Northeastern View | Is Northeast India in Southeast Asia?

When we imagine “South Asia” or “Southeast Asia” in our heads, we tend to instantly think about lines etched on the map. These regions, therefore, are based on imaginaries of national borders. This is also why we tend to synonymise them not with shared communities of people, but with regional organisations made up of nation-states. In reality, organisations like SAARC and ASEAN exist because South and Southeast Asia exist – not the other way around.

This only means it is perfectly valid to reimagine the contours of these “regions”. By doing so, we not only liberate geography from the shackles of modern geopolitics but also create possibilities to revive a premodern Asia that is perhaps more interconnected than today.

Historical continuities

There is enough scholarship to show that Northeast India is a melting pot of history. But there is sparser work on the region’s ties to “historical Southeast Asia” — a dynamic region that, according to some historians, included the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

Yang Bin, in his seminal book, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan, shows that the multi-ethnic region in China, which was ultimately fully integrated into the mainland by the Ming and Qing empires, was linked to India’s Northeast through at least two mobility routes that were part of the larger Southwestern Silk Road.

These routes, which ferried a wide variety of goods, from silk to Buddhism, emerged from Yunnan and entered Burma before forking into India’s Northeast through the Chindwin River in the north and across the Arakan Mountains in the south. Yang concedes that we know very little of these routes (especially the northern one) because locals left no documents. Yet, the sociocultural implications of these inconspicuous north-south connections are all too clear today.

Sukhapha (Siu-Ka-Pha), the founder of the Brahmaputra Valley-based Ahom Dynasty, came from Mong Mao – a Tai (Dai) state in what is today’s Yunnan province. Some historians, like Chen Ruxing, even claim that the Dai-centric Dianyue Kingdom was based in Kamarupa, the ancient name for Assam.

Several major highland tribes in the Northeast, such as the Nagas and Mizos, trace their origins to historical Southeast Asia (including the broader Yunnanese sphere). In fact, some Naga historians, such as M Horam and RR Shimray, suggest that the tribe may have roots in the tropical islands of southern Southeast Asia.

Contemporary congruences

History tells us a romantic fable of a Northeast India-Southeast Asia affair. But history should not be overstated. The past, at best, can be a signpost for alternative futures. Two moot questions arise in the contemporary context: one, can we still frame Northeast India as part of Southeast Asia? Two, if yes, then to what end?

Sometime in the early years of the last decade, at least four separatist armed groups from the Northeast who had bases in northwest Myanmar’s Sagaing Region bordering India got together to raise a strategic coalition. It had a provocative name: United Liberation Front of Western South East Asia (ULFWSEA).

Here was a motley group of Northeast Indian rebel groups claiming to represent a larger region by subverting a colonial border. It was a bit like the Islamic State tearing down, physically and symbolically, the colonial-era Sykes-Picot line between Syria and Iraq in 2014.

Nothing really has come out of the ULFWSEA as yet, but understanding the context behind its peculiar name might have some value. That the ethnic groups they claimed to represent have both historical and contemporary fraternities in Myanmar and further east tells us that such radical political reimaginations of our modern geography are not entirely out of line. The only question, therefore, is who is doing the reimagination – armed separatists, civil societies, asylum groups, or nation-states?

Policy framework?

In 2018, then Chinese Consul General in Kolkata, Ma Zhanwu, said at a public event that Beijing was keen to build a direct railway line between the West Bengal capital and Kunming, the ancient capital city of Yunnan Province. The suggestion might have appeared fanciful but wasn’t entirely baseless.

In 1999, officials and scholars from Myanmar, China, India and Bangladesh met in Kunming to formalise what was known as the ‘Kunming Initiative’. It later became the BCIM Economic Corridor, which after a brief period of rejuvenation in the last decade, is now back in the cold storage.

The Kunming Initiative and the BCIM represented a profound moment of scholarly-cum-policy consensus over the need to restore the ancient connections between Northeast and East India, southwestern China and Western Southeast Asia. Part of this plan was to build (and rebuild) some of the older trade routes, such as the Kunming-Kolkata corridor that once carried the much-desired Yunnanese horses to Bengal.

Sadly, that moment seems to have slipped away now – not least because of resurgent tensions between India and China, the civil war in Myanmar, and ethnic unrest in Manipur. One can even argue that the BIMSTEC, which was embraced as a less contentious alternative to the BCIM, is just a shorter shadow of the BCIM, an audacious project that could have reshaped the entire region’s political geography.

But, Northeast India – with all its colourful transregional historical links and contemporary community relationships across the Patkai range or the Tiau river – still stands as a reminder of a world that could have been. But it isn’t a mere historical artefact, but also something that should continuously encourage the Indian state to think about the possibility of reimagining its easternmost frontier beyond the limiting confines of a bounded “South Asia”.

Angshuman Choudhury is a researcher and writer from Assam and is currently a joint PhD candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. The views expressed are personal