The Long Way Home

Abstract

The salience of home often comes into being in the wake of its loss. The loss of home for me was engendered by a physical departure from the place of my birth as well as the uncertainty of return posed by escalation of ethnic violence in the region. That loss became the impetus for my ethnographic journey engaging with issues of identity, belonging, conflict, and resistance in my home community—the Garo Hills region of Northeast India. In this article, I draw from my autoethnographic journeys to offer a more nuanced and discursively complex understanding of ethnic antagonisms in Northeast India. Challenging dominant security-driven perspectives, my article is foregrounded in the everyday experiences of ordinary citizens in the Northeastern borderlands. Dissolving strict boundaries between ethnography, oral history, testimonials, and storytelling, I open up discursive spaces to explore alternative framing of home and belonging for people located in Northeastern India.

Women of color in academia: Theorizing in the flesh toward decolonial feminist futures.

“…Lütfiye and Kelly's stories demonstrate that should we reject offerings, question, speak up about racism, or even forge relationships with the "wrong" person, we are unwelcomed and academic opportunities are denied and even withdrawn. These everyday forms of colonial violence undermine our struggles for survival and liberation for ourselves and our communities and create suffering (Dutta, 2015), normalize our marginalization, exclusion and exploitation (Dutta et al, 2016), and violate our epistemic rights and knowledges. They create a sense of angst, diverting our energies from our research to surviving and existing in academia.…”

“…Universities as liberal institutions continue to operate as sites of colonial violence (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). Echoing across our diverse anthologies are what Dutta (2015) calls “everyday enactments of violence” that are rooted in coloniality. More specifically, our stories show the ordinariness and the interrelatedness of our experiences of epistemic, intersubjective, and structural violence.…”

Reimagining the Politics of Belonging Through Counterstorytelling: A Decolonial Praxis of Refusal and Desire

“…Now I understand it as the tyranny of relying on origin stories that reduce belonging to a static, essentialized, immutable relationship between people and place; stories that relegate us to perpetual alterity such that we cannot quite belong anywhere. These ways of adjudicating belonging do not account for mass migrations (starting from precolonial times) and forced displacements, including those wrought by British colonial practices of population transfers, violent partitions, settler colonial state violence, and climate change in Northeast India (Chatterjee, 2013;Dutta, 2015Dutta, , 2017Kabeer, 2005).…”

“…Automatically. No one can say anything after that.” (Dutta, 2015). I felt all this that hot summer afternoon when Sengberth called me Bangal.…”

“…As a South Asian woman with deep roots in the Northeastern borderlands of India, both coloniality and decolonial desires are imprinted on my body and the legacies I am a part of. Coloniality fuels the politics of identity and belonging in Northeast India that relegates so many of our communities to perpetual alterity (see Dutta, 2015). The shackles of coloniality and state violence are embedded in the histories of partition/nation-making and nation state borders that surveil our everyday existence in South Asia (e.g., Dutta, Azad, & Hussain, 2022; Murshid, 2016).…”