Category: Book Review

Monoj Kumar Nath, The Muslim question in Assam and Northeast India, New Delhi: Routledge, 2021

Book Review

Reviewed by Fakhruz Zaman

The book ‘The Muslim Questions in Assam and Northeast India’ by Monoj Kumar Nath provides a comprehensive and historically informed analysis of the political, social, and demographic changes affecting the Muslim community in Assam, especially during the post-independence period. ‘The Muslim Question in Assam and Northeast India’ offers an in-depth exploration of Muslim political identity and the crises of citizenship and cultural identity in the region. The book demonstrates that the Muslim question in Assam arises within a complex and specific political-social environment, closely linked to demographic shifts, illegal migration, political polarisation, and majoritarianism. Nath diligently seeks to understand the Muslim question through the interconnected lenses of history, identity, and citizenship. His work is likely one of the first detailed studies to highlight the politics surrounding the internal divisions between Assamese residents and Muslim migrants from East Bengal in Assam.

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Roluahpuia, Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, andthe Politics of Peace in Northeast India, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2023

Book Review

Reviewed by George Chakma

Isaiah Berlin, one of the finest historians of ideas, on nationalism once wrote: ‘‘There was one movement which dominated much of the nineteenth century in Europe and was so pervasive, so familiar, that it is only by a conscious effort of the imagination that one can conceive a world in which it played no part: It had its partisans and its enemies, its democratic, its, aristocratic, and monarchist wings, it inspired men of action and artists, intellectual elites and the masses…’’ (Berlin, 1968, p. 337). Of course, Berlin was specifically talking about the European condition, but nationalism as a socio-cultural-political phenomenon has taken shape in almost every nook and corner of the world. Berlin’s comments succinctly describe the nature of nationalism and the role it plays in shaping modern polities and identities. The northeastern region of India has been no exception. The winds of modernity have caused (sub?) nationalist groups here as well to ideate their respective poetics and sensibilities of national identity and nationalist politics. The case of Mizo nationalism presents to us as one of the textbook examples of modern invention of a national identity and the playing out of nationalist politics, yet it has not grabbed the attention of many scholars. Roluahpuia’s book ‘‘Nationalism in the vernacular: state, tribes, and the politics of peace in northeast India’’ is a timely intervention that has the potential to become a seminal work.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13285988

Jelle J.P. Wouters (Ed.). Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity. Oxford University Press, India, 2022

Book Review

Reviewed by Tanaya Hazarika

Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity, edited by Jelle J.P. Wouters, is a compilation of essays that attempts to comprehensively explore the complex political landscape of the Northeast region of India. It is an insightful analysis of the complex interplay between politics, democracy, ethnicity, and indigeneity by compiling research from a diverse group of scholars who possess an intimate affinity to the region, either scholastically or by being native to the region. Hence, it provides an understanding of the intricate web of politics in Northeast India.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12748303

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, 2005

Book Review

Reviewed by Monis Ahmad

Giorgio Agamben’s seminal work the State of exception is primarily dealing with the nuances of theorising, when it comes to using/enforcing emergency power provisions by modern constitutional states. To quote Agamben, “the unstoppable progression of what has been called a “global civil war,” the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a government technique threatens to radically alter, and at times have altered the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms”. The state of exception from the outset is a point of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism. In this context the concept of bio-politics borrowed from Michel Foucault to further expatiate on the control of state when it comes to enforcing and controlling law over its citizens deserves a mention.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12781763

John Thomas, Evangelising the Nation: Religion and the
Formation of Naga Political Identity. New Delhi:
Routledge, 2016

Book Review

Reviewed by Sangay Tamang

Within the domain of controversial debate concerning missionary and Naga Nationalism in India, this book presents a new perspective to look historically the relationship between missionary, colonialism and ethnic identity formation among the Nagas of North East India. Tracking history dated back to 17th century Europe, the author attempted to bring a picture of missionary emergence and the role it played in transforming the culture and tradition of Native American.Through extensive archival research and using the missionary metaphor of “city set on the hill”,Thomas tried to locate the birth of American Baptist missionary in the Hills of Nagatoo and the way it mediate the notion of “’civilisation” and “modernity” in North East India. The discussion on conversion towards Christianity among the Nagas has been well presented in this book by articulating the contradiction, confrontation and negotiation of politics between missionary, colonial administration and local institutions. The question likes “what do we want of this man’s new religion?” by an Ao elder (p. 50) present a problematic discourse of missionary’s inconsistency, conflict and its suspicious character within the heterogeneous configuration of Naga society.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12780426

Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012

Book Review

Reviewed by Prashant Narang

In present day India, where we debate rights and access to resources and opportunities through a vocabulary of social justice and also sometimes through citizenship and son-of-soil claims; in “Define and Rule,” Mamdani interrogates the construction of the concept of “native”. He argues that the concept of “nativism” is a political construction of colonial intellectuals during crisis in mid-nineteenth century. Mamdani distinguishes between direct and indirect rule. Initially, the colonial supremacy was direct but post-mutiny in Colonial India, British institutionalized politics of difference which Mamdani calls as “Define and Rule”. This was more indirect by way of managing differences and monopolizing the power to define identities. Mamdani attributes construction of “the native” to the colonial intellectuals at the time of crisis. He identifies Sir Henry Maine as the key intellectual who guides the colonial administrators post-1857 crisis of the British Empire in India. Similar project was undertaken by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje in Dutch East Indies. These colonial historiographers demarcated and carved out the native identity differentiating it from the settler and amongst native based on tribes.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12780275

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Book Review

Reviewed by Jeemut Pratim Das

‘The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia’, published in 2009, marked a renewed focus on the history and people of the Southeast Asian mainland massif of ‘zomia’, a term that Scott borrows from Willem Van Schendel1 to denote the geographical region stretching from the mountain highlands of Vietnam to India’s northeastern regions. This area, he argues, is populated by people characterized by a history of escapism from the expansionist padi wet rice agricultural states of the lowlands over the course of their fluid history, thereby seeking to contest the common assumption of them being left behind in the march of civilizational progress and being reduced to uncivilized barbarians in the process. Scott argues that the art of escaping was a deliberate choice rather than a forced exclusion, where the history of the hills is itself a unique construction of a ‘state effect’ of ‘ingathering’ of populations that seeks to make the peripheries visible and legible in the eyes of the modern state. By extension, this denotes an anarchist and non-state history as the choice came ‘from below’ and was not a state imposition, though the lenses through which the hills are viewed still exist and are defined and reified by (misguided) state practices of ordering the totality of existence within its increasingly well-defined borders.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12783077

Being a tribal man from the North-East: Migration, Morality and Masculinity by Duncan McDuie-Ra

Book Review

By Hoineilhing Sitlhou

Duncan McDuie-Ra is an Australian academician who has done extensive research on the subject of Northeast migrants in New Delhi. He has written numerous articles on Northeast Indian culture and society, all of which are published in reputed journals and are excerpt from his more critically acclaimed book ‘Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail’. The article highlights the intersection between masculinity, ethnicity and migration within national boundaries with particular references to the Northeast frontier of India. For McDuie-Ra the theory that ‘migration cause the production and reproduction of masculine norms’ is relevant to understand the tribals of Northeast India. In Delhi, the concept of masculinity is reshaped in the face of changing gender relations and the status of tribals as a minority ethnic community. The article used the interpretative paradigm of study. He conducted ethnographic field research in Delhi from December 2010 to February 2011 and again in December 2011. The research is also informed by ten years of regular ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast India itself, primarily in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nagaland. The author established rapport, lived and interacted with his respondent in order to understand their everyday experiences and realities. In Delhi, the author lived in a North easterner’s neighbourhood, travelled with tribal migrants around the city and conducted interviews and conversations in the places where tribal migrants live, work and study. Delhi was chosen as the universe of study to understand the problem of tribal migration for three reasons: First, it has the largest community of tribal migrants outside the Northeast region, second, the tribal community in Delhi is more diverse and third, Delhi is the ultimate choice of destination for the tribals either to pursue their education or career.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12779977

Sanjib Baruah, In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.

Book Review

Reviewed by Thongkholal Haokip

The scholarship of Sanjib Baruah on North East India studies is well-known in India and beyond in the last two decades. Many benefitted from his earlier works on various issues of the Northeast – from the politics of subnationalism to citizenship, ethnic conflicts to peace process, territoriality and indigeneity. However, in this latest work under review he mainly draws from the existing studies on India’s Northeast to further explain the prevalent problems together in the region in the last one decade. Baruah introduces the book by explaining the directional name “the northeast”, and its derivate term northeasterner as an expression of “a certain hierarchy and relation of power”, and the attempt by postcolonial Indian state to “turn an imperial frontier space into the national space”. In this process, through the imposition and creation of a special security regime, a situation of democracy deficits emerges in this regime of othering. Within the region, the “other others” responded by trying to identify themselves in certain terms, for example Gorkha, to assert Indian citizenship. Baurah continues the discussion on the colonial origins of indirect rule in the northeast frontier as a mode of governance during the British rule and its continuation in independent India.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788049

Dilip Gogoi, Making of India’s Northeast: Geopolitics of Borderland and Transnational Interactions, Routledge, 2020.

Book Review

Reviewed by Chinggelniang

Making of India’s Northeast: Geopolitics of Borderland and Transnational Interactions by Dilip Gogoi, is an engaging book that explores topics of borderland, sub-state, territories, and geopolitics. The conceptual framework of the research examines state behavior and interstate interactions while drawing largely on theories of international relations. In addition to charting the idea of Northeast India’s sub-state territory, it delves into the region’s complex political and socioeconomic challenges. The first chapter discusses the notion of sub-state and its exclusion from the dominant theories of international relations. Gogoi discusses how he attempts to investigate the same through an intensive study on Northeast India, the region that is often viewed as a geopolitically sensitive and distinctive region of India (p 1). The rationale behind selecting the sub-state region of Northeast India for this study is linked to the post-colonial state-making process, which saw the introduction of a new notion of border and sovereignty (p 4). As a result, it prompted the construction of additional barriers, further dividing several ethnic groups who were on the “margins” of the process. It also led to the introduction of multiple political and socio economic issues in the region.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12747896

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