''NORTH EAST'': A COMIC MISNOMER!

The phrase 'North-East India' makes a geographically fitting terminology; politically it doesn’t. By the slapdash use of this term one cannot help but be reminded of the by-gone days half a century ago when all the South-Indians in the country were preposterously clubbed as Madrasis!

The cultural and social awakening in the country has been rather ethnocentric I reckon. The horizon of consciousness of cultures and peoples has been narrow and confined to one’s own social well if I may! This is more so in terms of the outlook of the people at large, with exceptions I readily admit, from mainland India towards traditions and cultures of the ‘strange looking’ people living in the northeastern part of the country.

Anyway without getting emotional and going too deep into the way our “consciousness” has matured, let me focus on the point I’m trying to drive home! The term ‘North-east’ is used so liberally and conveniently in every possible context by one and all but without giving much thought to the political and cultural shade of the terminology.

For the record, politically and culturally, North-east India as a naturally fitting coalition does not exist. Very few countrymen are meaningfully aware that the ethos, customs and politics of the region beyond the waters of river Brahmaputra are not one and the same thing!

“Floods have gripped the North East” is a freely used news item flashed very often in the national media. The irony is that certain States in the region have never experienced floods for generations together! Similarly, to many people, North East India means Assam and Assam is North-East India! Well, it may be enlightening to know that Assam herself is a unique State embracing a wide diversity both in space and culture not to talk about the amazingly huge multiplicity of the peoples across the region. Arunachal Pradesh is a State endowed with enticing range of ethnicities that one-time exploration trips do not permit time enough to pick every different social group living within the State. Again, Tripura is entirely unrelated in many ways with any of the neighbouring States for the exception that it is a part of the region by geography. (By the way, very few countrymen are sure about the capital of Tripura!). There are other States like Manipur which has an exclusive and peculiar history of a great Kingdom the traces of which have by and large survived till today. Then you have States like Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Sikkim which are an assortment of inconceivable shades of peoples, traditions, practices and institutions inhabiting an insignificant space on the eastern wings of the Country.

The issue at point is simple but twofold- one, the knowledge about the region and the people living there is rather shallow and superficial; and two, the term ‘North East’ is technically a terminology too simple and erroneously unpalatable to be used to describe a sea of humanity that has an incredibly immense multiplicity of cultures, politics and geography.

The expression 'North-east' is indeed a comic misnomer in that sense of the term!