Ethnonationalism in Northeast India

Abstract

In September 2000, the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Front (RPF), in its fight for a sovereign country, imposed a ban on Hindi movies and songs in the borderland province Manipur in India’s Northeast. Recognizing the RPF propaganda as exemplifying an ethnonationalism amongst the Meetei people in Manipur, this chapter addresses the politics of ethnicity, territorial belonging, and nationalism. Unlike other works grounded in the physical landscapes of borderland societies and their connectivity with neighboring communities and countries, this chapter mostly focuses on the symbolic and mental counterparts of the physical landscapes or simply the mindscape and the mediascape of place-based ethnic belonging and its concurrent disconnectivity and connectivity with the Indian state. It shows that while the postcolonial Indian state solidifies its territorial sovereignty over Northeast India through border making, it also enters a tug of war with recalcitrant ethnic groups in the cultural arenas, such as the entertainment world, laden with contending representations of local ethnic belongings and state territorial sovereignty. This chapter is thus concerned with the tension between what the author calls the two divergent “identity geographies”: namely, the Manipuri sense of their ancestral land and the Indian state’s territorial sovereignty over the Northeast.