In the name of the father? Northeast India and problems of national kinship

ABSTRACT

This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah’s book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.

KEYWORDS:

• Sovereignty
• kinship
• resource frontier
• indigeneity and hybrid regimes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This bloody event occurred on 8 June 2018 near Dokmoka town in Karbi Anglong Autonomous District. Two interloping Assamese caste Hindus from Guwahati were murdered by a mob of Karbi and Kachari villagers who had misrecognized them as kidnappers following a rash of rumors about sightings of preternatural ‘child thieves’ (xupadhora in Assamese, phankodong in Karbi). In the weeks following the murders, the entire state of Assam fell into a collective panic. What began as a very local and contextual (if tragic) misunderstanding transformed into bona fide ethnopolitical conflict between tokens of more general sociopolitical types: Assamese vs. Karbi, Castes vs. Tribes, Valley vs. Hills, etc.

2 Stack and Lyall (1908, 23) elaborate on this photograph: ‘During the Burmese wars in the early part of the last century, the [Mikir/Karbi] tribe deserted its settlements in the submontane tract, and fled into the higher hills. Many Assamese are reported to have taken refuge with them during this time, and to have become Mikirs…in North Cachar outsiders are admitted into the tribe and are enrolled as members of one of the kurs [clans], after purification by one of the Bē-kuru kur…. In the group [above]…the short man is evidently a Khasi, while the man to his left appears to be an Assamese.' What are referred to as Bē-Kuru clans here is, in contemporary Karbi lexicography, written as Bîr-Kūlut. The term is actually a totemic one (a fact that is absent from Stack's ethnography). It refers to a particular species of tree that is the totem for the Kro sub-clan of the Terang sib. If a person is to ritually ‘become Karbi,’ then they must pass under a bent branch of this tree over a stream of water for a specified number of times.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean M. Dowdy

Sean M. Dowdy is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and an advanced candidate at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.