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Language, Ethnicity and Migration in North-Eastern India / Burling, Robbins

Burling, Robbins	Journal Article
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2007.

Summary/Abstract

The peoples of north-eastern India often construct migration stories in an attempt to explain their history and present distribution. These stories assume that language and ethnic (tribal) boundaries coincide, and that they endure through long periods. Ethnic boundaries, however, are widely contested in north-eastern India, and even language boundaries are interpreted in varied ways so as to support particular ethnic and political goals. While people certainly migrate, they rarely do so as coherent tribes, and the present distribution of ethnic groups is better seen as an adjustment to environmental, economic, and political conditions than as the outcome of migrations. In the past, ethnic differences were constructed, and ethnic loyalty invoked, both to justify aggression and to rally defence against aggressors. Ethnicity is still used today, both to assert local differences and in an attempt to forge unity. Ethnic sentiments have contributed to the simmering violence that has punctuated the history of north-eastern India since the end of the colonial period. 1 This paper grows from my long interest in north-eastern India, an interest that goes all the way back to the 1950s when I made my first trip to the Garo Hills. My attitude toward migration theories was formed during innumerable conversations with Garos and other north-easterners, starting with that early trip and continuing later in both north-eastern India and in nearby districts of Bangladesh. For this paper, I am much indebted to my friend and one-time colleague, Ruata Rengsi of the History Department at North-eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya. Among other things, he has done his best to straighten out my understanding of ethnic and linguistic relations among the Mizo-Lakher-Kuki-Chin. I am also much in debt to Bettina Zeisler, Mark Post, and Stuart Blackburn with each of whom I have had extended conversations, some face-to-face but most by e-mail, about the ideas offered here. None of these will agree with all I have said in this paper, so please do not blame them because I am too stubborn to yield to all their arguments.

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