Insider Outsider

A compelling and untold bunch of short non-fiction, essays and poems that address the issues faced by the North-Eastern states of India. The North-East is a complex mosaic of multiple ethnicities, languages, religions and tribes. Apart from the groups that lay claim to indigeneity, there are minorities here from communities that are majorities elsewhere in the Indian mainland. These are people who are typically viewed as outsiders in the North-East, though they may have been living there for generations. Theirs is something of a mirror image of the experience of North-Easterners in mainland Indian cities such as Delhi, who have often had to deal with an outsider tag they did not relish, in the capital of a country against which many of the picturesque, remote hills and valleys they called home saw armed insurgencies. These shared twin experiences of being simultaneously insiders and outsiders is the subject of this anthology. There are scholarly essays as well as personal accounts and a few poems. The result is a delightful mix that opens up a window to a part of the world that is still little-known and poorly understood, whose experiences may shed some light on global issues of migration and citizenship as embodied in the lives of ordinary people.