Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North-East India

Abstract

The North-East in India is a shorthand for a territory built on violence, commodity extraction and exceptional laws. For years now, the region has nurtured a stygian discontent. However, instead of succumbing to the despair and disapproval of technocrats and security personnel such crises usually evokes, one can find political and analytical sustenance in such turbulent histories. Often in the histories of ‘failed’ states, ‘disturbed’ frontiers and borderlands, one finds cyphers to modern governance. In this sense, the North-East is quite au courant. In this analytically productive sense, the essay will discuss the recent and older trends of historiographies of the North-East. How is the North-East located within South Asian historiography? How does it speak to academic collectives beyond the Indian/South Asian historiography? How does the political discord and potential of the region shape academic engagements? Answers to these questions will provide insight into the production and nature of academic silos or lumps as the North-East simultaneously poses as a political problematic at the heart of Indian democracy and a component of an emergent field of South-Asian, South-East Asian and global scholarship.