ABSTRACT
Dominant representations of Northeast India as a cultural and political periphery of India often fail to appreciate sheer size and diversity of this region. It is over six times the size of Switzerland and roughly one-and-a-half times the surface of Nepal and Bangladesh, its neighbours on the north and south, respectively. The Northeast has become an existing unit through political and administrative conceptions of order and institutionalized discursive spaces, and by enactment of special government institutions such as the North Eastern Council and Ministry of Development of the North-Eastern Region. Yet, present-day Northeast India is often seen through the lens of insulation and remoteness: as a land of marginalized minorities, an economic backwater, the political and cultural fringe of India, a place where India's territorial sovereignty is defended, where raw materials are extracted to fuel its economic growth. Northeast India's natural history and landscape formation, and to which humans and other-than-humans variously adapted, significantly revolved around three overarching natural forces.
