Challenges to the Nation-State

India’s North East region has offered many paradoxes for observers over the years, thus emerging as a major field of research. Professor Udayon Misra has been one of the early commentators on the region making some of the pioneering interventions on various contentious issues. His recent book India’s North East: Identity Movements, State and Civil Society is a voluminous compilation of some of these works around ‘India’s North-East Experience’, ‘an experience made up of grave challenges to the nation-state and compelling the latter not only to take note of happenings here but also to expand its own parameters of the nation-state and ideas of nationalism’ (p. 349). The book is divided into four thematic parts, each containing a series of articles around the given theme with an introduction that provides some contemporary perspective to the articles within each section. Most of the articles having been published at different points of time over the last three decades benefit from these updated accounts.