Introduction

At a weekly market in a remote, rural district of the Indian state of Meghalaya, a vendor is offering bootleg VCDs of the latest Hindi movies for sale. In addition, she sells disks of movies and music videos in Garo, Assamese, Bengali and other local languages. Movies and music videos are also available for download onto memory cards or for wireless transfer via Bluetooth onto smartphone. In attempting to claim ‘the nation’ for themselves, the former tend to marginalise the latter, if they do not ideologically locate them outside its confines altogether. Among the most excluded are those whom the language of governance refers to as ‘tribal’ communities. In accordance with a rigid understanding of social structure, the erstwhile British colonial administration sought to chart, enumerate and map the South Asian population, an endeavour which involved creating extensive listings and descriptions of the various tribes, cataloguing their ethnographic traits and ranking them in terms of ‘civilisational hierarchy’.