There’s a tendency to cherry-pick instances, stories and behaviours to club the “protuberance that hangs on to the rest of the country by a slender thread” under a collective—Northeast India—ignoring the gamut of diverse experiences, voices and histories of the states it comprises.
Journalist and author of The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra, Samrat Choudhury’s latest, Northeast India: A Political History, stands as a befittingly scholarly correction. It offers a savoury account of the making and remaking of Northeast India by telling the story of the formulation of their individual identities—along territorial and linguistic lines—and how they ended up being part of ‘mainland India’ in this little over 300-page volume.
Split into nine chapters, the book celebrates both the oral and written traditions of the region in its historiography. For example, while Choudhury writes that the region was mentioned in the “myth and legend” of the kingdom of Pragjyotish (the land of eastern light), he finds its earliest documentation in literature in the “account of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang”. The author then elaborates how its modern (re)birth “begins with religion—and cups of tea”, noting that the “British love of tea” helped annex “upper Assam to British India”, which further galvanised the region’s fate in the absence of stronger native protest.
Principally, because of its storytelling, the professor of history at Assam University, Sajal Nag, notes that the book “reads like fiction”, for only a few non-fictional accounts as wonderfully capture both the tapestry and texture of a geographical landmass, as Choudhury manages with this work, using both anecdotes and myth-legends.
Sample two incidents that demonstrate how events, unrelated to the region, shaped its current form. First, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, among whose “scheduled meetings later that day was one with Laldenga”—the founder of Mizo National Front and Mizoram’s first Chief Minister—who was supposed to discuss the “resolution of the conflict in Mizoram” with the PM. And second, the missing of “a strand of hair” in December 1963 “from a shrine near Srinagar named Hazratbal”.
An incident occurring “more than 3,000 kilometres away from Tripura” changed the state’s demography as hurt sentiments resulted in communal clashes, which further led to the fleeing of “more than 100,000 refugees, almost all Bengali Hindus” into Tripura in 1964. Other influences can’t be ignored either. For example, the “massive changes in water flows (which) were accompanied by larger changes in river systems, altered the landscape of the entire region”.
Though magisterial in appeal, Northeast India is binge-worthy because of the anecdotes and the scintillating legends it recounts. Take, for instance, the reason why copper half pennies were “valued (more than silver two pennies)” was because they were “used for making bullets”. Then, there’s Sikkim’s origin story as a kingdom, which “begins with the ascent of the throne of a man of Tibetan roots named Phuntsog Namgyal in 1641/42”.
The other is the story of the Zo tribe; they “trace their origins to a place called Chhinlung or Sinlung”, whose location the author suspects to be “somewhere in today’s China, perhaps in or near Yunnan or eastern Tibet, from where the Zo people migrated to what is now Myanmar”. Several heroic accounts populate the book as well. There’s one about the revolutionary schoolteacher, Surya Sen, popularly known as ‘Master da’, who “led a raid on the local armoury in Chittagong in 1930”. And, of course, there’s mention of the iron lady of Manipur Irom Chanu Sharmila’s 16-year-long hunger strike.
The book’s biggest triumph, however, is in its demonstration of how the people from the region have been constantly made to feel neglected. Choudhury notes that each state that forms Northeast India preferred self-governance. Reasons are multifarious, for all of them contributed to its wavering trust in the Indian heartland.
They include indecisive native rebellions, politically motivated actions of the Indian nationalists, world-changing events like the two World Wars, and the multiple natural disasters that it witnessed. Furthermore, “practically every tribe and sub-tribe of Northeast India has its own language and its own notional homeland where it is dominant; this is a place where the spoken dialect, if not the language, often changes from one hill to the next”. This posed another challenge for policymakers to tackle. Then, in addition to the oppressive measures like the AFSPA, which immunised armed forces to violate human rights, and were put in place to muzzle protesting voices, helped cement the feeling of being ‘othered’.
In conclusion, the author writes that though the advancements in telecommunications and transportation paved the way for better interactions with, and thus control of the protuberant region, ultimately “the structure of administration in the states of Northeast India now is much the same as the one that was put in place during colonial rule”. And the only thing that will control the region’s narrative in the future again will be capitalistic interests, much like centuries ago.