This past week, two developments brought India’s Northeast back into focus. On February 23, Manipuri language film Boong, directed by Lakshmipriya Devi and produced by Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar, made every Indian proud by winning the prestigious British Academy of Film and Television Arts award in the children’s and family film category.
The other incident, which happened on February 20 in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, outraged the nation. A video of the incident, which went viral, shows the aggressive heckling of three women from Arunachal Pradesh living in a fourth-floor rented accommodation. They were insulted with racial slurs by a couple living in another flat below theirs.
The provocation for the verbal assault was the installation of an air conditioner by the girls in their room and the dust that was kicked up during the process. They were heaped with loud derogatory stereotypes that most from the Northeast in Delhi would be familiar with, having faced them silently almost daily—though mostly as racial micro aggressions—normalised so much as to inhibit complaining lest they sound trivial or else incredulous to others.
Interestingly, what happened in Malviya Nagar was almost a dramatic vindication of what Lakshmipriya Devi flagged in her powerful acceptance speech in London: praying for the return of peace in her troubled home state Manipur but also calling attention to the continued neglect, undermining and unrepresentation of the Northeast region in the rest of India.
Quite definitively, the Northeast is part of the Indian State. But unfortunately, the region is still struggling to fit into the larger Indian national identity, not so much on account of its own sense of alienation but because of the subliminal irredentist nature of the Indian identity and the unwillingness of those within this racial fold to accept the Northeast as it is within this fold.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) ideologue Ashok Mitra anticipated this national blind-spot illustratively in a newspaper column titled ‘A dose of heresy: Imagining alternative histories of the Northeast’ years ago. Up until 1937, Burma was a part of British India. However, when the British decided to bifurcate India to be a separate colony that year, even though it was a time the Indian national movement was peaking, there was not even a squeak of protest. He also speculates that if the hill states of the Northeast, too, had been similarly separated that year, there probably would have been no protest either.
This nearly happened, too. Several British administrators posted in the Northeast noticed this psychological distance. Four of them had actually suggested that the ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ hill territories beyond Assam’s Inner Line drawn by the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873, together with the contiguous hill regions of Burma, should be left as a separate ‘Crown colony’—neither a part of India nor of Burma—when the British leave.
The most elaborate of these suggestions came as a 22-page note from Robert Reid, who was the governor of Assam from 1937 to 1942. This plan came to be taken seriously, and as David R Syiemlieh notes in his book On the Edge of Empire: Four British Plans for North East India, 1941-1947, the then secretary of state for India, L S Amery, forwarded a copy of it to Oxford professor Reginald Coupland to be used in the third and final volume on the constitutional problem in India that he was working on at the time. The professor did so, but lazy scholarship later resulted in this ‘Reid’s plan’ coming to be also referred to falsely as the ‘Coupland plan’.
The plan was almost adopted before being ultimately dropped—not for any objection from Indian leaders, but because other British administrators felt such a place would be ungovernable.
A comparison between counterfactual scenarios of Burma and the Indian Northeast should be interesting. In a hypothetical situation, had Burma not been separated from India in 1937, it would have become India’s sacred territory to be defended at all cost from any aggression. In an imagined reverse situation, had the Northeast been made a ‘Crown colony’, it would have become no more than just another exotic neighbour. “The first and almost instinctive reaction of every new government was to hold fast to the territory bequeathed to it,” as Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal is cited saying in Neville Maxwell’s book, India’s China War.
What is also evident is that the East has never registered too deeply in India’s heart. Though Burma’s separation went almost unnoticed, when Pakistan was separated 10 years later, a holocaust followed, leaving several crores of people dead or displaced. Obviously, India and Pakistan were seen as once constituting an organic whole, while the territory and the people east of Bengal seldom figured in this imagined national community.
It is tragic that nearly eight decades after independence, the Northeast still remains incompletely integrated into the Indian mainstream ethos. The faults for this are often attributed to those who cannot integrate with this mainstream; but this logic must now be reconsidered.
In the early decades of independence, the official approach was to require all sub-nationalities to leave their individual streams and join the Indian mainstream, which, though unspecified, is generally understood to be closer to the soul of the Gangetic plains. As the Malviya Nagar racial outrage reminded, the hangover from this outlook still persists.
The ideal situation would be when this binary between sub-streams and mainstream disappear. For a frictionless Union, rather than the familiar appeal for those in the sub-streams to leave their shoals and join the mainstream, the mainstream must widen to accommodate all sub-streams as they are, thus adding to the beauty of unity in diversity that India’s Constitution proclaims as its intent.
For this diversity to not become anarchic, there will however have to be a common pathway to conform to. This consensual pathway must be constitutionally defined, and not be under the shadow of any religion or ethnicity. It must be forged by the aggregate of the diverse aspirations of all, and by the aggregate of all the sacrifices each will have to necessarily make to accommodate the others.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)