There are very few books that have attempted to engage with the Northeast as a whole—each of its eight states. Samrat Choudhury’s “Northeast India: A Political History” published by Harper Collins is one of those rare attempts to paint a wholesome portrait of the region from a journalist’s point of view.
Since the scope of the book is very large, it is a boon and a curse for both the author and the reader. The author admits that any attempt to write the whole region is a “difficult and a fraught” one. Casting a wide net, it offers multiple journeys into the geography, culture and politics of the place. To borrow an expression from Walter Benjamin, it provides a “compressed image” of the Northeast. The author contends that the Northeast today is an “administrative construct rather than a historical region with a shared past.” The book begins with Assam and the author declares, “the story of the decline of the Ahom kingdom, and the birth of modern Northeast India, begins with religion—and cups of tea.” A significant chunk of the book invests in unpacking the different historical, geographic, and political threads that are part of each state. The materials used in the book are neither bound by time nor any fixed method per se, but it does manage to tell us a story of each region with care and sensitivity. He shows sensitivity particularly when unpacking the ethnic, linguistic, and religious concerns and contradictions that are rife in the Northeast. Additionally, it locates Northeast as a site of flow from not just India but puts it into conversation with mainland Southeast Asia too. For a lay reader, these “journeys through time” that the author makes will prove to be an excellent primer to understand the Northeast.
In this review, instead of detailing each chapter, I will instead engage with some of the arguments that the author makes in the text. The first aspect that caught my eye is the author’s attempt to highlight the difference between right-wing nationalism and regional nationalism(s) in the Northeast. He rightly characterizes the Assamese nationalism to be linguistic in character, over their Hindu nationalist counterparts whose nationalism is predominantly religious in nature. Furthermore, “the politics of Assam since the heyday of the ULFA has seen a sharp turn from separatism to Hindu nationalism with an Assamese twist.” He succinctly notes on politics of migration in the following manner: “the identity politics which fuels it—now in a tango of simultaneous collaboration and conflict with Hindu nationalism.” The conflict is tangible in both nationalisms’ positions on the excluded from the NRC. While Hindu nationalism wants to exclude only the Muslim Bengalis, the Assamese want all immigrants to be excluded—Hindus and Muslims alike. There is an affinity between Hindu and Assamese nationalism and the book tries to highlight this affinity.
The second aspect noticed in the book is its attempt to locate the Northeast with multiple geographies and histories. Northeast also suffers from the perils of nationalist historiography, a significant part of which is homegrown beginning with historians like Surya Kumar Bhuyan. In such histories, the region is mostly put in conversation with India thereby highlighting a shocking amnesia and omission of its connections to mainland Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, among others. This book does offer anecdotes of connected histories, consciously or otherwise, of the region of Northeast with other regions and cultures.
In my opinion, any portrait of a state is incomplete without a biography of the minorities. In his concluding chapter on Sikkim, the author highlighted as a general comment the importance of the figure of minority in the politics of South Asia. India, writes the author, is “haunted” by the equations of the majorities and minorities. There is an important interjection in the book about the role of enumerative practices in colonial India and how that contributed to anxieties. Such anxieties had a profound influence on the minorities in South Asia. Yet, one of the shocking omissions in the book is on Mizoram precisely on this question of minorities. The author moves very smoothly with the political history of the Mizos—their encounter with the British, the conflict with Assamese and its statehood. But in this political history, the life of the Chakmas, a significant and victimized minority in Mizoram, is completely underwritten. He does critique the treatment of minorities in Assam, but in the case of Mizoram, it is a stark omission given the similar qualitative treatment meted out to them. Chakmas have faced multiple, repetitive exclusions from all sections of Mizoram—its civil society, state, and other non-state entities. To name a few: evictions, denial of counsel for students even after clearing competitive exams, deleting of names from electoral rolls, constant vilification in the public, and more. The silence on Chakmas, certainly avoidable, is one of the signposts of the “compressed image” that accompanies this book.
The compressed image gets further accentuated when the book discusses the political present of the Northeast. The author writes, “the force that animates both politics and society is money.” The concluding paragraphs of the book detail how the aspirations of people have now changed and they are no different from “everywhere else.” In other words, even sameness deserves a biography. I was hoping for more on this front. Social facts and life surrounding money, development and capitalism are found everywhere but, at the same time, such sweeping observations on people and their aspirations in the Northeast, political or otherwise, both undermine and overmine the lifeworld of people and their capacity to be political. There are certainly more social currents of “tradition” than what meets the eye. Some are latent. Some gain life with time.
From religion to tea and politics of inclusion/separatism to nationalism, the book covers a mosaic of cultures and the histories of places and people that make up this frontier region of India. In the words of the author, this book is an “introduction to the political history of Northeast” guided by “history, geography and chronology”. I think this book is a worthwhile addition to the emerging literature on Northeast India. It is accessible and flows very well. Any reader looking to gain a background to Northeast would gain from this book which takes sufficient journeys into the past. To borrow from the author, it is a “readable narrative account” of the Northeast of its histories and identities.
Suraj Gogoi teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.
