Being a Northeasterner in India is not easy—a shadow of suspicion, that oddballish mistrust, tails each one who ventures west of those river valleys and forested highlands of the tourist brochures. Ask Nido Tania, lynched in Delhi. Or Richard Loitam, bludgeoned to death in Bangalore. There are more and some are lucky to be alive, spared to live the trauma of being unaccepted by their own countrymen for just being someone from a region with faces or food habits that does not agree with the typical Indian trademark. They suffer the humiliation every day, like dying a thousand deaths. The constant “othering” is a grim reminder of the majority’s contempt for a distinctive minority—the “Chinkies”— that often translates into bullying. That also begets a kind of reverse-racism when a member of the majority checks into the minority’s territory where tables turn in the form of numbers. So, any non-native is a Dkhar in Meghalaya or a Haring/Haliang in Arunachal Pradesh. But these are not words minted recently. They existed from long...
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