Can the borderland speak? Entangled territoriality in the foothills of Northeast India

Abstract

This article is an attempt to understand the fraught territorial contestations in the post-colonial borderlands within Northeast India. Focusing especially on the foothill borderlands located between Assam and the surrounding hill states, this article engages with the northeastern foothills as sites and products of territorial politics and thereby brings out the role played by territoriality in shaping contemporary politics in Northeast India. This work attempts to situate foothills as a historical and contemporary vantage point through which territorial politics in Northeast India could be explored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article captures everyday territorial entanglements with the subnational border in the foothills between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and unpacks how infrastructures of development and conservation become the sites where borderland dwellers articulate and contest their territorial anxieties. Engaging with the emergent politics of ethnic diplomacy in these foothills, this paper brings out and analyses its emergence as an agentive response of the borderland dwellers deployed for navigating this volatile landscape of territoriality in the region.