ABSTRACT
The category of ‘vernacular politics’ is often used to highlight a certain kind of exclusivist nativism that is read off as local expressions of politics. Recent interventions by Jelle P. Wouters characterized NE-India's politics as autochthonous and vernacularized local-ethnic democracy and Gunnel Cederlöf's description of ‘flows and frictions in trans-himalayan spaces’ portray life across rigid social boundaries and fluidity of those boundaries. From a social theory perspective, the plurality of such self-descriptions presents incommensurable paradigms of understanding North-East India. A critique of such relativized notions and theories in the context of North-East India poses several questions on the epistemic benchmarks adopted by such frames of description. Certain unmediated spaces of dissonance that proclaim rigidification of categories, boundaries and ecologies of knowledge practices assume politically a discursive role of reproduction of extant anomalies, ambiguities and casuistries involved in formulations of an ontology. Therefore, the task is to deconstruct such formulations. On an asymmetric plane of local and geopolitics, negotiations between certain pre-ontological senses of being a community and the adoption of a language of resistance cum dominance allow for repositioning mediated spaces of understanding, which could be best described as a politics of narrativization that poses a politics of self-distinction authored and co-authored between subjects and the State North-East India. Can we redescribe such politics using Laclau's agnostic critique or Shruti Kapila's violent fraternities? Can biopolitics of this kind be shattered by a new kind of poetics of the self that could be opened to I-Thou relations, as Yasmin Saikia described it eloquently as a ‘place of relations’? The chapter explores such social theoretic descriptions and shall hermeneutically explore their place within the world of the vernacular from the point of view of experiences of social pain and its mitigation.
