The idea of the Northeast is intriguing. It indicates a direction therefore should have remained as an adjectival clause – “north-east”. It indeed does to some extent but increasingly the hyphen is dropped for it to become a single word proper noun with many layers of nuanced meanings. Among the many immediate images evoked by the name are of wilderness, exotic customs, pristine landscapes, insurgency, incomprehensible tribal feuds, underdevelopment etc.
The name also conjures up the picture of a composite geography of eight states, including Sikkim after this former Himalayan kingdom became a part of India in 1975. In spirit probably North Bengal/Darjeeling should also be included, as this peripheral extension of West Bengal geographically, culturally and psychologically, shares many affinities with this region.
How did a term signifying a coordinate come to be so intimately associated with the character, and indeed the personality of a region? The question will necessarily invoke a legacy from British colonial rule. If the anchor of this coordinate were to be India’s national capital, the region should have been just east and not north-east, for the place lies directly to the east of New Delhi, virtually along the same latitude. Obviously, the anchor was different when the region first came to be taken cognizance of on the Indian map, which is after Assam’s formal annexation into British India by the Treaty of Yandaboo, 1826, signed with Burma (Ava kingdom), ending a devastating invasion and occupation of Assam by the latter.
After annexation, this new territory was merged into Bengal and remained so till 1874 when Assam was separated and made a separate chief commissioner’s province. Assam then constituted almost the entire Northeast, with the exception of Tripura and Manipur, which were separate principalities. From the then British India capital of Calcutta, Northeast was indeed to the north-east. Early colonial literature on the region were the first to begin using the adjectival clause ‘north-east’ in reference to the region. This includes Alexander Mackenzie’s archival treasure of official documents compiled in his 1884 book, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal.
Geographically, what makes the region unique is that it shares only approximately 2 per cent of its boundary with the country it belongs to, and the remaining 98 per cent with Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal. The immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the region, therefore, is only to be expected. The region has also always been a unique administrative challenge especially for those who wished to bring them into the folds of modern statehood.
Hence, in 1873, a year before Assam was separated from Bengal, the British came up with the idea of the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, introduced to segregate administered revenue plains from unadministered hill tracts inhabited by “wild tribes”, territories which they nonetheless claimed as theirs. This regulation created the contentious ‘Inner Line’ drawn along the foot of the hills which virtually surround Assam’s two major river valleys, Brahmaputra and Barak.
Territories beyond the Inner Line were considered as backward tracts and largely excluded from modern revenue administration that the British introduced. In 1914, some hill tracts in North Assam were marked off as the North-East Frontier Tracts, NEFT. By the Government of India Act of 1919, the NEFT and all other territories beyond the Inner Line were classified as ‘Excluded Areas’ and left out of the newly introduced, partly representative, provincial government. By the Government of India Act 1935, some of the ‘Excluded Areas’ were made ‘Partially Excluded Areas’ and given some representation in the provincial government through nomination by the Governor but not by popular mandate.
The British also came to not consider the Northeast as emotionally, culturally and ethnically part of subcontinental India, and this outlook became pronounced as Indian Independence became imminent. Administrative notes by British civil servants are loud testimonies of this. Olaf Caroe, for instance, wrote a paper The Mongolian Fringe (1940), which referenced the Himalayan region, including areas such as Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Northern Assam, as racially different from “India Proper”, as it was inhabited predominantly by people with Mongolian ethnic affinities.
This outlook is shared by many other important British officers of the time associated with the Northeast. David R. Syiemlieh has reproduced in his book On the Edge of Empire: Four British Plans for North East India, 1941-1947, proposals on the eve of Indian independence by four British officers of the time, Robert N Reid, James P. Mills, Sir Andrew G. Clow and Philip F. Adams, to club the region’s hilly ‘Excluded Areas’ and ‘Partially Excluded Areas’ with the adjacent hill regions of Upper Burma (Myanmar now), and leave them unaffiliated to either India or Burma to remain as a British Crown Colony after India and Burma were granted independence.
If these plans, in particular Reid’s 1941 paper which was the most influential of the four, had been adopted, Imphal was the place considered to be the capital of this Crown Colony. The idea was ultimately abandoned because of objection from other British officers who were of the opinion such a place would be ungovernable. In retrospect, it must be said this was indeed a disaster avoided, considering how complex the ethnic mosaic of even a single state of the Northeast is.
This attitude of seeing the Northeast as alien territory is however not British exclusive. The legacy filtered into Independent India too. No document is a better alibi than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s November 7, 1950 letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In it, Patel is unambiguous about an irredentist suspicion of the Northeast: “The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India. Even Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices,” he wrote.
There is no gainsaying that even today the Northeast remains a challenge to the nation’s capacity to reinvent itself and accommodate the ‘non-mainstream’. The challenge is equally for the myriad ethnicities in the Northeast to reinvent themselves to come to terms with a rights-based constitutional identity within which their smaller individual ethnic identities can find accommodation without contradiction. This story is also very much one of a painful postcolonial struggle of communities in the region, as much of India at large, to find a dignified reconciliation and union.
This article was first published in The New Indian Express under a different headline. The original can be read HERE
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
