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From the mid-19th century onwards, indigenously led conversion movements drew scores of separate tribal (adivāsi) peoples toward Christian faith in all of the eastern mountain frontiers. It is significant that, as a consequence, adivāsi populations in the seven states that now surround Assam Valley are predominantly Christian. Moreover, modern education and literacy in Roman script has not only given them easy cultural access to all of India but to the entire anglophone world. This chapter examines the Nagas, with the hope that this can serve as a representative sample or template for the understanding of other adivāsi tribes. It also briefly summarizes how the Gospel came to other adivāsi peoples.

This chapter shows how the cult transformed against the backdrop of upcoming lineages, such as the early Rajputs, into a symbol of particularity by absorbing other similar deities important to specific lineages. Chapter 5 encapsulates the 6th and 12th centuries, when the political map of India represented a heterogeneous order of entrepreneurial lineages. It untangles the distinctively coloured threads of smaller local figures enmeshed with Durgā in her symbolic form of this cohesive social backdrop. It presents as case studies the stories of six locally popular goddesses who were synthesized with Durgā—Bhīmā, Nana, Kaṇṭeśvarī of the Caulukyas, Māneśvarī of the Mallas, Āśāpurī of the Cāhamānas and Danteśvarī of the Nāgas and Kākatiyas of the Bastar Raj. These aid us in evaluating the intricacies of individual goddess-cults and their continuity through dynastic shifts up to the 12th century. It also recounts other tales of clan-goddesses, in which heroic Śāktism is seen as the theology sanctifying a king, assessing the tropes and motifs whereby this sanctification and its concomitant concepts of power are evoked. First it locates a period and a locus when and where Brahmanical discourse, silent on local goddesses, began to contain such deities and the heterogeneous practices many represented, and assess accordingly the genealogical part of the Sahyādrikhaṇḍa, a Purāṇic work, as an example of this containment. Next, I study the legend of Kāmateśvarī, a story that was employed by the princely state of Cooch-Behar in explaining the divine right of its rulers, assessing this in parallel with Rajput ideologies and narratives, where similar narrative structures and figurative devices centring on the goddess and the king are employed.

This book explores the causes as well as the meaning and significance of political violence in Northeast India, focusing on the formal and informal structures of governance and the democracy deficit in the region. It looks at the life and times of the United Liberation Front of Assam(ULFA), the conflict between the Indian government and the Nagas, as well as the cultural politics that animate the militias of the region, and their relationship to their constituencies and to ‘mainstream’ social and political forces. In addressing the politics of militancy in Northeast India, the book focuses on areas both inside and outside the borders of what is called Assam today. Instead of reinforcing a false separation between ‘insurgency’ and the ‘mainstream’ of social and political life, the book argues that ethnic militias, counter-insurgency operations, state-backed militias, developmentalist practices, and the deformed institutions of democratic governance constitute a coherent whole, known as durable disorder.

Since 1947 when India gained independence from British rule, the government has been engaged in a bloody armed conflict with the leading political organization fighting for Naga independence. In 1963, the Indian government created the state of Nagaland whose territory coincided with what was then the centrally administered Naga Hills Tuensang Area. Despite efforts to end the conflict, the line between the independentist and the integrationist factions in Naga politics have remained blurred. The author looks at the Naga independentist movement in the context of its opposition to federal constructionism of Naga identity. He also discusses the pamphlet Bedrock of Naga Society (2000) in which the state Congress party takes on the independentist argument that the formation of the Nagaland compromised the sovereignty of the Nagas. The chapter also explores the dynamic between the hill peoples and the lowland states in pre-colonial times and focuses on the relation between the Nagas and the Manipuris which presents the greatest challenge to the peace process today.