About
Critical Northeast emerges from a shared restlessness: the sense that the Northeast is too often spoken of only through clichés and silences. It is either romanticized as an exotic frontier, reduced to a security problem, or ignored altogether in the larger conversations about India and the world. At the same time, our own ways of thinking about the region are not free from parochialism or narrowness. If we are to imagine a different future, we must begin by questioning everything, including ourselves. The platform is an attempt by two friends to think about the region we dearly call home with honesty and care.
This is why we turn to Marx’s call for a “…ruthless criticism of all that exists…”. To us, this means that no idea, institution, or discourse should be immune from critique. To reflect critically is not to dismiss, but to take seriously; not to destroy, but to question what is taken for granted and to imagine alternatives. Critique, for us, is an act of care.
What We Stand For
Critical Northeast is a space of reflection, interrogation, and imagination. It is an attempt by two friends who deeply feel for the region they call home to create a platform where:
- Histories of migration, resistance, and state-making are revisited without nostalgia or selective memory.
- Politics is examined not only as power and policy but also as everyday struggle, aspiration, and survival.
- Culture is read as both a site of creativity and contestation, resisting essentialist frames.
- Ecology is taken seriously, recognizing that questions of land, rivers, forests, and climate are inseparable from the lives, livelihoods, and futures of the people.
- Knowledge is produced collaboratively, drawing from scholarship, journalism, art, and lived experience alike.
Our Objectives
- To cultivate a forum for critical reflection on all issues from the Northeast: political, social, cultural, economic, and ecological.
- To dismantle stereotypes, disrupt silences, and challenge parochialism in all its forms, including our own.
- To bring together an interdisciplinary community of scholars, writers, artists, journalists, and citizens who care for the region.
- To insist that the Northeast is not a periphery but a space that matters- intellectually, politically, and ethically to the world.
- To create an archive of ideas and debates that will stand as testimony to the region’s complexity and vitality.
Our Vision
We do not claim neutrality. Our commitment is to critical thought that unsettles comfort, disturbs easy narratives, and opens up the space for new possibilities. We see Critical Northeast as a living project: never complete, never closed, always in conversation.
In refusing to accept things as they are, we hope to think the Northeast otherwise; not as a problem to be solved or a curiosity to be explained away, but as a site of ideas, struggles, and futures that demand attention.