanitarian nightmare, a patchwork of staggering administrative complexity. And all set down among a landscape, with rice paddies and hills of the greenest beauty and loneliness, like nowhere else on the planet.

  And that was merely in Mughal times. As this part of India became subsequently ruled by the British, by the local princely states, and then sliced asunder by Cyril Radcliffe’s fountain pen to be divided between Indian Bengal and by the short-lived entity of East Pakistan, which became the new nation of Bangladesh, so this strange complexity of broken-off morsels of states remained, endured, and became notorious for its singular oddness.

  Thus, here and there in tiny dots of historical bizarrerie, inside tracts of territory that were indubitably Bangladeshi, was a marooned flyspeck of land that, because of a two-century-old peace treaty, was still actually a part of India. And similarly, in dozens of instances, small and orphaned portions of Bangladesh were in fact swimming inside the immensity of some of India’s sovereign borderlands. To make matters even more weird, even tinier bits of India—with people, hundreds of people in some cases—lived inside some of these minuscule parcels of Bangladeshi territory that were themselves inside India. And in one particularly and unutterably mad instance, a village of undoubted Indian ownership was inside a piece of Bangladeshi territory that was itself inside an Indian parcel that has been somehow pinioned inside Bangladesh. Four mutually enclosed levels of sovereignty, getting progressively smaller like matryoshka dolls.

  The borderlands in these few hundred square miles contained some hundreds of enclaves and exclaves with tens of thousands of people who—for example—could not claim their citizenship, if they were Indian, say, because to visit an Indian consulate obliged them to pass through Bangladeshi territory—for which they did not have a visa. The Indian government, its local officials high-caste babus seemingly schooled in the minutiae of pedantic exactitude, was especially harsh in enforcing its own immigration rules, and it was said that some 75 percent of those who lived in Bangladesh enclaves spent time in Indian prisons for having—either deliberately or inadvertently—passed into the Indian territory into which history had so pitilessly enfolded them.

  It would be unfair to suggest that here was a place where the land had gone mad. It would seem proper to suggest, however, that here was a place where the men that ruled the land had gone mad. The land is of course always indifferent to the insanity of those who live on it; but here one imagines that the patience of the acres must have been sorely tested.

  Gradually, it appears, political will and maturity (though of a peculiarly subcontinental kind) seem to be groping their way toward resolving the situation. Proposals are currently being put forward for enclaves like these to be formally swapped between India and Bangladesh, though it is all happening with much bureaucratically frustrated and characteristically subcontinental tardiness.

  The first attempt to do so, wholesale, was in 1958; another try, based on legislation written in faraway Delhi, was made in 1974; and a third was attempted in 2011. And still enclaves and their enclosed people remain—in 2015, some 38,521 people lived in 111 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh and 14,863 Bangladeshi villagers lived in 51 enclaves trapped inside India. Although both governments insist that progress is being made to solve the problem of these manifestly unlucky people, it does so at a lumbering, elephantine pace. To these unfortunates, held in a time warp of Kafkaesque dimensions, the thought that a civil servant from London could once have come and established on the far side of the country an impenetrable, indelible, and still permanent borderline in just thirty-six days in the summer of 1947, while their landlocked imprisonment derives from the eighteenth-century history of the maharajahs of Cooch Behar, simply beggars belief.

  Yet India does not have a monopoly on such a self-evident borderline personality disorder. There are oddities with America’s northern frontier, too.

  Unlike the more troublesome southern border with Mexico, the frontier with Canada has a general appearance of geometric tidiness. For some 2,175 of its miles it follows the 49th parallel, straight as a die aside from a few hundred-foot deviations made inadvertently—intense cold, and strong drink, may have been involved—by those nineteenth-century surveyors charged with laying it out. The very different, topographically much scruffier part of the borderline in northern New England is home to many of the better-known eccentricities—the library in Vermont with the frontier passing through its lending room, a hotel similarly divided between Quebec and New York state, and a number of houses split in two by the unyielding demands of treaties and surveys in the nineteenth century. Time was when both countries regarded these oddities as amusing; but the U.S. Border Patrol officers nowadays—perhaps understandably—have had something of a sense-of-humor failure and tell passersby quite forcefully that, for instance, they may use only the Canadian sidewalk in the settlement of Derby Line, Vermont, since the pavement itself is U.S. territory, and merely to stroll on it without a visa is a violation of immigration law, and can result in a fine or worse.

  The thousands of miles of supposedly unguarded—but electronically monitored—frontier between Canada and the United States is marked by a twenty-foot permanently cleared vista to help define and police the borderline.

  There is one glaring—and similarly rather strictly policed—oddity at the very eastern end of the 49th parallel. A strange historical error—followed by the stubborn intransigence of the new U.S. government—has resulted in the existence today of a somewhat inconveniently sited American enclave, 123 square miles of it, and which is only accessible, if trying to get there by land, by way of passing through Canada. It is called the Northwest Angle, it is the most northerly point of the contiguous forty-eight states of the United States—and it derives its existence from a simple mistake made in the early nineteenth century by explorers who believed, wrongly, that hills to the west of the Lake of the Woods were the source of the Mississippi River.

  The Lake of the Woods, a wildly irregularly shaped body of water that straddles Ontario and Manitoba, and provides Winnipeg with much of its water supply, is a relic of the once massive Lake Agassiz, one of the largest-ever glacial lakes in history. When the immense volume of Agassiz freshwater finally drained out through a broken ice dam, eight thousand years ago, the world’s sea levels steadily rose by as much as nine feet—an event that gave rise, many suppose, to the biblical myths of the Great Flood, Noah’s Ark, and the supposed strandings on the summit of Armenia’s Mount Ararat. Fanciful these myths may be, but the legacy of the Lake of the Woods remains, and its very existence helped create a geographical fancy of its own, two centuries ago.

  The origins of the error go back to the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which fully recognized the legitimate existence of the new-made republic of the United States, and granted to this new country perpetual title to its immense extent of lands. Exactly what these lands comprised and where they began and ended was a little vague, especially in the north around the Great Lakes—but the treaty’s framers, with a small army of geographic advisers, did their best to define the division, the ultimate border, between the latitudinal limits of this new nation and the British-ruled remnants of land to its north, which would become Canada. Until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the lands west of the Mississippi River belonged variously to Spain and France, and so the river was considered to be the western frontier. In 1883 it was erroneously assumed that the lake, according to the celebrated British mapmaker John Mitchell,* was shaped like an egg, not the wild mess of inlets and arms and outlets that surveyors later determined it to be. The border would thus pass from “the northwesternmost point of this lake,” as the framers of the 1783 treaty wrote, and more critically, “thence across to the Mississippi in the west.” The ragged-looking thing that eventuated would be the frontier-line between new-made American territory and the possessions of France, after which the line would follow the Mississippi southward all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. So, a border was laboriously drawn, and inscribed onto the maps of the day. America had its first official outline.

  But then, fifteen years later, along came David Thompson, the Welsh immigrant and former Hudson’s Bay Company trader who became perhaps the most notable of all the explorers and mapmakers of the Canadian interior.* He realized that the Mississippi does not rise anywhere near the Lake of the Woods, but much farther south—and since it therefore does not intersect with the Canadian border, there must now be a significant gap in the line between the two countries. The importance of this realization—which initially concerned more trappers than settlers, as well as a large number of puzzled Native Americans, mainly members of the Ojibwe tribes, who weren’t certain which country they now lived in—was much magnified when, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson had the United States buy from France the lands to the west of the Mississippi River. The result of the Louisiana Purchase, as it came to be known, was a massive westward extension of the border, and which was agreed by all to be a geometric border that would pass along the 49th parallel of latitude all the way to the Rocky Mountains (known back then as the Stone Mountains). But the untidy and very porous gap between the parallel at the Lake of the Woods persisted—and the still more-or-less new American government, stubborn in its independence, refused to countenance any deviation from the 1783 treaty. That document had specified the border march west from the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods—and after some argument the British—arguing for the shape of the borders of Canada—agreed. Except that no one had the foggiest idea where that northwesternmost point was.