‘To Lay Down the Frontier of an Empire’: Circumscribing Identity in Northeast India

Abstract

Northeast India is in an apparent state of being marginalized, rediscovered and redefined. The region, it might be said, is a historical problem. This article explores ways in which India’s northeast is represented and experienced that signal deeply-rooted, contradictory and contested narratives of history, geography and identity. It further proposes an agenda for historicising the northeast by way of three interconnected strands of inquiry. First, it argues that an analysis of governance is essential to determine the ways in which the northeast frontier as British and Indian buffer zone has been shaped by the personnel, agencies and regulatory systems of imperial authority. Second, it proposes that a deeper study of Christianity and the ways in which particular experiences of belief, conversion and intimate cross-cultural encounter can exemplify tensions at the heart of colonial power and identity. Third, it turns attention to the ways in which ecological history can determine the extent to which the experience of colonialism as a political, economic and cultural regime thus conditioned local ecologies and socio-religious practices in forest and town. In this way, the article advances an understanding of the frontier as both a literal and imagined space, that is, at the same time locally and centrally produced and resisted.