Parallelly, the border also exemplifies ambiguity, mobility, vitality, creativity, and restlessness. They are like allegories that can zip up social realities and surprise us at all points of history, such as in this Assam-Mizoram conflict. As anthropologist Anna Tsing would call them, they can be viewed as ‘awkward engagement or cultural friction’. One such friction of the border is the imagination of cultural or political space we see among various nationalities in the Northeast.
The Assamese literati in the early decades of the 20th century were very conscious about the demands of “greater Assam”. Expanding the influence of Assam or its language, Assamese, was taken up actively in places like the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA, present-day Arunachal) by the Assam Sahitya Sabha. The Mizos also demand a larger space to be brought under their imagination of a cultural place for all people who relate to the Zo identity; some of those spaces fall in today’s Burma.
On the…