Sangh in the Northeast

In contemporary scholarship, nation-building is widely understood as an ongoing project. Those located on the geographical and socio-cultural margins are often the last to fully identify with the nation. This delay arises partly from the dominant conceptions of the nation itself.

Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava identifies four such conceptions in the Indian context, one of which—ethno-religious nationalism—is particularly relevant here. Its principal advocate is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for whom Indian nationalism is essentially Hindu nationalism, grounded in a deep cultural unity among Hindus across the subcontinent. Followers of religions that originated outside India are expected to live on Hindu terms, while those adhering to indigenous or tribal faiths—described by the ‘father of Indian sociology’ G.S. Ghurye as ‘backward Hindus’—are ultimately expected to be absorbed into Hinduism. Such demands for assimilation are not unique to India; dominant cultural groups across the world seek to incorporate marginalised and minority communities into the mainstream. Yet, the strategies deployed in the Northeast remain less examined. One avenue through which the Sangh has sought to assimilate the region is by deploying historical and cultural narratives.  

The Northeast’s trajectory from colonial frontier to postcolonial borderland after 1947 has produced a fraught and contested relationship with the Indian state. The region has witnessed multiple autonomy and ‘independentist’ movements, and postcolonial discourse often casts it as a space of instability and conflict. A central claim behind these movements is that most of these areas were never politically or culturally part of India prior to British annexation. This perception was reinforced by colonial knowledge systems that sought to control these communities. 

British administrators distinguished the hill peoples from the Assamese valley and from ‘mainstream’ Indian society on the basis of race, culture and social organisation. These distinctions were institutionalised through exclusionary policies, such as the Inner Line Regulation of 1873 and the classification of Tribal, Excluded, and Partially Excluded Areas in the 1935 Government of India Act. In the early twentieth century, these colonial distinctions were appropriated in divergent ways. Assamese elites asserted their distinct cultural identity by emphasising Assamese ties with North Indian Aryan languages and distancing themselves from dominant Bengalis and non-Aryan tribal groups.

Simultaneously, various tribal communities reworked colonial categories to articulate their own distinctiveness. The Nagas, for example, asserted their national difference in racial, cultural and lifestyle terms, famously petitioning the Simon Commission to ‘leave them alone’ and separate them from Assam. The adoption of Christianity by the Nagas and other hill tribes also became a means of marking a difference from Hinduism and Islam, the two dominant religions of the subcontinent. Many of these colonial legacies, and the practices they engendered, persisted into the postcolonial era.

It is within this framework that the RSS intervenes. The Sangh seeks to situate the history of the region within a pre-colonial civilisational narrative, thereby facilitating the assimilation of these communities into a broader Hindu cultural fold. The idea of Akhand Bharat, extending across South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayan regions, provides the ideological frame. Sangh ideologues reject the notion of the Northeast as a separate cultural entity, instead portraying it as a central source of cultural influence. The presence of Indian cultural elements across Southeast Asia is invoked to suggest that the region was never peripheral, but rather a vital bridge between the subcontinent and its eastern neighbours.

According to this view, colonialism and Christian missionaries disrupted the ancient cultural connection between the Northeast and the rest of the nation. By embracing Christianity, the tribes are seen as having lost their cultural roots, which must now be restored. This restoration of cultural connections unfolds in two main ways. First, by reemphasising or even inventing cultural connections, and second, by reinterpreting historical events through a religious lens. The cultural diversity of the Northeast provides fertile ground for both.

Since colonial times, the divide between hills and valleys has been central to ethnic relations. The valleys—particularly the plains of Assam and central Manipur—were home to state-oriented societies shaped by scriptural Hindu traditions, whereas most hill regions were marked by non-state, tribal, and non-scriptural religious practices. These hill societies entered modern political frameworks largely under colonial rule, which also coincided with the spread of Christianity. Certain areas, such as western Arunachal Pradesh and the Chittagong Hills, also witnessed the presence of Buddhism. In the Sangh’s telling, Hindu and Buddhist traditions and practices serve as evidence of ancient cultural ties that need to be reemphasised. Tribal practices are incorporated through epic and mythical narratives. For instance, the story of Lord Krishna’s marriage to Rukmini, portrayed as a tribal princess from Arunachal Pradesh, is deployed to signify the civilisational connection between the western and eastern parts of the country. Yet, as Arkotong Longkumer observes in The Greater India Experiment, this version of the Krishna-Rukmini narrative is a relatively recent construction.

The second mode of intervention lies in the reinterpretation of historical events. Here, the Sangh emphasises shared struggles and collective resistance, aligning regional histories with a broader Hindu nationalist narrative. A prominent example is the 1671 Battle of Saraighat between the Ahoms and the Mughals. In Sangh accounts, this battle, led by Lachit Borphukan, is reframed not as a localised conflict but as part of a larger Hindu resistance against Mughal rule, paralleling the struggles of Rana Pratap in Rajasthan and Shivaji in Maharashtra. In this reading, disparate conflicts are woven into a single story of collective Hindu resistance against the Mughals. However, historians point out that Saraighat was not a religious war between Hindus and Muslims but the culmination of centuries of contestation between Bengal and Kamrup/Assam over control of strategic trade routes and natural resources. The Sangh’s reframing thus exemplifies how historical memory is restructured to consolidate a homogenising narrative of cultural unity.

In the context of Northeast India, such narratives are often framed as efforts to recover ‘lost’ cultural connections and to re-establish a sense of shared belonging. Although presented as progressive inclusion, the process of cultural assimilation simultaneously conceals structural inequalities and upholds dominant hierarchies under the guise of unity. The cultural codes of the mainstream tend to set the terms of belonging, meaning that what appears as the unification of diverse cultural communities will, in fact, marginalise tribal practices and identities. In this way, assimilation not only narrows the space for constitutionally covered cultural difference but also reinforces asymmetrical power relations within the broader cultural discourse.

Note: This article was originally written for Outlook India and published online on Oct 14, 2025. You can read the original version here.