Sanjib Baruah’s new book In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press, takes the history of the troubled relationship between India and its Northeast “as a vantage point to reflect on how the generalization of the territorially circumscribed nation-form, and of the sovereignty of the nation-state, has played out since decolonization.” In doing so, Baruah develops a sketch of how these political forms –seemingly inevitable – are actually “highly contingent artifacts”.

Contributing Editor Rishav Thakur converses with Professor Sanjib Baruah, in a series of email exchanges, to discuss some of these thoughts and arguments in this interview for Borderlines.

Rishav Thakur (RT): You begin your book by interrogating the term Northeast to denote and demarcate a region comprising of present-day Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura in India. You also contend that this directional name was charged by a sense of strangeness felt by British colonizers, who took recourse to conceptions of race to identify the alterity that the region represented for them. How has the postcolonial state’s treatment of the Northeast continued with - or diverged from - the policies and attitudes adopted by the British Raj?

Sanjib Baruah (SB): The North East Frontier of British Imperial India was not the same territorial construction as what we now call Northeast India. Similarly, while I point to affinities between the term “Mongolian Fringe” used by British Indian official and geopolitical thinker Olaf Caroe and the racially-tinged term “Northeasterner” that has entered the Indian public lexicon relatively recently, there are important differences as well. Northeast India is a postcolonial coinage, a fact that is worth reflecting on since directional names like these are usually associated with the age of European colonial empires, when names like the Far East and the Middle East were coined.  

Northeast India is not an informal name like north India or south India. It is the official name given to the region; and some institutions use the term, such as the North Eastern Council and the Government of India’s Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region. They point to a distinctive governance structure specific to the region—with formal and informal ‘rules.’  Again, that most of contemporary Northeast India— with the notable exception of Sikkim— formed part of the colonial frontier province of Assam is more than a matter of historical interest. 

Imperial sovereignty had a layered and uneven quality in the frontier provinces of British Imperial India. This was true of Assam as well as of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010. They encompassed directly ruled areas and a variety of indirectly ruled areas: native states, Excluded Areas, Partially Excluded Areas, Tribal Areas of Assam etcetera. Even some territories, over which the British colonial authorities had only the most tenuous type of control, were incorporated into these provinces. Recognizing that a form of territorialization particular to an imperial frontier such as the Inner Line and the other boundaries has persisted into our times is important for understanding the nature of postcolonial sovereignty, not in the way it is idealized by nationalists and by the United Nations way of seeing, but in its actually existing form. The book explores some of the implications of these institutional continuities, rather than the question of convergence and divergence between colonial and postcolonial policies and attitudes.

RT: It is striking that the British administration put in place a dual regime of directly administered areas — parts of the Brahmaputra and Surma valleys that made economic sense to administer directly— and the Partially Excluded, Excluded Areas and Tribal areas of Assam (denoted collectively under the term ‘excluded areas’ in the book) which were ostensibly left alone to preserve indigenous culture. This gesture of ‘leaving alone,’ you argue, is somewhat misleading. That is, it was in service of the British political-economic interests, for such a dual stance broke up “the native” into a multitude of “tribes” and “non-tribes.” This move, as you say, helped cultivate a neo-elite in the garb of  existing indigenous institutions. Further, when the postcolonial Indian state incorporated these previously excluded areas into the national fold while continuing with British policy tools and attitudes, it lent this incorporation an uneasiness or fragility. Could you shed some light on this tension?

SB: The phrase “dual regime,” though, has to be qualified. As I just said, there were territories within these frontier provinces where the term “indirect rule” would exaggerate the actual control that colonial authorities exercised. For the “tribes” in those areas, the British presence meant little more than brutal “punitive expeditions” from time to time. It was only during the last days of empire,      as late as the 1940s, that there was an effort to extend administrative control to the un-administered areas of the North East Frontier Tracts (today’s Arunachal Pradesh).  The anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf’s infamous expedition to the Apatani valley that allowed him to write his 1962 book The Apatanis and their Neighbours, was designed to prepare the ground for a colonial administrative presence in those areas.

There were, however, excluded areas that were administered, and they can indeed be described as being under indirect rule. But preserving indigenous culture would be too generous a way to describe British colonial intentions. For instance, if you look at their effort to look for and enforce customary laws specific to each “tribe,” there were several factors at play. Among them were their ideas about civilizational hierarchies and a sense of racialized paternalism. Communities defined as tribes were perceived as needing protection because they were deemed incapable of becoming full market subjects. That is why such laws in force to this day prohibit the sale of land owned by a person of tribal ethnicity to someone not of ethnic tribal descent. They have had some beneficial effects for sure. But they idealize bonds of community and misread mechanisms of dispossession. That is why, despite the land being theoretically under the control of communities, the hill societies of Northeast India (erstwhile excluded areas) are fast becoming class-divided societies with sharp divisions between rich and poor within each tribe, and an ethnic divide between those that are supposed to belong and those that are not. 

This ethnic divide is the result of colonial protocols governing excluded areas that were retained under the postcolonial dispensation.  The Naga uprising that began soon after India’s independence made it loud and clear that the surge of nationalism that had carried the nationalists to power in the nation’s capital did not give them the political capacity to radically reform the institutions of indirect rule in Northeast India. The excluded area protocols and the customary law regime acquired a new lease of life as a form of protective discrimination. As a result, the elected state governments of the erstwhile excluded areas now consist almost entirely of politicians belonging to the core ethnic groups: Scheduled Tribes considered indigenous to a state. Emergent forms of exploitation, dispossession, subordination, and sub-citizenship of ethnically “othered” groups receive almost no political attention under this political dispensation. The process of incremental decision-making that has given Northeast India its peculiar structure of postcolonial governance was bound to have many such unintended consequences. The book zeroes in on some of these contradictions.

RT: One of my favorite passages in the introduction to your book is when you argue that “Northeast India, as an official place-name, carries with it the weight of many haphazard and poorly thought-out decisions made by managers of the postcolonial Indian state as they were trying to turn an imperial frontier space into the national space of a ‘normal sovereign state.’” (p. 2). I am struck by the use of the term “manager” here. Could you tell us why you chose this word? 

SB: The use of that word was simply to avoid the possible implication that the postcolonial Indian state —or any state for that matter— acts in a single unified and coherent manner. The state is not a totalized structure of power. Decisions made by particular politicians in power or by bureaucrats occupying a critical position at crucial times have shaped Northeast India’s postcolonial governance structure. The worldview of key decision-makers—and some decisions being the result of groupthink— has played an important role. 

This is not unique to Northeast India. Recently I was reading Beatrice Juaregui’s ethnographic account of policing in Uttar Pradesh. She spoke to senior police officials that probably belong to the elite Indian Police Service, who said to her that the lower-ranking police personnel “have no sense of the nation, which is what we are protecting.” This attitude would be familiar to students of Northeast India.

In my book, I explore some of the implications of the official imagining of the region as a latecomer to the nation and development, and thus needing tutelage and protection during what is thought of as a time of transition: giving the region the time to catch up with development and join the “national mainstream,” a project that apparently requires both the pedagogy of violence and pedagogy of culture—to borrow Partha Chatterjee’s words.

RT: I am also intrigued by your use of the word “frontier” in the book. What analytical gains does this concept afford when thinking about Northeast India and its relation to British imperialism and the postcolonial Indian state? How is the purchase of this concept different from, say, the concept of a borderland?

SB: I didn’t intend to make an either-or choice between frontier and borderland as concepts. In fact, the first draft of the chapter of the book where I discuss these terms was written as a keynote address to a meeting of the Asian Borderlands Research Network. I called the lecture “Bringing the frontier back in.” Prominent scholars of Asian borderlands were among those who came to my talk. Their comments helped me to fine-tune my argument.

It makes a lot of sense to think of Northeast India as a resource frontier, a settlement frontier, and a geopolitical frontier.  Most people would understand what these phrases mean. In English, the words frontier and border have some meanings in common, but they are not the same. A foundational article in the field of Borderland Studies says that it excludes “the classical themes of the frontier— that is, demographic, political, or economic expansion into ‘empty’ territories.”  But these themes are constitutive of Northeast India’s postcolonial predicament, and they are at the heart of my book.  While insights from Borderland Studies have made an important contribution to our understanding of Northeast India, the frontier themes are not the focus of this field of study. That’s why you come across the word ‘frontier’ more often than ‘borderland’ in my book.

RT: I also found the following lines from Chapter 3 very acute: “Frontiers are rarely empty spaces without people. They may be places full of promise to some, but to those whose life-space is invaded, incursion comes as a shock, a disruption, and a trauma. The frontier encounter is therefore a stubborn source of conflicts, even though it may take years—and sometimes decades—for them to surface. Locals may view migrants and their descendants as “ethnic others for generations;” (p. 77). In the case of the settled areas of Northeast India, we do know that under the British, efforts were made to transfer farmers from East Bengal and dispossessed indigenous people from Central India to settle arable land and work on tea plantations. But there is a certain contingency that you gesture towards when you write that while “[i]t is possible to reimagine settlement frontiers as inclusive, diverse, and hybrid places. But conditions— local, national, and global—do not always favor the pursuit of a politics of inclusion” (p. 78).  In such a situation, how are we to study the links between this transfer of population, and in-migration, to the region and the incidence of conflict between those identified as sons-of-the-soil and immigrant?

SB: I like to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism towards a cosmopolitan disdain that sometimes marks pronouncements made from locations of privilege regarding say, an episode of “ethnic violence” occurring in a far-away place.  Usually, there are no simple explanations for such incidents. They typically require an understanding of multiple factors: local power dynamics, the behavior of state actors that may not follow the metropolitan-based commentator’s expectations, how the tradition of dead generations, as Karl Marx had put it, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and whatnot.

We hear a lot about the values of inclusivity, cultural hybridity, diversity, etcetera. When it comes to Northeast India it does not take much to figure out that, after British colonial conquest, the new rulers viewed the region as a settlement frontier where ‘wastelands’ could be given out in abundance to European tea planters, and on a less grand scale to poorer settlers from elsewhere in British India. Influential local actors were accomplices to this project.  Nevertheless, there has been a long history of local resistance to this framing of the region. For more than a century there have been efforts to reclaim the land and its past: the assertion of the historical presence of collectivities against the discourse of power. 

Yet there is no reason why the region cannot become a place that is at peace with this history celebrating its diversity and hybridity. In many ways, it already has. After all, some of the worst fears expressed by the colonial census official C. S. Mullan, who famously predicted in 1931 [Census of India] that migration from eastern Bengal would “destroy more surely than the Burmese invaders of 1820 the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilization,” did not come true.  That is not because the demographic transformation of Assam did not occur exactly as Mullan had predicted,  but because of the processes of ethnic and cultural change —notably the language switch from Bengali to Assamese by many migrants. As a result, the number of Assamese speakers in Assam increased significantly. This is the story of the emergence of the Miya Muslim community, which now has a significant presence in Assamese literary and cultural life. There is perhaps something to be said for Benedict Anderson’s claim that language is “fundamentally inclusive” and is not “an instrument of exclusion.”    

Yet the persistent conflicts in the region, over who belongs and who does not, hardly permits resting on past laurels. In principle, the conflicts over belonging and membership can be adjudicated and settled peacefully and justly, adopting measures to gradually integrate successive generations of ethnic outsiders, utilizing symbolic tools such as reparations, public apologies or commemorations, when they can help.  But political and ideational conditions—local, national, and global—have to support the pursuit of a politics of inclusion that celebrates diversity and hybridity. If what I have called (borrowing the words of James Ferguson) the politics of rightful shares —demands that privilege indigeneity— has emerged as the dominant mode of political claims-making in the region, Northeast India’s history as a settlement frontier and the postcolonial state’s prevailing governing philosophy must take the lion’s share of the blame. The major challenge for the region today is how to create a climate of political innovation that allows for new kinds of political imagination to flourish.

RT: This provides a good background to think through some specific cases. In Chapter 4, you reflect on the movement for Nagalim and Naga independence. Indeed, “[t]he Nagas were pioneers among tribal communities of Northeast India to call themselves a nation.” (p. 105). You find in this assertion a rejection of being denoted as a “tribe” that relegated communities to a position of constant primitiveness, and thus never fully modern. Could you elaborate on this? Further, this designation went with a need— on the part of the British— to fix tribes to their “abodes proper.” How was this policy— preserved in the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution— negotiated with by communities in the region as they aspired to progress?

SB: It was nearly a hundred years ago that British colonial administrators criticized American Baptist missionaries for imposing an alien Western culture on the Nagas. Their critique—anticipating the latter-day discourse of cultural authenticity —failed to recognize a new strain of cultural politics that was emerging in the late colonial order: the struggle for equal membership within a modern world society. Wearing European-style clothes was becoming, to borrow words that Godfrey Wilson had used in another context, a way of asserting the claim “to be respected by the Europeans and by one another as civilized, if humble, men, members of the new world society.”          

Historically, the aspiration to break away from the “backwardness and parochialism” of the “tribal” past and become part of the “enlightened and modern” world of Christianity is inseparable from the idea of the Naga nation. This discourse can indeed be seen as a form of resistance to the colonial knowledge practices vis-à-vis the Naga tribes whose identities were thought to be irrevocably tied to their natal groups and natal territories.

The aspiration to achieve “progress” through the pursuit of “development” is, of course, a complicated idea. I find it useful to think of development not as a process of change that is destined to transform all societies and promote human well-being, but as a powerful idea and a practice.

Let me make two points about the Naga conflict. First, the Sixth Schedule may have been intended for the Nagas, but it couldn’t be applied to them. While the Constitution-makers designed those provisions with the Hill Tribes of undivided Assam in mind, among whom the Nagas were certainly the most prominent, the outbreak of the Naga rebellion made it impossible to apply them to the Naga areas. In the troubled conditions of the 1950s, there was no way that Indian state authorities could have conducted elections to a District Council for what was then the Naga Hills District of Assam. By 1946 the Naga National Council was already promoting a very different vision of the Naga future following decolonization. Only when the state of Nagaland was created in 1963, Article 371-A was inserted into the Constitution of India to extend Sixth Schedule-like special laws to that area. Second, there is an aspect of the Naga conflict that relates to something I said earlier. The territorial imaginary of the Naga homeland that animates Naga nationalism spans across the different spaces of governance of the imperial frontier: areas under direct rule as well as areas under various forms of indirect rule, and un-administered areas. Is it accidental that the idea of integrating the Naga inhabited areas has emerged as the most formidable obstacle to ending this conflict?

RT: This discussion resonates with your argument that we need to interrogate the term “development” instead of accepting it on face value. You show in your book that the continuation of the assumption that tribal societies are egalitarian—   which can again be attributed to British colonial views—  serves to occlude socio-economic stratification in such societies in the present Northeast. Could you elaborate on this point?

SB: I brought up the British colonial rulers’ perception of the tribal societies of Northeast India as comparatively egalitarian only to explain why they considered them to be racially, culturally, and linguistically different from the people living in the rest of India. Their habits and mores did not easily fit with the British colonial idea of India as an essentially hierarchical civilization with caste at its core. Since I have already said quite a bit about new forms of class differentiation that have emerged in some of these societies in postcolonial times (in response to question two) I won’t address them here.

On the question of development, let me simply say that since almost anything in the world from schools and health care centers, to coal mines, tea plantations, oil installations, nuclear plants, luxury hotels or call centers can pass as development, I find Wolfgang Sachs’s characterization of it as “a concept of monumental emptiness” quite instructive.      It is much more rewarding to ask what development does to people in particular places and times.

RT: What would be required to view the societies of Northeast as not being ossified in a colonial vision of primitive egalitarianism while still preserving indigenous rights and sensitivity to newer dynamics of oppression especially of Miya Muslim and the Adivasi communities, ossified as ‘Tea Tribes’ in official discourse?

SB: I have addressed some of these issues earlier.  But let me say something about the two communities that you mention; you are right to draw attention to their particular vulnerabilities.

Even in the late nineteenth century, the indentured workers in Assam’s tea plantations posed a classificatory problem for census officials. When most people in the region were being characterized as members of castes and tribes, what do you do with people who were brought in from elsewhere to do the hard work of clearing natural forests to make room for tea plantations —and thus provide the foundation for the capitalist transformation of Assam? To the 1891 census officials it made sense to classify them simply as laborers —and not as members of this or that tribe or caste. Today no other community in Assam has a better claim to full citizenship rights and compensatory justice than the descendants of tea workers. But with the idea of rightful claims that privileges indigeneity becoming the region’s dominant political idiom, there is little space for them to assert their claims for historical justice except in that language. 

It is not surprising that a new generation of descendants of tea workers describe themselves as Adivasis —the commonly used Indian translation of the term indigenous people. Rejecting the official term Tea Tribes, Adivasi activist and poet Kamal Kumar Tanti asks: “Is there any community in this world named after a commodity?” More recently, he has invited us to reflect on a more fundamental question: “Must one be ‘indigenous’ in order to live with respect in Assam?” 

Ironically, even though not officially recognized as members of Scheduled Tribes, Assam’s Adivasis are the only community in Northeast India that uses the term Adivasi to describe themselves. Most of the region’s officially recognized tribes, i.e., Scheduled Tribes, prefer the English word tribe; they don’t have much use for the Indic word Adivasi, popular among both Indian and foreign scholars of indigenous people’s movements mainly because it translates easily into the UN-sanctioned international term indigenous people.

One example of the Adivasi community’s particular vulnerability in contemporary Northeast India is the plight of those who live in the foothills along the disputed Assam-Nagaland border. They are among the many groups of people settled in those lands that are officially designated as forests. The area is adjacent to many tea plantations. It is not unlikely that the forefathers of many Adivasis living there had settled in what were once vast tracts of public lands after their labor contracts with their recruiters had expired. Since these lands are supposed to be Reserve Forests, few have formal legal titles. But since the Naga conflict is framed exclusively as a bilateral one between Nagas and the Indian government, their interests are not represented in the peace negotiations. They are in too weak a position to defend their land claims against armed men who may eye their lands because of the mineral deposits lying below the surface. A final settlement of the Naga conflict could even lead to their dispossession. That the exploitative labor practices of nineteenth-century plantation capitalism have reverberated across so many generations make the Adivasi community’s struggles for livelihood especially poignant.

I mentioned earlier about the noticeable presence of Miya Muslims in Assamese literary and cultural life. In fact, it is this phenomenon that encouraged me to use Miya Muslims as the name for this community. The Assamese word Miya or Miya Musalman was once used pejoratively. But the radical Miya poetry movement has reappropriated the term. Young activists of this community now prefer this term to traditional alternatives such Bengali-origin Muslims since they or their parents were all born in Assam, or the term Na-Axomiya or neo-Assamese, which has assimilative connotations.

But despite being such an integral part of Assamese life, there is no doubt that the controversies around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act have created an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust between Miya Muslims and the ethnic Assamese. Muslims of eastern Bengali descent have a growing presence all across Northeast India occupying many essential but marginalized economic roles. But they are nearly invisible in the official economic narratives shaped by the discourse of rightful shares and are often seen as false nationals by many. 

RT: You devote Chapter 5 on the movement for independent Assam led by the United Liberation Front of Assam — which was the first secessionist movement by a community from a settled area considered as more or less integrated with the Indian “mainstream.” Why do you adopt the lens of “contentious politics” as opposed to considering this as an insurgency, which is the preferred terminology of the state?

SB: I find the theoretical apparatus of contentious politics to be an analytically productive way to think about Northeast India’s armed conflicts.  Many aspects of the region’s armed conflicts make “insurgency” a term of questionable accuracy. For instance, it has not been unusual for small groups of young people to announce the formation of an organization to represent the interests of their ethnic community and declare complete independence from India as its mission, and armed resistance as its preferred strategy. No one can reasonably claim that such groups pose a strategic threat to the Indian state. Does it really make any sense to call them insurgent groups? 

To be sure, there are armed resistance movements in the region that have mobilized significant levels of support at certain times. But they are very different from say, groups that we associate with guerrilla warfare the focus of the canonical works on counterinsurgency.  Generally, Northeast India’s armed groups have done well when they are able to capitalize on the gaps in the authority of state institutions; and in almost all cases, they maintain ties with mainstream actors, whether in politics, administration, or business.  Moreover, the use of the term insurgency is not without consequences; after all, India’s official discourse of insurgency provides the rationale for retaining the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which in Northeast India is now as old as the Republic. 

I find it more useful to think of the United Liberation Front of Assam or Ulfa not as a group with its own natural history from infancy to adulthood as it were, but as a political entity that was in complex interaction with other political actors and the broader public. It began as a radical fringe of the Assam Movement of 1979-85.  Possibly, Ulfa would not have achieved its prominence had it not been for the Indian government’s ill-considered decision to hold elections to the state Assembly in 1983. The election pitted the coercive capacity and will of Indian state against the popular will in the streets of Assam. Ulfa’s support shot up during the campaign to boycott those elections and the period immediately after that, when the government in power in the state lacked any semblance of legitimacy because of the successful boycott of the 1983 elections, which led to record low turnouts in most parts of Assam. Ulfa flourished during the tenure of the first government of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) from 1986 to 1990, thanks to the protection and patronage it received from senior members of the state government whom Ulfa leaders knew as fellow activists of the Assam Movement. 

RT: Your book ends with a discussion on the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the Northeast. Here again, you show the continuities between colonial and postcolonial policing especially around the notion of the army supporting civil administration in “disturbed areas.”      Yet perhaps in the postcolonial Indian state’s attitude towards Northeast we see an intensification of a need for security interests to override all concerns. How has this “military metaphysics”— that has sometimes meant that the Center has adopted a “pedagogy of violence”— panned out? Has it led to a deepening of the already existing tensions of incorporating Northeast in India?

SB: I borrow the phrase military metaphysics from an American sociologist of another generation C. Wright Mills, best known for his book The Sociological Imagination. The notion allows us to distinguish a military definition of reality from other more complex ways of thinking about the same situation. 

Consider the case of Ulfa in Assam. It became common to describe it as an insurgency only after 1990 when the organization was banned, and Assam was declared a “disturbed area” under AFSPA. The policy space narrowed significantly after that decision and alternative approaches disappeared from consideration. Even the government’s approach to restoring peace came to be shaped by the Indian army’s counterinsurgency doctrine. 

In principle, it would have been possible to choose another path. For instance, it is not impossible for a democratic government to strengthen its criminal justice system and use it to effectively neutralize a politically motivated group of rebels. Letting the criminal justice system deal with politically motivated offenses can produce social learning that is good for democracy. Ulfa has long ceased to be a political force in Assam. Yet even three decades later, Assam remains a disturbed area under AFSPA to this day.

Does all this mean a deepening of tensions between India and its Northeast? Not necessarily so. We, humans, are good at adapting; we get used to things. For example, in some societies, large numbers of armed soldiers on the streets may be a common sight. But visitors from a well-functioning democracy can be scared off by the sight of armed soldiers providing them security. It can hardly be a successful strategy to attract tourists. Yet this may not occur to government officials in the host society because normalization has a way of creeping in. Letting a military metaphysics dominate our approach to Northeast India has harmed the quality of our democracy, and it has led to its steady erosion.

Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York. His previous books include India Against Itself (1999) and Durable Disorder (2005). Baruah serves on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Indian Politics (Sage Publications) and the book series South Asia in Motion from Stanford University Press.

Rishav Kumar Thakur is a doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology at Columbia University, New York. His work grapples with questions of violence, identity and memory in contemporary Assam.    

Prepared with the editorial assistance of Khadija Hussain, who is a senior at Barnard College, studying history.