The eastern Himalayan region has a rich history of culture and politics, making each an inseparable part of the other. This relationship between culture and politics is made evident through activities ranging from the celebration of regional or group specific festivals (usually distinct from Hindu festivals) to strategic ethnic voting. Thus, contemporary politics in the eastern Himalaya is marked by a form of ethnic revivalism that is loaded with political meaning and intention. Apart from the celebration of cultural diversity, ethnic revivalism can also be seen as a form of contention against the dominant hegemony either of the state and/or of another ethnic group (both of which tend to overlap). This is a process that is also facilitated by geographical interconnectedness, history of migration, and fluidity of cultures.

The crux of ethnic politics is the maintenance of effective inter group boundaries in order to ensure the rights, privileges, and grievances of a given group can be distinguished and articulated as unique and specific to that group. However, migration and the lack of recorded historical data have rendered a major portion of the ethnic heritage and history of Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal a modification if not entirely an ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). However, lack of authenticity does not lower the credibility or potency of ethnicity as a political resource. Language, history, myths, dress, and folk lore may become subject to revivalism or revitalisation, but as Horowitz (1977) rightly points out, the attempt to return to culture is not necessary to recapture it in its pristine form as the new histories may contain large components of myth, language may contain foreign terms, and alphabets (Shneiderman and Turin, 2006) and traditions may not be directly authentic. Cultural performance could be an elaborate ‘performatization of practice’ wherein an explicit form of cultural practice is publicly displayed in order to garner the attention of the state or other important institutions (Shneiderman, 2015: 33). Ethnic revivalism in the eastern Himalaya works in exactly this way: it is a conscious process of projection and promotion of a particular ethnic identity, which is complemented by corresponding claims to public goods made within the framework of local and/or regional politics.