Nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Approaching politics in the vernacular, this book thinks itself afresh into the region's political life.

Jelle P Wouters is a social anthropologist and teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at Royal Thimphu College. He has written on politics, insurgency, capitalism, and identity in Northeast India, and is the author of In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (OUP, 2018).

• Preface and Introduction


• 2: Sean Dowdy: What is a Raij? Translating Counter-Sovereignties in Twenty-First-Century Assam


• 3: Milinda Banerjee: A Non-Eurocentric Genealogy of Indian Democracy: Tripura in History of Political Thought


• 4: Swargajyoti Gohain: Monks and Minority Politics in Arunachal Pradesh


• 5: Joy Pachuau: Ethnic mobilization and the election process: A study of the contours of identity making in Mizoram


• 7: Thongkholal Haokip: Ethnocracy in Deeply Divided Societies: The Dynamics of Ethnopolitics in Manipur


• 8: Edward Moon-Little: Like The Fish Follow The Python: Biomoral Politics Amongst Meitei Revivalists


• 9: Leishipem Khamrang and Jelle J.P Wouters: Prophecy as Politics: Of Chosenness, Covenant and Cosmos in the Naga Struggle for Sovereignty


• 10: Michael Heneise: Konyak cosmopolitics: feasting kings, fasting prophets and the state


• 11: Kaustubh Deka: 'A register and a bill' The contentious making of citizenship in Assam


• 12: Maranatha G.T. Wahlang and Bengt G. Karlsson: The body of the land: Women, ethnicity and alter-politics


• 13: Sajal Nag: Women as/and Outsiders: Subjectification, Exclusion and Depoliticisation in North East India


• 14: Mabel Gergan: Designing Indigeneity: Eco-Tourism, State Benevolence, and 'Entitled' Youth in Dzongu, Sikkim


• Northeast India as a Complex and Compressed Modernity