North-East of India or India’s North-East is essentially an idea of space. It is a hybrid space, with each community that makes up this region having a distinctive history of their own. The structural homology of the hills and the plains presents us with a social world that is both complex and contested. The various complexities and contestations that are witnessed in contemporary North-East are manufactured by various actors with their own agendas. Phenomenons such as insurgency, counter-insurgency, uneven-development, autonomy demands, floods, natural resource extraction, Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA), inter-ethnic conflict, inter-religious violence and festivals, among others, make up the everyday social world in the North-East.

As far as historical accounts allow us, the different communities that are home to the North-East, migrated into the region at some point or the other. Pangsau Pass, located in the Patkai hills, forms one among the many entry points of communities into the North-East. We wish to use Pangsau as a symbolic and historical entity to draw attention to the shared history of critical crossings and human interactions.

The idea for Pangsau is rooted in our collective efforts to understand India’s North-East from diverse perspectives, with the help of individuals from multiple backgrounds. While specific state or issues remain the core focus of research that activists and scholars engage with, thinking of those, in terms of the region, throws questions which have no simple answer. The inability of the national media to report about the region is a truth beyond doubt. Alternative media platforms have either become commercialised, or limits itself to specific questions or parts of the North-East. Pangsau intricately captures the fluidity, hybridity, creolised processes, migration history, cultural, economic and political exchanges, among others, that constitutes the North-East as a region. In its essence, it seeks to recover the life-worlds and multiple experiences of various communities of the region, and archive common and possible universal grounds that make everyday life possible. This blog attempts to implicitly bring out the various concerns and commitments of the region.

We welcome contributions in the form of articles, commentaries, fiction, poems, photographs, essays, videos, cartoons, and memes, among others to reflect on the following questions and beyond:

Is there any difference in everyday life from the colonial to the post-colonial government in the region? What has been the nature of state-making in India’s North-East? How are social boundaries formed, maintained, transgressed and crossed in the region? Will there be a New North-East, concomitant to the invocation of ‘New India’ by Narendra Modi? Who defines indigenous and autochthonous in the North-East? Who envisions and finalises the measurement of North-East’s legitimate history? What is the role of ethnology and anthropology in museumization and governing the people and their land? Why are indigenous models of development bypassed in the development of the region? Are people in the North-East still a ‘known’ category, if so how and why? Is the scholarship that reflects, articulates, and defines the North-East adequate? How does one deal with the egoistic and Mein-Kampf like literature and action that are home to the North-East? Who are the ‘Others’ in the various states of the North-East? What is the nature of relationship and interaction of the ‘great-traditions’, ‘little traditions’, and the syncretic world of beliefs? Are cultural debts that make up broader identities and inter-ethnic agro-cultural-complex such as Assamese, Meitei or Mi-Zo acknowledged with humility? These are some of the questions that stir our collective interest in the region and its specificities.

We look forward to your contribution, and hope that together we can re-think, re-articulate, write, read, discuss and debate about the various issues and life-worlds of India’s North-East and beyond.

Thanking You,

The Pangsau Collective

 

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