Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter invites its readers to reflect on the political gloss of the Northeast India landscape and the complex relationship that exists between Northeast India and the Indian nation-state. It argues that in exploring the political gloss of Northeast India, we need to account both for distinctive political figurations that are grounded in local histories and ontologies; in people’s own sense, that is, of what politics is about, and the dialectical relations that exist between local politics and the Indian state in whose institutional, conceptual, and constitutional–legal grammar it functions, if often on terms of exceptionality (e.g. the Sixth Schedule, ethnic homelands, and special constitutional amendments). To capture the underlying political logic, complexities, and intricacies in the region, what is required, in a word, is to look at state, region, and local politics as interwoven processes and highlight relations of production, resistance, and power between the Indian centre and the Northeast. This chapter then proffers grounded theory to conceptually chart and theorize a set of major political processes in the region, and in particular, democracy, ethnicity, and indigeneity, and in each instance shows how Northeast Indians are the enactors and repositories of their own visions of ‘the political’ in ways shaped by historical particularities and societies’ own conception and normative imagination of its political self, sociality, and imagined futures.