As students of Liberal Arts, we could choose courses across a wide range of disciplines, including Media and Communication, Political Science, Business, Psychology, English and Cultural Studies, and Economics.
The choices were broad and varied, yet not a single course focused on Northeast India. What we did learn about the region’s complexity, culture, diversity and people, we owed almost entirely to our faculty members from Northeast India, who wove their own examples and experiences into their courses.
Our education about the region came not from the curriculum, but from the individuals who chose to fill its gaps.
The recent death of Manipuri musician Chongtham Vikram Singh in Delhi brings the consequences of that absence into uncomfortable focus.
Singh, a pioneer of Manipur’s rock music scene and a former guitarist with bands including Phoenix, was allegedly beaten to death in South Delhi after he objected to a group of men making noise outside his home.
Seven adults have been arrested and a juvenile apprehended in connection with the case.
The incident has sparked outrage in Manipur and among Northeast communities, as well as renewed concerns about the safety of people from the region in metropolitan India.
The family has not alleged that a racial slur was used or that the assault was racially motivated.
Yet Singh’s death has once again forced a larger question into public view: how well does the rest of India actually know the people and histories of the Northeast?
Apart from classroom discussions, we have also had the opportunity to interact with prominent scholars and public intellectuals from the region, including veteran journalist Patricia Mukhim, author and activist Sanjoy Hazarika, Professor Dolly Kikon and Professor Joy Pachuau, among others, during an international conference on Northeast India.
But the fact that we had to seek these encounters outside the classroom, at a conference rather than through a syllabus, says something about how little formal education accounts for the region.
Perhaps this absence becomes even more striking when we trace it back to where our formal education began. We both grew up with a love for Indian history.
We could go on explaining the Mauryan Empire or confidently trace the Mughal timeline, but if we were asked about the Ahom kingdom, we would have had little to offer beyond silence. This silence is not accidental; it is a failure of formal education.
India’s school curriculum has long treated the history of the Northeast as supplementary — something worth knowing, perhaps, but apparently not essential.
In 2017, NCERT released North East India: People, History and Culture, a supplementary reader dedicated to the region. But therein lies the problem, contained in a single word: supplementary. A history can be published without ever being made compulsory, acknowledged without ever being meaningfully taught.
The question, then, is not whether India lacks information about the Northeast. It is why it has been acceptable for generations to grow up without it. And perhaps more urgently, what happens when the next generation inherits the same silence?
The consequences of this absence extend far beyond the classroom. The distance between the Northeast and the rest of India is not simply geographical; it is also constructed through what we choose to teach, what we choose to ignore and what we allow generations to grow up believing.
Racism and stereotyping do not emerge in isolation. They are often reinforced by ignorance, by an education system that renders an entire region unfamiliar within its own country.
We do not simply ignore the Northeast; we isolate it. We romanticise it as an exotic land of mountains and untouched beauty, stereotype its people based solely on appearance, and reduce a region of immense political, cultural and historical complexity to a handful of images convenient enough for the rest of the country.
The very idea of “mainland India” reinforces this psychological distance, constructing an implicit centre against which the Northeast is imagined as peripheral.
If children were taught from a young age about the histories, cultures, communities and political contributions of Northeast India as an integral part of Indian history, perhaps we would not be so quick to reduce people to their appearance. Perhaps someone from the Northeast would not be casually presumed to be “Chinese” before being recognised as Indian.
The issue here is not merely a lack of information, but what that lack produces: a politics of misrecognition, where communities are repeatedly understood through stereotypes, assumptions and exclusion rather than through the complexity of their histories and lived experiences.
There have been repeated demands from student organisations for greater inclusion of Northeastern history and culture in school curricula.
The Bezbaruah Committee, constituted in 2014 to examine concerns relating to discrimination and safety faced by people from the Northeast, also recognised the importance of greater awareness and representation.
Yet awareness cannot simply mean adding a colourful paragraph about festivals or inserting photographs of traditional clothing into a textbook. That is not recognition; it is decoration.
Meaningful inclusion requires integrating the political, social and historical complexities of the region into the broader understanding of Indian history — not as an appendix or a special chapter to be occasionally visited, but as an integral part of the story itself.
Perhaps, then, we do not even want to ask what India is scared of anymore. We want to ask why it has been so comfortable with this silence. Why have we allowed an entire region to remain unfamiliar to its own country? Have we ever truly tried to understand it?
As students, we want to believe that questioning matters. We are constantly reminded that we live in the world’s largest democracy and that we have the right to question, criticise and participate. Yet if so many people recognise this exclusion, why does so little change?
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The authors are third-year Liberal Arts students at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, majoring in Political Science and Global Governance.
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