If there was just the one book you chose to read on India’s magnificent North East, this is the book: Sanjoy Hazarika’s Strangers in the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India’s Northeast (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995). I have only once seen a copy in South India; the copy I bought was purchased at Calcutta airport. Perhaps booksellers down South do not order it as we don’t seem very interested in our own country.
Hazarika is an acclaimed journalist and Strangers in the Mist explains the turmoil of the North East to a reader who is not familiar with the are. Importantly, Hazarika explains and analyses thereasons behind the militancy prevalent in the North East, and one is shocked when one reads of the callous treatment of the North East by successive Central governments. (Did you know that for several years after Independence the North East was ‘looked after’ by the Ministry of External affairs? Did you know that we just walked in and took over once the British left? And that the our treaty with the Nagas expired sometime in the 1960s?)
One of the most fascinating aspects about the book is the documentation of the deliberate attempts to strangle the cultures on the North East, by inviting Bengalis to colonise the land and by attempting to declare Bengali as the official language! And of course there was the Muslim League’s attempts to encourage mass migration from today’s Bangladesh into Assam so that they could claim Assam for Pakistan.
Read this book; and if you only read one book about your country, let this be the book.
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