Northeast India has witnessed several nationality movements during the 20th century. The oldest and one of the most formidable has been that of the Nagas — inhabiting the hill tracts between the Brahmaputra river in India and the Chindwin river in Burma (now Myanmar). Rallying behind the slogan, ‘Nagaland for Christ’, this movement has been the site of an ambiguous relation between a particular understanding of Christianity and nation-making. This book, based on meticulous archival research, traces the making of this relation and offers fresh perspectives on the workings of religion in the formation of political and cultural identities among the Nagas. It tracks the transmutations of Protestantism from the United States to the hill tracts of Northeast India, and its impact on the form and content of the nation that was imagined and longed for by the Nagas. The volume also examines the role of missionaries, local church leaders, and colonial and post-colonial states in facilitating this process. Lucidly written and rigorous in its analyses, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, political science, sociology and social anthropology, and particularly those concerned with Northeast India.
A study of the history and politics of colonial and post-colonial northeast India. In India, the eight states that border Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Tibetan areas of China are often referred to as just “the Northeast.” In the Name of the Nation offers a critical and historical account of the country’s troubled relations with this borderland region. Its modern history is shaped by the dynamics of a “frontier” in its multiple references: migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics. Partly because of this, the political trajectory of the region has been different from the rest of the country. Ethnic militias and armed groups have flourished for decades, but they coexist comfortably with functioning electoral institutions. The region has some of India’s highest voter turnout rates, but special security laws produce significant democracy deficits that are now almost as old as the Republic. That these policies have been enforced to foment national unity while multiple alternative conceptions of the “nation” animate politics in the region forces us to reflect on the very foundations of the nation form. Sanjib Baruah offers a nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions. Praise for In the Name of the Nation “In this book, Sanjib Baruah provides scholars and students up-to-date facts, new revelations, astute analysis, and basic background for understanding history and politics in northeast India. This is also essential reading for anyone concerned with the quality of sovereignty in India, where national state territorialism is rife with contradictions, ambiguities, militarism, and conflicting allegiances.” —David Ludden, New York University “This survey of [northeastern India] is an excellent guide to its diversity and complexity and is characterized by a heartfelt criticism of the actions of the Indian government, guided by Baruah’s scholarly authority and personal experiences. Highly recommended.” —R. D. Long, CHOICE “A powerful overview of the overlapping mechanisms that have made Northeast India “an exceptional example of the shortcomings and failures of the territorially circumscribed post-colonial nation-state.” —Berenice Guyot-Rechard, H-Asia
"Re-Imagining Northeast Writings and Narratives: Language, Culture, and Border Identity" presents a collaborative effort to critically examine the concept of Northeast India, focusing on its linguistic, geographical, cultural, and social dimensions. Through a compilation of articles and essays, the volume delves into various aspects such as language, literature, culture, challenges, and the complexities of identity within the region. Each contribution offers detailed insights and findings, enhancing our understanding of Northeast India's diverse cultural landscape and the experiences of its people. By addressing themes of spatiality, movement, and responses to representations of the Northeast, the volume aims to deepen scholarly engagement with the region and stimulate discourse on its unique linguistic, cultural, and border dynamics. It serves as a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, and anyone interested in gaining a nuanced understanding of Northeast India and its intricate interplay of language, culture, and identity.
Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging focuses on the Heraka, a religious reform movement, and its impact on the Zeme, a Naga tribe, in the North Cachar Hills of Assam, India. Drawing upon critical studies of 'religion', cultural/ethnic identity, and nationalism, archival research in both India and Britain, and fieldwork in Assam, the book initiates new grounds for understanding the evolving notions of 'reform' and 'identity' in the emergence of a Heraka 'religion'. Arkotong Longkumer argues that 'reform' and 'identity' are dynamically inter-related and linked to the revitalisation and negotiation of both 'tradition' legitimising indigeneity, and 'change' legitimising reform. The results have deepened, yet challenged, not only prevailing views of the Western construction of the category 'religion' but also understandings of how marginalised communities use collective historical imagination to inspire self-identification through the discourse of religion. In conclusion, this book argues for a re-evaluation of the way in which multi-religious traditions interact to reshape identities and belongings.
This book examines the question of class formation and social inequality within tribal groups in North-East India. Focussing on the Nagas, it analyses and challenges common perceptions about them as a class-less society with a uniform culture. It looks at the previously neglected themes of class formation and structure, division of work, emerging social milieus and cultural differentiation among the Naga youth – and presents fresh arguments about notions of modernity. Providing a theoretical understanding of inequality, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of North-East India, tribal studies, exclusion studies, sociology, social anthropology, political studies, development studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
This collection of essays is an important contribution to the new literature on frontier studies and the historiography of Northeast India. Moving away from an exclusive dependence on colonial ethnographies, the authors build their arguments on a varied range of sources: from buranjis to revenue records, survey maps to explorers' diaries, and missionary papers to police files. They question the givennes of the categories through which the region is usually described, and contest the stereotypes by which the people of the region are primitivized. They explore the historical processes whereby the region was surveyed, mapped, understood, represented, politically governed, economically refigured, and historically constituted during the colonial period. Though focused on the experience of Northeast India, the volume also raises substantive questions about the idea of the frontier and the border, the primitive and the modern, and the tribal and the settled, the local and the trans-local.
South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with nationalisms of various kinds - religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural and exclusivist. In all the region’s major states, officially promulgated nationalism at various times has been fiercely contested by minority groups intent on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their own cultural inheritance. This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the ‘nation state’ in South Asia. It examines three different kinds of minority articulations – cultural conclaves with real or fictitious attachments to an imaginary homeland, the identity problems of dispersed minorities with no territorial claims and the aspirations of indigenous communities, tribes or ethnicities. The essays in this volume offer a rich menu: the evolution of Naga nationalism, the construction of the territory-less Sylheti identity, the debates over Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan, the evolution of Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka, the politics of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the making of minority politics in India, and questions of Islam and nationalism in colonial India. It is an eclectic mix for students of nationalism, politics, modern history and anyone interested in the evolution of South Asia. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
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.