This book considers three questions about understanding the past. How can we rethink human histories by including animals and plants? How can we overcome nationally territorialised narratives? And how can we balance academic history-writing and indigenous understandings of history? This is a tentative foray into the connections between these questions. Each has, in recent years, been subject to wide-ranging scholarly debate, but rarely in combination – and never for the region that we focus on.

We explore these questions for an area that historians seldom choose as their unit of enquiry. For most it has very low visibility, so they marginalise or ignore it in their accounts about the past. As a result, it appears as a remote expanse without historical dynamism or relevance to wider processes – a space where only trivial, local and derivative events and interactions occur. But grant it a central role and we learn about key moments, dynamic connections and mobile actors that force us to reinterpret and reassess the significance of processes, territorial units and personalities that historians habitually foreground.

The area we are concerned with does not even have an established name. For brevity's sake, we decided to refer to it as the Triangle (short for Eastern Himalayan Triangle). In Chapter 1 we explain its dimensions and our reasons for treating it as a unit – but suffice it here to say that it is a roughly triangular region that is dominated by two mountain ranges, the eastern Himalayas and the Indo-Burma Arc, and the basins formed by the rivers that flow from them. It forms a corridor between the two most populous societies on earth, China and India. At its heart is Northeast India, so another way to describe it is to speak of Northeast India and its surrounding areas. We are especially interested in the uplands of the region, not least because historians have been ‘less fond of mountaineering’ than other researchers.1 Today five states administer the Triangle: India, Myanmar or Burma, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China (Map I.1).

More-than-human histories

We live in a period in which the social sciences are being vigorously reconstructed in response to our rapidly growing awareness of planetary changes.