Modern practices in North East India: history, culutre, representation

Table of Contents:

Introduction: frames of region and people: practices of knowledge and representations
Part I : Region, frontier and state
Region formed and imagined: reconsidering temporal, spatial and social context of Kāmarūpa
Conquest and the quotidian: violence and the making of Tripura (1760-1793)
The arteries of empire: routes, people and mobility in colonial Naga Hills (1850-1920s)
Part II : Knowledge, people and representation
Vai phobia to Raj nostalgia: Sahibs, chiefs and commoners in colonial Lushai hills
Text, knowledge and representation: reading gender in Sumi marriage practices
Orality: analysing its politics within the domains of the Mizo narrative
Empire and the making of a narrative: The Ballad of the General and its history as a historical source in colonial Assam
Part III : Writing culture, writing politics
Of people and their stories: writings in English from India's Northeast
Close encounters of the real kind: the avatars of terror in two Assamese short stories
Subdued eloquence: poetics of body movement, time and space.

Through the lens of modern practices, the essays in this volume engage with diverse issues, including state-making practices, knowledge production and its politics, history writing, colonialism, role of capital, institutions, changing locations of orality and modernity, production and reception of texts, performances and literatures, social change and memory, violence and gender relations, along with their wider historical, geographical and ideational mappings. In the process, they illustrate how the specificities of the region can become useful sites to interrogate global phenomena and processes — for instance, in what ways ideas and practices of modernity played an important role in framing the region and its people. Further, the volume underlines the complex ways in which the past came to be imagined, produced and contested in the region.

With its blend of inter-disciplinary approach, analytical models and perspectives, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and general readers interested in North East India and those working on history, frontiers and borderlands, gender, cultural studies and literature.

(https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Practices-in-North-East-India-History-Culture-Representation/Dzuvichu-Baruah/p/book/9781138294257)