Papers presented at the Seminar on the Problems of Ethnicity in the North-East India, held in 2006 in New Delhi, organized by Astha Bharati.

Over the last three decades, Tripura, the smallest of North East Indian states surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh, was caught in the vortex of highly patterned militant violence, deadly ethnic conflicts, and planned destruction of thousand year old harmonious and peaceful coexistence of tribal and non-tribal people of the state. Since the day the TNV took to arms, the surfeit of tribal insurgencies in Tripura is marked by brutal civilian massacres, abduction of innocent citizens, ambushes on security forces, large scale extortions and a ruthless ethnic cleansing perpetrated on unarmed non-tribals by the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the All Tripura Tiger Force-two banned underground organizations.The armed insurrections in Tripura at varied levels and colors - often abetted by narrow political interest - were marked not only by serious threat to human life and civilian security, but also by destruction of properties on a colossal scale. The blood spilling xenophobic tribal militancy sough homogenization of the land, and the subsequent fall out also caused wide ethnic fissures between the majority Bengalis and minority indigenous tribal people. One of the important features of the orgy of violent campaigns was that it had taken ominous proportions, with the forces inimical to India coming to play the key role to help and support the underground elements. The book 'The Eyewitness-Tales from Tripura's Ethnic Conflict', creates a matrix of hard facts and figures with personal experiences and stories of witnesses from a cross section of people-common men, police and security officials, administrators, militants, journalists, businessmen, victims of militancy, et al. The book records in cold letters, and with appropriate interpretations, the painful litany of grisly crimes in the name of insurgency and how and why these happened. ILLUSTRATIONS 16 b/w photographs

In Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927, Swarupa Gupta outlines a fresh paradigm moving beyond stereotypical representations of eastern India as a site of ethnic fragmentation. The book traces unities by exploring intersections between (1) cultural constellations; (2) place-making and (3) ethnicity. Centralising place-making, it tells the story of how people made places, mediating caste / religious / linguistic contestations. It offers new meanings of ‘region’ in Eastern Indian and global contexts by showing how an interregional arena comprising Bengal, Assam and Orissa was forged. Using historical tracts, novels, poetry and travelogues, the book argues that commonalities in Eastern India were linked to imaginings of Indian nationhood. The analysis contains interpretive strategies for mediating federalist separatisms and fragmentation in contemporary India.

Contributed articles presented at the Seminar on Ethnic Issues, Secularism, and Conflict Resolution in North-East India held at Shillong during 25-26 April, 2001.

This book looks at conflict zones in the Asia Pacific with a special focus on secessionist groups/movements in the Indian Northeast, Tibet, Chinese Xinjiang, the Burmese borderlands, Kashmir in South Asia, CHT in Bangladesh, South Thailand, and Aceh in Indonesia. These conflict zones are predominantly ethnic minority provinces, which by and large do not share a sense of one-ness with the country that they are currently a part of; most of these insurgencies have had strong linkages with separatist nationalist groups in the region. Methodologically, the author uses extensive fieldwork, interview data, and participant observation from these conflict zones to take a bottom-up approach, giving importance to the voices of ordinary people and/or the residents of these conflict zones whose voices have generally been ignored. Although the book looks at both the historical background and contemporary dimensions of these conflicts, the author focuses on exploring how the role of race, ethnicity and religion in these conflicts can be both direct and indirect. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of conflict and security in contemporary Asia with a background in politics, history, IR, security studies, religion, and sociology.

This book explores the transitions in the adivasi identity as well as in the political representation of adivasi communities in Bangladesh. It traces the use of categories such as “primitive”, “tribe”, and “adivasi” in post-colonial Bangladesh, both in the political discourse and in everyday life. The volume studies the history of these essentialized categories used for indigenous communities within the hierarchies of power and identity. It also analyses the diverse articulations of indigeneity through ethnographic narratives, exploring the formations of newer traditions and identity. The author highlights the persistence of the terms “simple” and “primitive” in contemporary discourses while also sharing examples of complex mediations and appropriation of these categories by adivasi groups in Bangladesh. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, social ethnography, social and cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, exclusion studies, development studies, political sociology, and South Asian studies.

Offering a detailed analysis of post-colonial South Asia, The Politics of Dialogue discusses the creation and impact of borders and the pervasive tension between the new nations. Neither all-out war nor complete peace, this fragile condition makes political leaders and strategists feel claustrophobic - a war produces an end result but peace allows the rulers to carry out their policies for governing along their preferred path of development. The book shows how cartographic, communal and political lines are not only dividing countries, but that they are being replicated within countries, creating new visible and invisible internal frontiers. It argues that, in a situation where geopolitics constrains democracy, the political class becomes incapable of coping with the tension between the inside/outside, eg democracy appears as an internal problem and geopolitics appears as a problem related to the 'outside'.

The Bengal Borderland constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians.

As India and the world are roiled by questions of nationalism and identity, this book journeys into the history of one of the world’s newest and most fascinating regions: Northeast India. Having appeared with the stroke of a pen in 1947, as the British Raj was torn asunder and partitioned into India and Pakistan, this is a region of hills inhabited by myriad tribes. Until colonial rule, they had lived in their ancient ways largely unmolested by their neighbours, who were rather keen to avoid their traditions of head-hunting. Samrat Choudhury chronicles the processes by which these remote hill-tribes, and the diverse other peoples inhabiting the valley of the vast Brahmaputra River below, became parts of the ‘imagined nation’ that is India. Through the invention of the Northeast, he explores two other ideas of India that remain in daily competition: Bharat, the Hindu nationalist conception of the country, and Hindustan, the Persian-origin name by which India is still known as far west as Turkey. Taking a long view, this absorbing political history chronicles the separate pathways by which imperialism, Christianity and the British love of tea brought each of the contemporary region’s constituent states, kicking and screaming, into modern India.

Ethnic Kukis are one of the indigenous Hill tribes of present day India, Myanmar /Burma and Bangladesh inhabiting their territory known as 'ZALENGAM' (land of freedom) who fought the mighty British Empire for consecutive three years (1917-1919), who encroached their territory and later trifurcated Kuki territory into three international boundaries as India, Burma now Myanmar and East Pakistan now Bangladesh. Now this subjugated community is known as CHIN in Myanmar/Burma, MIZO in Mizoram state and KUKI in Northeast India. They are neglected and assimilated in Bangladesh. About 10 Kuki tribes in the state of Manipur are politically subjugated into NAGA polity since late 1960s. Ethnic KARENS are indigenous Hill tribes of Burma now Myanmar and Thailand. They are the most educated ethnic group in the country who are being subjugated and hatred since pre-British Era till date in Myanmar/Burma. Data source from Karen Organizations revealed that they are the most populated ethnic groups in the country which the majority ethnic Bamar authorities never recognized. The author/ researcher elaborates the pitiful political situation of the stated two separate ethnic groups for autonomy and world recognition in their relentless insurgency struggle towards their respective political ambition and a comparative study of the two thereof in this research work/ book.