ABSTRACT
India’s densest concentration of Tibeto-Burman languages is found in its far northeast where an almost disconnected fragment of the country is nearly encircled by Bhutan, Tibet, Myanmar, and Bangladesh (see Map 11.1). By comparison with most Indian states, the seven states of the northeast are small in area and low in population, but even by Indian standards they are very high in linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity. At their centre is Assam, the only state of the seven that is predominantly lowland. A hilly extension to the south is still a part of Assam, but the heart of the state consists of the low valley of the Brahmaputra River. Surrounding Assam are the six ‘hill states,’ an oddly modest way to describe not only the mountainous region that divides India from Myanmar, but even the eastern slope of the Himalayas where the state of Arunachal Pradesh rises all the way up to its border with Tibet.
