Joy L. K. Pachuau – författare

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. Entangled Lives explore them for a large area that has seldom been explored in academic inquiry. The ''Eastern Himalayan Triangle'' includes both uplands and lowlands. The region is the meeting point of three global biodiversity hotspots connecting India and China across Myanmar/Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan. The ''Triangle'' is treated as a multispecies site in which human histories have always been utterly intertwined with plant and animal histories. It foregrounds that history is co-created – it is always interspecies history – but that its contours are locally specific.

The Camera as Witness lifts the veil off the little known world of Mizoram and challenges - through unpublished photographs - core assumptions in the writing of India's national history. The pictures in the book establish the transformation of this society and the many forms of modernity that have emerged in it. It emphasises how 'indigenous people' in Mizoram used cameras to produce distinct modern identities and represent themselves to themselves, consistently contesting outsiders' imaginations of them as isolated, backward and in need of upliftment. The authors demonstrate how mostly amateur photographers used visual images to document a historical trajectory of heady change and continual reinvention, producing distinct modern identities. By virtue of its use of visual sources and its engagement with a wide range of important discourses, this book is relevant for students, historians, social scientists, political activists and general readers looking for a fresh approach to Northeast India.

This collection of essays is an important contribution to the new literature on frontier studies and the historiography of Northeast India. Moving away from an exclusive dependence on colonial ethnographies, the authors build their arguments on a varied range of sources: from buranjis to revenue records, survey maps to explorers' diaries, and missionary papers to police files. They question the givennes of the categories through which the region is usually described, and contest the stereotypes by which the people of the region are primitivized. They explore the historical processes whereby the region was surveyed, mapped, understood, represented, politically governed, economically refigured, and historically constituted during the colonial period. Though focused on the experience of Northeast India, the volume also raises substantive questions about the idea of the frontier and the border, the primitive and the modern, and the tribal and the settled, the local and the trans-local.