Abstract
The book Everyday State and Development in Northeast India (2025) provides a timely and significant intervention in the study of the state, development and indigenous politics in Northeast India. The book diverges from traditional methodologies by emphasising the experiences and negotiations of the state at the periphery, demonstrating how indigenous communities in Tripura actively interact with it through what the author terms ‘everyday hope and despair’. The book illustrates that the concept of ‘stateness’ is not a static entity but is perpetually constructed through daily interactions between communities and institutions alike.
The work draws on anthropological studies of the state, subaltern studies, development theory and decolonial-indigenous scholarship to examine themes of indigenous agency, governance and development. Methodologically, the author challenges the dominant colonial framing of tribes as anti-state, anti-development or isolated from modernity. Such representations, the book argues, have shaped postcolonial governance through militarisation, securitisation and technocratic models of development. Instead, the author advocates for decolonising and indigenising epistemes. This methodological shift is reflected in ethnographic practices, including conversational methods like ‘sitting around the fire’, indicating reflexivity and closeness between the researcher and the community, transcending rigid practices.
The book juxtaposes Tripura’s indigenous marginalisation with large-scale immigration that made them a demographic minority. In response, indigenous identity formation evolved strategically from Upajati to Borok and KokBorok, linking local struggles with global indigenous movements. This process of ‘negotiated integration’ enabled political mobilisation and constitutional recognition under the Sixth Schedule, culminating in the TIPRALAND movement and the signing of the Tiprasa Accord in 2023.
The book identifies three core issues driving indigenous struggles in Tripura: land, governance and language. It shows how postcolonial land policies, migration and development interventions produced widespread land alienation. Indigenous movements demanded land restoration, political autonomy through the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council, and recognition of KokBorok. Despite official recognition of the language, unresolved politics of language and the dominance of Bengali continue to marginalise KokBorok and constrain its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule.
The study examines how indigenous communities negotiate development in everyday life through interactions around roads, schools, electricity, welfare and elections. Communities use strategies such as electoral boycotts, political alliances and negotiations with officials to improve their livelihoods. The ‘regrouping village scheme’ is seen by the state as a security and modernising effort, but communities see it as a survival strategy that reinforces inequality and marginalisation.
The book further exposes how electoral politics and local patronage influence welfare distribution and political control over development benefits. Also, the author provides a systematic reinterpretation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act from indigenous perspectives, framing Tripura as a caste-based settler colonial state. For indigenous communities, the statutes represent another mechanism of dispossession and demographic threat, intensifying fears of cultural and political erasure.
Overall, the book makes a major contribution to the socio-anthropology of the state, indigenous studies and Northeast scholarship by demonstrating how indigenous communities in Tripura actively negotiate power, development and survival in their everyday lives.
