Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

Nationalism in the Vernacular illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. The book examines this process of vernacularisation at two levels, the first concerns the process of creating a vernacular language to express nationalist ideas and second, the irrepressibility of the oral against state's violent response to the nationalist movement. Drawing from multiple sources, the book through the rich oral narratives, archival materials, including government and media reports shows how Mizos have remained active agents in asserting and claiming their rights to defining ideas of nationalism in their own terms by making it distinctively Mizo.

Contributed articles chiefly with reference to rural development in Northeastern India; includes articles on cultural history of the region.

This book formulates a new pedagogy of death with regard to Northeast India and shows how this pedagogy offers an understanding of alternative knowledge systems and epistemes. In documenting a range of customs and practices pertaining to death, dying and the afterlife among the diverse ethnic communities of Northeast India, the book offers new soteriological, epistemological, sociological and phenomenological perspectives on death. Through an examination of these eschatological practices and their anthropological, theological and cultural moorings, the book aims to reach an understanding of notions of indigeneity with regard to Northeast India. The contributors to this book draw upon a range of subjects— from songs, literary texts, monuments, relics and funerary objects to biographies to folktales to stories of spirit possessions and supernatural encounters. It collates the research of scholars primarily from Northeast India, but also from Eastern India and offers an interdisciplinary analysis of these various belief systems and practices. This book will of interest to those researchers and scholars interested in South Asia in general and Northeast India in particular, and also to those interested in the social anthropology of religion, cultural studies, indigenous studies, folklore studies and Himalayan studies.

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. The book locates the historical experiences and agency of the Naga people and relates these to ordinary villagers’ perceptions, actions, and moral reasoning vis-à-vis both the Naga Movement and the state and its lucrative resources. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics.