08.08.2023“Urban Geopolitics From Northeast India”

India’s Northeastern frontier has long been an epicentre of ethnicity-based identity politics and exclusions. In post-independence India, the region experienced many territorial assertions being made on ethnic grounds. However, with the more recent rise of religious-nationalist politics in India, exclusions based on class and caste have increasingly become entangled with the already-existing divides. This has led to further displacement, anglicization, and ghettoization of the minority (deemed ‘non-native’) communities in urban areas. Frontier cities are critical sites for understanding this new identity politics in the Northeast, where concentrated entanglements of exclusions and bordering become manifest. In this paper, we discuss the entwining of class/caste/religion divides within ‘non-native’ communities and how the spaces they inhabit have become sites of prosecution from the ‘native’ communities.

To reflect on these issues, as well as recent violence in Imphal, Manipur, Jasnea Sarma from PGG was invited as one of the speakers for a talk based on a forthcoming paper titled “Entangled Exclusions in Frontier Cities: The urban geopolitics of northeast India” that she co-authored with Prerona Das and Gaurav Mittal. This was the Asia Research Institute (ARI, NUS) first ever concerted talk on Northeast India, a part of India largely ignored in the institute’s focus on South Asia.

See more information here: https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/20230817-urban-geopolitics/