Northeast India

Northeast India

Author: Samrat Choudhury

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1787389529

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As India and the world are roiled by questions of nationalism and identity, this book journeys into the history of one of the world's newest and most fascinating regions: Northeast India. Having appeared with the stroke of a pen in 1947, as the British Raj was torn asunder and partitioned into India and Pakistan, this is a region of hills inhabited by myriad tribes. Until colonial rule, they had lived in their ancient ways largely unmolested by their neighbors, who were rather keen to avoid their traditions of head-hunting. Samrat Choudhury chronicles the processes by which these remote hill-tribes, and the diverse other peoples inhabiting the valley of the vast Brahmaputra River below, became parts of the 'imagined nation' that is India. Through the invention of the Northeast, he explores two other ideas of India that remain in daily competition: Bharat, the Hindu nationalist conception of the country, and Hindustan, the Persian-origin name by which India is still known as far west as Turkey. Taking a long view, this absorbing political history chronicles the separate pathways by which imperialism, Christianity and the British love of tea brought each of the contemporary region's constituent states, kicking and screaming, into modern India.


The Quest for Modern Assam: A History

The Quest for Modern Assam: A History

Author: Arupjyoti Saikia

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2023-08-28

Total Pages: 607

ISBN-13: 9357082123

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'A model work of historical scholarship'-Ramachandra Guha 'The most well-researched, comprehensive history of contemporary Assam ever written'-Partha Chatterjee The crucial battles of World War II fought in India's north-east-followed soon after by Independence and Partition-had a critical impact on the making of modern Assam. In the three decades following 1947, the state of Assam underwent massive political turmoil, geographical instability, and social and demographic upheaval, among others. Later, the truncated state suffered widespread unrest as various groups believed their cultural identity and political leverage were under threat. New social energies and political forces were unleashed and came to the fore. Definitive, comprehensive and unputdownable, The Quest for Modern Assam explores the interconnected layers of political, environmental, economic and cultural processes that shaped the development of Assam since the 1940s. It offers an authoritative account that sets new standards in the writing of regional political history. Not to be missed by any one keen on Assam, India, Asia or world history in the twentieth century.


The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj

The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj

Author: Kyle Jackson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1009267361

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High in the eastern Himalayan foothills, people had a unique vantage point on the British Empire. The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj presents a history of Mizoram in Northeast India told from historical Indigenous perspectives of encounters with empire from the 1890s to the 1920s. Based on a wide range of research and enriched by sources newly digitised by the author through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, Kyle Jackson sheds new light on the complex and violent processes of how and why diverse populations of highland clans in the Indo-Burmese borderlands came to redefine themselves as Christian Mizos. By using historical Indigenous concepts and logics to approach early twentieth-century imperial encounters, Jackson guides readers into a decolonial history of Northeast India, demonstrating the value of thinking not just about the histories of colonized peoples and concepts but also with them.


Insurgency in India's Northeast

Insurgency in India's Northeast

Author: Jugdep Chima

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1000952002

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Insurgency in India’s Northeast provides a systematic analysis of every major secessionist group and insurgency in the region within a unified and original explanatory framework, focusing primarily on the postcolonial period. This book presents a parsimonious analytic narrative involving a rich sequential account of the historical evolution of Mizo, Naga, Meitei, and "ethnic Assamese" identities from precolonial to colonial to postcolonial times. Avoiding essentialist or primordialist arguments, the chapters in the book demonstrate how ethnic/(sub)national identities are dynamic and malleable phenomenon, not immutable natural givens. In particular, it argues that the postcolonial Indian state has attempted to integrate these ethnic/sub-state national groups into the Indian Union through a combination of democratic accommodation/consociationalism and hegemonic/violent control, strategically designed to encapsulate their evolving (sub) national identities into the overarching state-sponsored Indian nationality. Through this book, readers will gain a rich understanding of the dynamics of ethnicity/ nationality and the nation/state-building process in postcolonial India. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Asian studies, ethnicity, nationalism, separatism, security studies, border studies, and international relations.


Wild Races

Wild Races

Author: Lalruatkima

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1978716451

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"This book explores the narrative networks that underlie the empirical dimensions of the worlds we imagine and inhabit. Scripturalizing the empire locates this exploration within an ascendant social formation in the nineteenth century-British India"--


The Camera as Witness

The Camera as Witness

Author: Joy L. K. Pachuau

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-04-13

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1107073391

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The book challenges the stereotypes about and narrates the daily lives of the Mizos through the use of vernacular photography.


The Coolie's Great War

The Coolie's Great War

Author: Radhika Singha

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 019752558X

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Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over??550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service. The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials. The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.


Nationalism in the Vernacular

Nationalism in the Vernacular

Author: Roluah Puia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1009346083

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Nationalism in the Vernacular illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. The book examines this process of vernacularisation at two levels, the first concerns the process of creating a vernacular language to express nationalist ideas and second, the irrepressibility of the oral against state's violent response to the nationalist movement. Drawing from multiple sources, the book through the rich oral narratives, archival materials, including government and media reports shows how Mizos have remained active agents in asserting and claiming their rights to defining ideas of nationalism in their own terms by making it distinctively Mizo.


Settling Hebron

Settling Hebron

Author: Tamara Neuman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-06

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 081224995X

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In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Hebron, considered by many Israelis as the most "ideological" of settlements.