Book review: Jelle J. P. Wouters,ed. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy,Ethnicity & Indigeneity

The book is an elaborate effort to understand the local figuration of vernacular politics in India’s Northeast, and how these figurations are contingent with ethnic articulations, politics of indigeneity and specific manifestation(s) of Indian democracy in the region. In the introduction, delineating the conceptual and theoretical agenda of the volume, editor Wouters emphasizes the significance of historical and contemporary contingencies, particularly the dialectical relation between the Indian centre and Northeast, and how such relationship has produced interwoven vernacularization(s) in the region. This dialectic, its underlying logic and the institutional and discursive modalities it emphasizes articulate different regimes of fixation and flexibility, claims and counterclaims in imagining ethnic identities, community sovereignties, and the language and actual arithmetic of voting.

A 15 authors’ collective of emerging and senior scholars with multidisciplinary background, largely using ethnographic methodology, traverses almost the entire political geography of the region. With rich empirical documentation, they inquire into the articulation of vernacular politics in the realms of the locals. The first two chapters of the volume discuss the potential of traditional vernacular institutions and their conceptualization, entanglement and effects in the shapes of democracy in the region. In the second chapter, Sean Dowdy, through an intimate understanding of Assam’s traditional raijmel (public assembly) and the recent attempt for its revitalization, emphasizes the link between the survival of certain vernacular institutions and their governmental logic in the region. He shows how these traditional institutions structure the dialectics of political subjectivity and popular sovereignty outside the logic of the state, which is why historically they would produce a temporary moment of counter-sovereignties. In the specific context of counter-sovereign claims by the separatist movements in the region, the resurgence of such institutes allows space of proliferation of counter-sovereign polities that complicates or weakens the separatist movements. In the third chapter, Milinda Banerjee argues how pre-colonial polycentric distribution of power has produced plural forms of democracy in Tripura, very different from the Western constitutional or Eurocentric forms of democracy that in its Indian derivative has favoured Western educated caste Hindu elites in most cases.

The next four chapters concentrate on the question of ethno-territorial politics, election and distribution of power within the region. Saba Sharma, focusing on a sixth schedule area of Assam, argues how in this specific ethno-territorial administrative geography, the performative politics of vote mobilization and voting itself becomes a primary mode of expressing citizenship for so-called non-indigenous communities. Focusing upon a very different landscape, Swargajyoti Gohain discusses the emerging creed of monk-politicians in Arunachal Pradesh. While these monk politicians participate in the formal politics to uphold Buddhist traditions, Gohain asks the possibility of their ideological concurrence with the tenets of secular Indian state. Continuing in the theme of election, Joy L.K. Pachuau discusses how unlike the political parties in other parts of India, in Mizoram it is the NGOs and ethnic organizations that have driven the discourse of claims of puritan Mizo identity; the relationship between Mizo nation and the centre; and questions of governance during election times. Thongkholal Haokip discusses the politics of ethnocracy in Manipur and how the majoritarian Meitei community’s ethnocratic imagination in the state furthers the gap between majority and minority communities, and between (communities) of the hills and of the valley.

The next three chapters discuss the cosmopolitics and indigenous sovereignties in the region and the significance of non-human agency within it. Edward Moon-Little discusses how, in the shadow of large-scale transformation of Manipur’s demography through waves of migration from other parts of India, and the violent regime of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the state, the Meitei revivalists are waiting for the return of the Pakhamgba, a serpentine god as the leader to resolve each crisis and unite the society. Likewise, in Nagaland, as Leishipem Khamrang and Jelle J.P. Wouterss show, the long political struggle of blood and sweat, hope and despair of the Naga nation is sustained by prophetic revelations, millenarian thought and belief in otherworldly agency. Michael T. Heneise discusses a self-identifying minority community, in the Indo-Myanmar border region, emerging within the Konyak cosmopolites. In spite of active resistance from within that community, this new community is gaining ground, through the arrival of a ‘stranger king’. By invoking the ‘stranger king’, the new community invokes the institution of Kingship through cosmological alterity, where the new king and kingship line derive its authority precisely from its very foreignness.

The final four chapters discuss the recurrent question of binary identities; increasingly rigid politics of inclusion and exclusion; and the role of the state and emerging infrastructural, resource extractive regime in shaping up this politics. Kaustubh Deka examines the significance of the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the updating of the National Register of Citizenship in Assam, and how these two intertwined events unfold the intricate modalities of political, social and legal in the region. Maranatha G.T. Wahlong and Bengt G. Karlsson, discuss the so-called Lineage Act Amendment Bill of 2018, which proposes that a Khasi woman marrying a non-Khasi will no longer receive rights and privileges as a member of the tribe. Invoking the old vocabulary of silent invasion of outsiders, the bill has actually tried to curb the rights of the Khasi women, as in many instances women had used their ownership of land to block major mining ventures in Meghalaya. Continuing the theme of exclusionary politics, Sajal Nag brings up the almost universalized strategies excluding so-called outsiders and women from representation, recognition and decision-making possibilities in the region. Mabel Gergan discusses how ecotourism and infrastructural growth in Sikkim has produced a new site of engagement for the rural youth to contest grassroots political and generational hegemonies. In the afterword, anthropologist David N. Gellner discusses the location of Northeast India and its difficult, violent terrain of imposing the different versions and understandings of modernity and their incommensurability with the cosmologies and the practices that came before in the region.

With empirically substantiate accounts of differing social and political patterns, the volume has convincingly shown the effects of centralizing tendencies of the Indian state and how they have shaped up the vernacular locals in the region. In this context, the location and the vitality of the local(s) is a very interesting and welcome contribution of the volume. Often overlooked, the vernacular politics of the region, as the volume emphasizes, are not just as a priori existence but consistently shaped up by complex and interwoven trajectories. The recent circulation of the deeply loaded identity marker called the indigenous should be read in the region in this specific context.