The official and notional frontier
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: March 26, 2015 -
The Northeast as understood by many observers from mainland India is influenced by the Nation-State’s idea of territorial “frontiers” and “sovereignty”.
While this practice has not been able to portray a wholesome picture of the people and their worldview, there is no perceptible linkage that ties together the regions variegated socio-cultural or even political aspirations.
The production and reproduction of inaccuracies in the absence of context and perspective seem to have been further reinforced by the dominance of information heavily reliant on the military/security apparatus.
The “gaps and silences” over key issues confronting the Northeast seem to suggest that the content of any deliberation on the region is determined by the primary concerns of the Government of India.
The predictable nature of situations in the Northeast, points exactly to how the State and the Public have responded to burning issues.
Besides the dominant ideology of the Nation-State or the local ruling elites, there are also day-to-day experiences of the people.
The pattern of economic growth in the region has been both asymmetrical and imbalanced with trade and commerce activities not necessarily translating into economic well-being.
Here, one should be reminded that there are two ways of understanding the term “Northeast.” The first one is based on “official usage” since British colonialism to post-colonial India.
And the second is the “notional usage” of the same term since the same historical period.
What has been considered as the official usage of the term had its points of departure when David Scott was nominated the Agent to the Governor General, North East Frontier in 1823.
Since the second decade of the nineteenth century, the official usage of “Northeast” gained currency as colonial rule had officially recognised the area as a geographical expression but not necessarily related to areas demarcated cartographically.
In contrast to the official usage, there is the “notional usage”.
The latter includes the imagination of the Northeast as “violence ridden”, “backward” and “tribal” by the public mind and any ruling dispensation at the Centre.
Both the usages have the denotative cartography comprising of the eight states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.
However, there is a need to seriously relook into the over-arching tendency to homogenise areas strictly based on geography.
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