Northeast India A Place of Relations

Northeast India: A Place of Relations focuses on encounters and experiences between people and cultures, the human and the non-human world, allowing for building of new relationships of friendship and amity in the region. The twelve essays in this volume explore the possibility of a new search enabling a 'discovery' of the lived and the loved world of Northeast India from within. The volume employs a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches - literary, historical, anthropological, interpretative politics, and an analytical study of contemporary issues, engaging the people, cultures, and histories in the Northeast with a new outlook. In the study, the region emerges as a place of new happenings in which there is the possibility of continuous expansion of the horizon of history and issues of current relevance facilitating new voices and narratives that circulate and create bonding in the borderland of South, East, and Southeast Asia.

List of tables; List of figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction Yasmin Saikia and Amit Baishya; Part I. Contemporary Politics and Issues of Definition: 1. Solidarity, visibility, and vulnerability: 'Northeast' as a racial category in India Duncan McDuie-Ra; 2. India and its Northeast: another big push without a take-off? Sanjib Baruah; 3. (Un)natural disasters and the role of the state in the Brahmaputra Valley Assam Mitul Baruah; Part II. Creating Presence: 4. Bonnie guest house: fieldwork and friendship across borders Bengt G. Karlsson; 5. The Muslims of Assam: present/absent history Yasmin Saikia; 6. Ichthyonomics, or fish and humans in the time of floods: rethinking speciation in Assam Sean Dowdy; Part III. Knowing through Experience: 7. Dismembered lives: narrating history's footnotes in Aulingar Jui Amit R. Baishya; 8. Freedom and frustrated hopes: assessing the Jadonang movement, 1917–32 Arkotong Longkumer; 9. Celebrating a new 'New Year' in Tripura: space, place and identity politics R. K. Debbarma; Part IV. Rethinking Politics: 10. Difficult loves: purity and hardship Dolly Kikon; 11. Politics of difference in the Northeast: a feminist reflection Papori Bora; 12. Robes, rivers and ruptured spaces: hydro-power projects in west Arunachal Pradesh Swargajyoti Gohain; Glossary.

Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. Her research and teaching interests straddle peace studies, history and religion with a focus on gender issues, conflict transformation, and Islamic values. She is the author of Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (2011) and Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (2004).
Amit Baishya teaches at the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in postcolonial literature/theory, world literature, cinema, comic books, and popular culture.