Cartography & territoriality
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: July 04 2015 -

Colonial cartography rooted in the ideology of British India persisted and perpetuated as a legacy in mainstream Indian “nationalist” imagination with over-zealous and high-pitched sentiments in the post-colonial period.

This tradition has consolidated the idea and practice of “frontier” governance vis-à-vis the Northeast and also spawned territorial assertions within the region.

Here, 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 over the territory.

Colonial imagination has been manifested in introducing administrative cartography or lines like the Radcliffe Line and the MacMohan Line which demarcate the Northeast and also create international borders.

The very fact that these lines were allowed to act as the physical boundaries even after the British left India says a lot about the mindset of those in the business of running the affairs of the states.

It is an inconvenient “reality” that a large tract of the Northeast region still remains a “frontier.”

The idea of the cartographic Northeast is supposed to encompass the eight states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Sikkim.

This 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 India remain surreptitiously bereft of the existence of a distinctly different experience hitherto known as the “Northeast”.

Non cognizance of difference and non acceptance of the “imagination” of the existence of a different historical experience underscore the conflict inherent in the mindset of the people.

Hence, the region becomes a hostile or alien space inhabited by communities often termed as “tribes” and “backwards” who need to be integrated to the “mainstream”.

The Union’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.

While political assertions for inclusion were made, the process has also brought in different conceptualization of territories.

The fixation on territory has further reinforced the process of creating “difference” within and outside, without realizing that the motion was set by those who shaped or constructed the destiny of the nation state.