Generating vision and colonial imageries
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: January 20, 2014 -

Given the backdrop of homogenizing the colossal economic and social heterogeneity of India thrust upon by the compulsions of sustaining a "rationale" for a post-colonial democratic nation in the making, no stones were left unturned by the state in its attempt to impose an ideal frame.

While dissecting issues like racial discrimination faced by the people hailing from the Northeast region of India and also "alienation" from mainland India, the dominant discourse being floated around is that it is physical distance which has created psychological distance between the two zones.

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 construction of the Northeast is a 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 than 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 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 state.

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 ––– shaped and developed by centuries of civilization ontology that is beyond the circumscribed confines of mainstream Indian "imagination" ––– hitherto dubbed 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 mindset of the people.

Hence, the region becomes a hostile or alien space inhabited by "tribes" and "backwards" that 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 or a warped conception of the region.