Uddipana Goswami

Curtis Institute of Music · Liberal Arts

The recent post-insurgency years in Assam, one of the eight states of India’s northeastern periphery, are marked by a strong desire for peace, reconciliation and reconstruction. This paper, however, contends that advances in this direction were already being made during the most violent decades of Assam history. It delves into the transformative im...

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA) forms the core of the Indian Government's relationship with the Northeast region. Fifty years after its inception violence in the region is increasing rather than decreasing. While the AFSPA is central to the ways the state relates to citizens in the region and has been a major catalyst for increas...

Stories do not die: they resist oblivion, are resilient, and have many afterlives. One such story is that of Tejimola, a folktale from Assam, about a young girl who resists multiple violent deaths and comes back to life in different forms. This traditional oral narrative of regeneration and rebirth – first frozen in written text in the early 1900s...

This article draws on critical feminist methodologies and approaches to focus on hypermasculinist violence against marginalized populations—specifically women—in the geopolitical peripheries of modern nation-states. It treats Assam, one of the eight states of Northeast India, as a textbook case, lending itself to a gendered study of hierarchical, h...

This book forwards Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally. In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in...

The marginalized women of the militarized, hyper-masculinized periphery take centerstage in this chapter. It questions their elision from public politics and platforms of post-insurgency political reconciliation and reconstruction. Such elision and silencing have happened despite the women’s active participation in ethnic movements and their strong...

This chapter introduces the book’s specific location in Assam, one of India’s eight northeastern states. It also establishes why Assam particularly lends itself to a gendered study of multilayered operations of power in geopolitical peripheries. Nestled between South, East, and Southeast Asia, and part of the Asian ‘arc of instability’, addressing...

Chapter Two begins by introducing why communities in the particular Asian periphery under consideration are in intractable conflict among themselves and with the State. In exploring these horizontal as well as vertical conflicts, it addresses one of the central concerns of this book: the consequence of the violent collisions between disparate natio...

Chapter Three examines the many forms that intractable conflicts take and the different kinds of interconnected violence they inform: sexual and political, intimate and public. By expanding upon the links made in earlier chapters between militarization, hyper-masculinization, and gendered violence in the context of protracted ethno-nationalist conf...

In lieu of a conclusion, the postscript advances the book’s main approach and arguments. It revisits the book’s goal of engendering the post-independence conflictual association of Assam with mainland India to reclaim women’s histories and reconstruct a gendered analysis of Assam’s ethno-nationalist conflicts that are the consequence of this long a...

A reflection on the different forms that violence against women takes in militarized societies like that in Assam in Northeast India. A young girl living with an abusive father is married off to an abusive husband. Like other women living with quotidian violence, she devises coping mechanisms: often the lines between reality and fantasy become blur...

This paper looks at the women of Assam in Northeast India who have been steadily marginalized in post-insurgency politics (when peace treaties have been signed, but conflicts continue). While both armed patriarchies-the state and the anti-state-wage their wars against each other or deliberate upon political power-sharing following ceasefire agreeme...

This paper is a gendered analysis of structures and cultures of violence that characterize both public political and private domestic spaces in Northeast India, one of the most sustained conflict zones in South Asia. It links the violence at home with the political violence generated by the idea of ethnic homelands. While illustrating how domestic...

The current politics of polarization and state-sponsored violence on mainland India is a continuation of the state’s policy approach towards the marginalized communities in its northeastern periphery.

India's new Citizenship (Amendment) Act is not just anti-secular; it poses a threat to the survival of the marginalized indigenous and autochthonous communities of the country's Northeast periphery

Here are thirty tales that come from the seven sister states of Northeast India, tales that have been in circulation orally for generations, but never brought together in this manner. This is a first-time collation that covers the gamut of northeastern culture, vividly imagining the genesis of our world, our ideals, identities and artefacts—telling...