Abstract
A varied geographical and highly ethnicised area of the Eastern Himalaya, and the Brahmaputra Valley of the Indo-Myanmar frontier has been legitimised as India’s northeastern region. This defined territorial construct was mapped by dominant reference to international borders, boundedness, and geopolitics. Evolving political and economic geography remained paramount and sequential for the spatial and temporal specificities of the idea of the Northeast and its changing trajectories in India’s region-making process. This has largely unheeded its diverse ethno-cultural complexities, sovereign entities, cross-border ethnic-community relations, and various kinds of exchange relations, mainly in the domain of illegality. The homogenised construct of this region has been dominantly a state project from the colonial to early post-colonial to the neoliberal periods that persistently faced various contesting voices and subsequent conflicts and violence. This chapter takes the new developmental construct of the Indian state since 2014–2015 that re-validates the idea of the northeastern region as a geographical unit and entails a critical approach to revisit such a new approach of the state and its propensity to developmental construct against a contesting and conflictual reality of this region. It problematises such determinism, which is not grounded in the complex social predicament. It tends to make this regional labelling highly fragile and unsustainable in the scholarly debates and theoretical frame.
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Bhattacharya, R. (2024). The Idea of Northeast India: Contesting the Construct. In: Chakrabarti, A., Chakraborty, G., Chakraborty, A.S. (eds) Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 18. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1436-0_2
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