As I was winding up fieldwork for this book, I met a friend from Nagaland studying for her PhD in Delhi. Julee and I sat on a wonky table in a university cafeteria while she quizzed me about this research. I laid out the story I wanted to tell piece by piece. I sketched the trajectory on the table by moving spilled grains of sugar to show the different parts of the story – a small pile here for what was happening in the Northeast, a small pile there for what was happening in Delhi. Our tea overflowed while the table wobbled and my entire structure slowly trickled into a milky sugary mess. Julee asked, ‘Is this mess the Northeast or Delhi?’ I mumbled some non-committal answer and she said, ‘Make sure it is Delhi: I am tired of people talking about the mess in the Northeast.’

I began this book by suggesting that stories of Northeast migrants enable us to escape some recurring themes in research on the Northeast. It allows us to concentrate on things other than the ‘mess’, so to speak. Yet the mess can't be completely brushed aside. It is essential to understanding why people leave the frontier and to understanding experiences of separatism, territoriality, militarisation, federal statehood, and bureaucratic dysfunction – experiences that shape their attitude to the Indian heartland. However, in telling the story of Northeast migrants I have attempted to highlight elements of what it means to be an ethnic minority from the far eastern frontier in 21st century India. This has also been a story about Delhi and the intricacies of emerging spaces of neoliberal capital in the ‘global city’. New labour markets are linking Delhi to the frontier in ways never before seen. This has also been a story of Northeasterners themselves – why they leave, why they choose Delhi, what they do when they are there, what is done to them while they are there, and how they contend with these challenges. Before concluding, I will provide some thoughts on further research in this and other contexts.

Further Research

What does the story of Northeast migrants tell us about other places? Here I focus on three themes raised by this book that invite further research from scholars of Asian Studies.