Construction of Northeast
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: June 10 2015 -
While discussing ‘alienation’ of the Northeast from ‘mainstream’ India, the dominant discourse floating around is that it is physical distance which has created psychological distance between the two.
Underdevelopment, political turmoil and insurgencies in the region have been attributed to this distance.
From this thesis, it would indeed be facile to infer that the ‘other’ or the Northeast constructed over a period of time is also the result of this distance.
Very few have even dared to make a dispassionate inquiry on how this ‘physical distance’ is the creation of colonial politics and its imagination of the ‘frontiers’ rather the actual physical geography or cultural pattern in Southeast Asia.
Colonial cartography rooted in the ideology of British India persisted and perpetuated itself as a legacy in mainstream Indian ‘nationalist’ imagination with over-zealous and high-pitched sentiments in the post-colonial period consolidating the idea and practice of ‘frontier’ governance vis-à-vis the Northeast.
It is crucial to understand the basic manner in which imperialism and cartography intersect since both are imprinted with common concerns of territoriality and knowledge required to exercise domination.
Certain mindset has been responsible for the ‘exclusion’ or the ‘absence’ of the region in the standard histories of ancient, medieval and modern India in the post-colonial times.
The notion and concept of the country remained surreptitiously bereft of the existence of a distinctly different experience - shaped and developed by centuries of civilization ontology that is beyond the circumscribed confines of mainstream Indian ‘imagination’ - hitherto labeled as ‘the Northeast’.
Non cognizance of difference and non acceptance in the mainstream ‘imagination’ of the existence of a different historical experience underscore the conflict inherent in the Indian mindset.
Hence, the region becomes a hostile or alien space inhabited by ‘tribes’ and ‘backward’ who need to be integrated to the ‘mainstream’.
The state’s self imposed necessity of physical inclusion driven by the idea of ‘protecting the frontiers’, contrasts itself sharply with the absence of the Northeast from the popular imagination.
Moreover, the foundation on which the grand project of integrating the ‘country’ into a post-colonial national entity was laid not on ‘confidence and trust’ but on ‘doubts over loyalty’.
In the age of ‘globalization’, the ‘image’ of the Northeast still remains constant due to numerous constructs or rejection of the same.
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