Sanjib Baruah teaches political science at New York’s Bard College, and is the author of, most recently, In the Name of the Nation: India ...
Sanjib Baruah teaches political science at New York’s Bard College, and is the author of, most recently, In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast, a thematic yet granular historical account of India’s North East frontier. In many ways, In the Name of the Nation is a meditative postscript to Baruah’s earlier works, the most significant of which is perhaps India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality.
Baruah argues that a complex web of migration and resource extraction has shaped the tumultuous politics of the region and its relationship with the rest of India. How do these contestations manifest in Assam’s contemporary politics and political claim-making? How do modern political parties negotiate resource distribution? How does the idea of “indigenity” affect these mediations?
Ahead of the Assembly elections in the state, Scroll.in spoke to Baruah at length about how the past animates Assam’s present and what new political imaginations can help unshackle these memory-driven regimes of belongingness for a more inclusive future.
North East India, you have said in your latest book, is a “perfect example” of a region that is both a settlement and a resource frontier. The “duality”, you argue, is to a large extent the reason why “identity” is the favoured...
