SPECIAL CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF NORTH EAST INDIA
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES – BUILDING I
Against State, Against History: Freedom, Resistance, and Statelessness in Upland Northeast India
Jangkhomang Guite
Centre for Historical Studies, JNU
Life on the margins of the state is a dynamic and vibrant world, involving multiple processes of reenactment of life, lifeways and relationships. Surrounded on all sides by states as the sea encircle the peninsula, the Northeast India massif has been, instead of being a wild and isolated fringe, a zone of interstitial frontier, producing infinite numbers of frameworks and constraints that suggest a miniscule world ‘out of time’. Yet a world of meaning and pattern unfold once we take the field, feel their sensibilities, take a passage through the oral chords and codes, and brood over their practices, all in the long view and from a counter-perspective of the margin. The unfolding pattern of the tribal universe was in no way a match to what the dominant civilizational narrative has talked about, let alone what we wrote about them. Thus, the history of Northeast Indian highland, in the long view, registers the history of ‘a deliberate and reactive statelessness’. It informs how the hillmen/human had migrated from the surrounding valley spaces against the state-building projects, which their legends ascribed variously as the ‘great’ – flood, fire, darkness – powerful enemy, bad king, and so on. While they continue to maintain a symbiotic and interdependent relationship with the valley societies, they chose to physical dispersion of their population and settlements, fortressed at the top of hills, connected by repulsive pathways, governed by an independent village polity, and defended by the trained warriors at the morung. They also broadly followed the jhum economy and adopted a pliable social, cultural, ethnic and gender formations. All these practices inform and register a form of resistance inbuilt within the cultural collective, a system I called the counter-cultural collective which manifest at all levels not only to prevent oppressive control at the first place but repulsed effectively when it appears. This condition of society is understood as one of ‘statelessness’ or ‘unstate’, the process involving disowning the state and becoming an egalitarian society, the point at which their oral traditions stand witnessed, and where freedom of individuals is located at the core of their cultural collective.
DATE: April 26, Friday, 2019
TIME: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
VENUE: Room no.324, 3rd Floor, SSS-I, JNU
All Are Invited
