The prevalent tendency in the study of the north-east has been to look at the region as an exotic island segregated from the rest of the world and inhabited by equally exotic people untouched by modernity or else spoilt by the sudden encounter with it. Seldom has the region been looked upon as possibly a product of the larger environment within which it exists, which by the very nature of its political geography would transcend national boundaries. Often this outlook is determined by an inherent possessive hubris of a national community wanting to see all territories and peoples within its political geography as essentially a part of the national organic being.
Every part of India, therefore, must belong to the India story alone, or the Indian historical mainstream, and any other narrative that does not conform to this standard of national imagining, thereby, becomes deviant and alien, and must ultimately be brought into the mainstream.
But the story of the north-east cannot but be honestly told alongside those of the countries which straddle it on practically all sides. This, then, is the problem of the north-east story at its essence, defined by a core contradiction between what is projected as the Indian national mainstream and the different streams that the region expectedly has always also belonged to.
The state thus becomes akin to what Peter J. Taylor referred to in a critique, a cultural container. Nothing spills outside it and conversely, nothing from outside spills into it.
Any historical stream that tends not to fit perfectly into this container becomes a problem. Furthermore, it is another characteristic of the state to be suspicious of these ‘deviant and non-mainstream’ histories and peoples. The Indian state has been no exception. India’s first home minister Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel’s letter of November 7, 1950, to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is just one alibi of this. In this letter, the leader reverentially referred to in India as the Iron Man is unambiguous in an irredentist suspicion of the ‘non-mainstream’ north-east.
Patel’s political foresight was remarkable in almost predicting the 1962 war with China at a time when Nehru was befriending China and canvassing for bringing the country into the fold of the United Nations, making India the sole country outside of the Soviet bloc to do so.
But in this 1950 letter he also cautions Nehru to be wary of the population of the north-east, whose loyalty to India, he says, has always been suspect: ‘The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India. Even Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices…. European missionaries and other visitors had been in touch with them, but their influence was in no way friendly to India or Indians.’
Elsewhere, the statesman does acknowledge the cross-border interrelatedness of histories, but this is seen as a matter to be wary of: ‘All along the Himalayas in the north and north-east, we have on our side of the frontier a population ethnologically and culturally not different from Tibetans and Mongoloids. The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to the Tibetans or Chinese have all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves.’
Indeed, the conceptualisation of nation as a cultural container becomes extremely problematic in the context of north-east India, approximately 98 per cent of whose physical boundary is international. Little doubt, then, that there can be no other way of studying the place, its histories and peoples without doing so in consonance with those of territories beyond these international borders. In many ways, whatever their biases, colonial historians who worked on maps bigger than the confines of national boundaries provided clearer pictures of the pasts of these peripheral regions. Alexander Mackenzie, Edward Gait and Robert Reid, therefore, remain indispensable in any serious study of the north-east region.
It is indeed fascinating to discover on this bigger map how Imperial Russia’s thrust into Central Asia had an impact on the making of the north-east. Russia and Britain, for instance, ultimately came to a treaty-bound agreement in 1907 for mutual exclusion of each other from Tibet, ultimately leaving the field clear for China’s entry into Tibet, which in turn profoundly influenced the security environment of the north-east and introduced an element of uncertainty to the northern boundary of the region.
Not many have tried to explore these connections. But a few have gone even beyond to suggest the Great Game has a sequel. In Bertil Lintner’s 2012 book Great Game East, the author argues that after the Great Game in Central Asia concluded in the early 20th century with the changes in power alliances in Europe post WWI, another one began unfolding in South and South East Asia. This time the rivalry is for the control of Asia’s most volatile frontier—the Indo-Burma region.
It is little known, but also fascinating how connected this history has been to the Western Bloc’s mission of yore of combating the spread of communism. One of the chief protagonists in this conflict theatre was the United States which, through the CIA, once ran operations supporting Tibetan resistance fighters even as the ultimate defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist party the Koumintang, KMT, at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists, became imminent towards 1949. Prior to the 1962 India-China war, when hostilities between India and China were still not open, this was done without India’s participation, and with the assistance of Sikkimese and Nepali sleuths. After the 1962 war, India too became party to this game. In reciprocation, China in the 1970s and 80s, openly extended help to north-east insurgents, beginning with the Nagas.