1Edited by Jelle J P Wouters and Tanka B Subba, The Routledge Companion to Northeast India (Routledge, 2022) is an important work on Northeast India. The Companion has 81 entries. Written insightfully, each entry is thematically distinct. The entries cover a range of themes, from questions of history, culture, ethnicity, politics, space, geomorphology, archæology to those of language, religion, nature, agriculture, identity, migration, urbanism and governance. Barring a few exceptions, the entries mainly deal with the colonial and the post-Independence period. The contributors to the Companion are scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, located in different institutions throughout the world. They belong to different generations of scholars. It is to the credit of the editors and the contributors that such a Companion is now available.

2Since the Companion has 81 entries, it would be difficult to discuss the different entries, their specific themes and their analyses. Therefore, the attempt here is mainly to take a broad view of the Companion and to highlight some of the more general features. While each entry has a thematic focus, the Companion itself does not try to arrange the different entries into thematic sections. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order. For example, to just give an idea, the first seven entries that comprise the first 50 pages of the Companion are: (1) Ahom Legacy, (2) Animism, (3) Assam–Bangladesh Border, (4) Biodiversity, (5) Brahmaputra, (6) Buddhist Studies and (7) Christian Medical Missions. In terms of the themes and the way they are addressed from a disciplinary angle, all the entries are different. Regarding the reason for avoiding any thematic classification of the entries in the Companion, the editors point out (Introduction, p14), ‘We could, of course, map and classify the entries, much as the colonial administrators did about this region and its peoples, and thereby created some of the permanent problems for independent India, be that inter-state border conflicts or irrational international borders, the artificial hill-plains binary or the motivated Christian-Hindu binary, the salivating revenue areas of the plains or the tongue-dry mountain areas that evaded revenue collection, and so on. But, for ideological and intellectual reasons, we have refrained from doing that and thereby tried to stop, albeit symbolically, the prolongation of the colonial discourse on the region.’ It is not clear though how far the above is a reasonable justification for alphabetic sequencing of chapters in ascending order.

3Each entry provides a nuanced handling of its theme. Each entry also carries a bibliography that covers both some of the earlier works on the theme and recent works. The bibliographies are put together well and any reader would benefit from them. At the same time, when one steps back from the entries and tries to get an overall view of them, it is also possible to identify a couple of underlying premises that seem to condition the Companion generally. The different entries reflect these underlying premises. One such premise appertains to the categories of analysis through which the region, which is diverse or multiple, is comprehended. For example, if the social realities of the region are to be understood, it would require certain analytical frameworks that are deemed significant or relevant to the region. In this regard, the categories of analysis in the Companion are mainly those of community and the ethnics. These categories of analysis, as we know, have been largely used to study the region, especially since the 1990s. Overall, most of the entries dealing with questions of society, culture, politics, state or even capital have viewed the social realities of the region through these categories of community and the ethnics. Interestingly, one can also contrast this with another kind of category of analysis through which the region has been studied, and was especially deemed significant in some of the earlier works (such as, to take just one example, Amalendu Guha: 1991). Such categories are expressed in terms of social relations, which are mainly forms of class relations, agrarian relations and industrial relations. In the Companion, save for a couple of exceptions, the entries have tended not to view social realities of the region from the vantage point of these categories. Nevertheless, the choice of category of analysis is mainly a matter of approach.

4At a more general level, another underlying premise in the Companion can be seen in the entries which address a given matter from the idea of essence. For example, an entry deals with a given theme. It is not that the element of time is not present in the analysis of the theme. In other words, it is not that date, period or chronologies are not taken into account. Time comes across as an element that is internal to the nature of the essence. Entries dealing with questions of nature, religion, identity or culture have by and large tended to organise the analysis in this manner. When a given matter is viewed in terms of an essence, and time is a factor internal to the nature of the essence, the relationship of the matter with reality or its sense becomes an interesting question. For instance, to take an example, albeit of a general nature, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa (Llosa, 2017), while discussing his own works, points out that time in a novel is mainly a construct. Therefore, in a novel, time can be constructed as multiple. Hence, different characters can be shown to experience reality in multiple forms and levels; or the plot can be on multiple time scales. But this technique is mainly used to demonstrate that this apparent multiplicity is not reality per se. Rather, it is to demonstrate that, while reality is at multiple levels, at given historical junctures certain relationships constitute the multiple into an order of social relations, including that of power. Thus, while time is part of the novel’s structure, in itself that time is not reality. Reality is about those relationships at given historical junctures. Such an understanding also allows Vargas Llosa to overcome the binaries of the essential and the historical.

5In the Introduction, mention is made of the Companion seeking to set the research agenda for (Introduction, p14) ‘the young researchers who will be filling up the research space of Northeast India for the next two to three decades, if not longer.’ The 81 entries in the Companion do indeed cover a broad range of themes that are important and relevant. Nevertheless, setting the research agenda for the future would perhaps also require conceptualising the region in a particular manner that would allow visualising in some way what it means to be a region. From the Introduction, it is not clear what this would be. However, there are entries that provide some important and interesting clues. For example, entries such as ‘Frontier Baptists’ (pp179–184), ‘Foothills’ (pp174–178), or ‘Cultural Citizenship’ (pp98–103), to name just a few, not only shed light on how agents, institutions, beliefs, cultural forms and space can come to exist in given configurations at given historical moments, but also imply a sense of the concerns that it might be important to bear in mind when perceiving the contours of the future. In fact, an interesting and important dimension that seems to emerge from some of these entries is to keep a look out for how both disruptions and configurations engender each other.

6In this regard, a point that these entries seem to indicate is that disruptions and configurations engender each other because they tend to share a dialectical relation. The basis of this dialectical relation is not due to some conscious agency exercised by a given ‘subject’; nor is it due to certain policies. Rather, one would have to begin one’s analysis by considering such a relation as the historical basis, the starting point. For instance, if one has to make sense of reality from the standpoint of the foothills, then what one would find out about the foothills is that ‘the hills are in the plains and the plains are in the hills’ (p177). But if this comprises the reality of the foothills, then it indicates something else too: namely, the categories that the state or researchers work with both heuristically and practically, such as tribe, ethnicity, hills/valleys and so on, would come across as inadequate in themselves. This is because, unlike the manner in which these categories have been conceived or applied, it is in terms of dialectical relations of the different forms or senses of being that reality actually becomes comprehensible. Now if that is the case, then the question would be: can such a framework be a possible model to also foresee the region? This question arises because, while the categories of state or research, as mentioned above, tend to recognise the opposite conditions/contradictions that the categories signify, or even their entanglements, the possibilities or the idea of their dialectical relations are generally not perceived or conceived. As we know, dialectical relations are not about harmonious, syncretic, etc existence of contradictory elements. It is about certain kinds of relations that constitute contradictions in given historical forms. The interesting inference from here would be whether recognising these kinds of relations as real and possible could allow one to conceive of new patterns of such relations and thereby see the region or its future differently.

7What is discussed above leads directly to another question that these entries draw our attention to, namely, vis-à-vis the region: how are we to understand the question of ‘subject’? For instance, if cultural citizenship is a ‘dual process of self-making and being made through negotiations with the state’ (p99), then a basic question that assumes importance is: how is one to conceive the ‘subject’? The ‘process of self-making and being made’ would necessarily entail not only a condition of being but also of becoming. But if both are simultaneous and dynamically engender the other, then it would become difficult to refer to a distinct ‘subject’, something that is already given. In other words, rather than the realisation of a concrete ‘subject’, one can meaningfully refer only to the reality of a condition. The condition is how certain kinds of relations are or become organised, ‘subject’ being at best just a position in these relations. It would also mean that the collective organisation of people as a distinct body would require a form, but the form itself cannot be treated as its own basis. The starting point for comprehending the form would still be relation. As such, forms cannot be treated as pre-given or unchanging. When thus viewed, other pertinent questions arise too. For example, it is noted that ‘The Indo-Myanmar frontier is home to numerous ethnic communities’ (p179). However, it is also noted that ‘In the geopolitically frontier region known as Northeast India, a high percentage of the Christian population contributed to a distinctive socio-political climate.’ (p179). At the same time, ‘In a country where nearly 80 per cent of the citizens identify as Hindus, this region remains a litmus test to the Indian democracy and diversity’ (p179). When these three points are taken together, one is led to recognising a complexity, namely that, while ‘subject’ is more meaningfully comprehensible as a position in types of relations, acknowledging this also has tremendous significance in examining or establishing the efficacy of what it means to be citizen or democracy, not only vis-à-vis the region but also within the region.

8Therefore, there are entries in the Companion that raise fundamental questions, including bearing in mind the future. In this regard, it is not that answers are provided for the questions. Rather, their significance is such that they are like subtexts. As subtexts, they in turn provide opportunities to think of other significant issues. For example, what is the relationship between a branch of knowledge and representation/construction of reality. In terms of institutions, relationships of power and forms of practices, how would one begin to identify agency. How would a researcher write their own reflexive moment vis-à-vis their study with regard to the region. For the reader, perhaps these subtexts are also clues for making sense of the region and for perceiving the contours of its future.

9To conclude, the range of themes that the Companion covers constitutes a commendable achievement. In its very nature, the Companion is inter-disciplinary. To the best of my knowledge, no such Companion presently covers this region. Between the colonial and the post-Independence period, the different entries in the Companion also allow the reader to make sense of the complex ways in which past and present – in writing, memory and practices – are bound and shape the realities of the region. As such, the Companion helps to identify these complexities in order to address and interpret a region like Northeast India.