One Hundred Years Of...Wooing the Seven Sisters

The RSS is trying to bring the Northeastern communities into a broader Hindu fold by inventing cultural connections and by reinterpreting historical events through a religious lens

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IN contemporary scholarship, nation-building is widely understood as an ongoing project. Those located on the geographical and socio-cultural margins are often the last to fully identify with the nation. This delay arises partly from the dominant conceptions of the nation itself.

Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava identifies four such conceptions in the Indian context, one of which—ethno-religious nationalism—is particularly relevant here. Its principal advocate is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for whom Indian nationalism is essentially Hindu nationalism, grounded in a deep cultural unity among Hindus across the subcontinent. Followers of religions that originated outside India are expected to live on Hindu terms, while those adhering to indigenous or tribal faiths—described by academic and sociologist G.S. Ghurye as ‘backward Hindus’—are ultimately expected to be absorbed into Hinduism.

Such demands for assimilation are not unique to India; dominant cultural groups across the world seek to incorporate marginalised and minority communities into the mainstream. Yet, the strategies deployed in the Northeast remain less examined. One avenue through which the Sangh has sought to assimilate the region is by deploying historical and cultural narratives.

The Northeast’s trajectory from colonial frontier to postcolonial borderland after 1947 has produced a fraught and contested relationship with the Indian state. The region has witnessed multiple autonomy and ‘independentist’ movements, and postcolonial discourse often casts it as a space of instability and conflict. A central claim behind these movements is that most of these areas were never politically or culturally part of India prior to British annexation. This perception was reinforced by colonial knowledge systems that sought to control these communities.