The Pen is Mightier than the Dao: People without Writing Writing a Nation: The term Northeast India refers to no more than a geographical location on India’s political map. Unlike other place names it evokes no cultural memory and shared collective history. It is, in a lot of ways, reflective of the entrenched view of the people in the region that has remained stagnant since the first colonial incursion into the region i.e. they are people without writing and thus without any veritable recognizable history and memory. Colonial ethnographic accounts which described the diverse communities dwelling in the hills and the fertile valleys as depressed uncivilized, treacherous, pernicious opiate and wild races was superimposed to generate a dominant image of the people which condemned them as discriminated, underprivileged and backward tribes. The image of the hoary past marked by absence of writing, cultural deprivation and technological backwardness was projected to construct and ...
