THE NORTHEAST LENS: Art Practices from The borderland
– Amrita Gupta Singh

One can say that conventionally for Northeast India, there are two views which Mrinal Miri states: one from the ‘outside’ as a unitary entity; the other from the ‘inside’ with its rich cultural diversity. In the contemporary context, how does this borderland get contextualized in the age of globalization, where the markers of liberalization and the internet make its complex histories (political, social and cultural) accessible to the world? It is only in the 21st century that a greater interest is being taken in the literary and artistic histories of the region, with a shift away from the anthropologic lens. Much of this ignorance has been driven by a ‘geographical determinism’ and an essentialist ‘centre-periphery’ discourse which is also mirrored in its art histories and contemporary visual culture being conspicuous in the academic curriculum of the country.


Originally, the North-East was comprised of undivided Assam and the independent princely states of Manipur and Tripura. The earliest literary evidence of the art of Assam is traced to royal gifts presented to Hiuen Tsang and Harshavardhana by Kumar Bhaskaravarman, the king of Kamrupa.1 The gifts included colored or painted cloth in the pattern of jasmine flowers, carved boxes for painting and brushes.2 In particular, the Ahom Kingdom (1228 – 1826) provided a firm royal patronage of 600 years that shaped its assimilative cultural character and we find murals, traditional sculptures, manuscript painting, and crafts flourishing in this period. In 1826, Assam was handed over to the British East India Company with the Treaty of Yandabo, and became part of the Bengal Presidency. The commercial exploitation and migration policy for trade by the colonizers fractured the interconnectedness of the cultures that existed in the region, particularly between the hills and the plains. In fact, Assam was almost lost to Pakistan in the territorial dissection for Partition and the support of M.K. Gandhi prevented this.


To contextualize the post-colonial cartography of the Northeast, the independent princely states of Manipur and Tripura became part of the Indian Union in 1949, and achieved statehood in 1972. Nagaland was the first to be carved out of the Assam Province in 1963, followed by Meghalaya in 1972. Mizoram became a union territory in 1972 and a state in 1986. Arunachal Pradesh, formerly known as North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) attained union territory status in 1972 before becoming a full-fledged state in 1987. Sikkim was annexed to India in 1975, and became the eighth state of the Northeast in 2002. Barring Sikkim whose annexation was according to the will of its citizens, all the other states have witnessed strategic insurgencies against the ‘Nation’ to greater and lesser degrees. Indeed, the ethno-nationalisms that emerged through the separation of the different federal states from Assam are predicated on them being part of the greater ‘Indo-Burma’ continuum, and embedded in the ‘centre-periphery’ discourse. This political history becomes significant as we can trace the modernisms of the different states emerging through the lens of a chequered landscape, and also the limitations of exposure and infrastructure in relation to the other art centres of the country.


To trace the beginnings of modernity, the Assamese middle class was a product of colonial bureaucracy, English education, the tea industry and also print culture, largely educated in Calcutta and inspired by the Bengal Renaissance. While the first Assamese journal, Orunodoi (1846 – 1880), ushered in the consciousness of modern Assamese literature through the patronage of the American Baptist missionaries, the realm of education in India was transformed dramatically through the western education policies of Thomas Macaulay, which influenced the artistic sphere as well. It must be noted that it was in the woodcut illustrations of Orunodoi that British Academism was introduced. The magazine, Abahan, founded in the 1920s, had articles on both Indian and western art, along with an espousal of aesthetic concepts, enabling awareness about modern art for the first time.