Talking Frontiers Reeju Ray

In this episode author Janice Pariat discusses questions of truth, time, and ways of seeing. We discuss her latest book Everything the Light Touches published in 2022. It has been in several best settler lists globally, and touched many many people’s hearts . Janice offers so much love, insight, and curiosity with her words and stories. Janice seamlessly weaves in history and orality into her fiction writing. Everything the Light Touches is a historical fiction and bring to readers the multiple and intersectional histories of environment, identity, travel, and the interstices of colonial and indigenous knowledge. Her earlier works, Boats in Land in particular addresses questions of historical sources and historical identity with specific reference to Meghalaya. Listen to us talk about Janice using historical sources as an author of literary fiction, writing characters as a "contradictory bunch of multitudes", geological and non-linear time, and the curiosity that drives her writing process,

In this episode we talk to Dr. Sanghamitra Misra Professor of History at Delhi University. We discuss the possibilities and limitations of research and teaching on north eastern India. In the podcast Dr. Misra highlights the importance historicising colonial tropes and pernicious legacies of primitivism, violence, space, and identity. Her new work focusses on the 18th century and shows how Garo communities are "forged at the anvil of resistance" to the East India Company. She raises a crucial point in this discussion about why so called "hill tribes" were not referred to as peasants in colonial records? Her recent articles and upcoming book elaborate upon the ways through which cotton producing Garo communities were sequestered as hill tribes and their history of agricultural production erased from contemporary memory.
Her first book Making a Borderland : The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India is in its third reprint. The second highly anticipated book is forthcoming. In this podcast our discussion covers old and new research, and a large time period spanning mid 18th century to the formation of the 6th Schedule in the 20th century. We look forward to the second part of this conversation once the new book is published.

In this episode of Talking Frontiers we speak with senior journalist and Dean of JSJC Professor Kishalay Bhattacharjee about his new book Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism (Orient Blackswan, 2023). We also get insights into his long career as a journalist working in the North East of India.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Dolly Kikon on contemporary issues that impact inhabitants of borderlands including natural resource extraction, gendered bodies and bordering practices, food sovereignty, and the repatriation of Naga ancestral remains,

We speak with Professor Joy Pachuau and discuss her extensive work on the region variously understood as Eastern Himalayan borderlands, North East frontier of British India, and most recently as the Triangle.
Producers: Siddhartha Pillay and Tushar Singh, Radio JSJC .