Area Study as Method: Theorizing State in India’s Northeast Region

The questions of disciplinary (scientific) inquiry and theorisation, along with the concern for the congruence of national interests and politics in Area Study, have been debated for quite some time among academics in various places, universities, and research projects. However, it is helpful to think of Area Study as a strategic assemblage and translation of research on a region/area into a reference point for a new form of knowledge and critical inquiry. This study takes the case of the state and society relationship in India’s border region to engage with two mainstream understandings of the state: one that thinks of the state as an aggregate of societies that orient toward it, not outside; another that thinks of the state as an elite project, from which the masses would distance themselves. However, this study argues that in the border region, such as North East India, where both outward and inward social tendencies exist, the nature of the state cannot be understood merely as an aggregate or an elite project. There is a coexistence of two forms of identity in the region: one that transcends the state and the other that seeks recognition within it. To understand this type of cohabitation, one must broaden the geographical and historical scope to include present-day Northeast India and its neighbouring areas. This may allow us to see not merely the region’s historical geography but also how this broader historical geography acts as the constitutive outside of politics of identity within the state of India. In addition, the nature of state intervention in the region also takes into account social and political changes in neighbouring border areas. The outside could be represented as the space of people’s ethnic origins within the state of India, or as a shared historical and political consciousness of belonging to a larger imagined ethnic homeland. Such ethnic settings, hence, imply that the state requires a different treatment as a constitutional and legal entity. Not only does the state shape the region’s politics, but society shapes the state as well.