When things Fall Apart

As a theatre of ethnic conflicts, India’s North East has generated a corpus of studies and policy prescriptions. Yet many of these, informed as they are by brief field visit/administrative posting in different parts of North East India, fail to capture the multilayered nature of conflicts among indeterminate ethnic groups in the region. The book under review is an exception as it is based on extensive ethnographic fieldworks in four districts of the Bodoland Territorial Administration District (BTAD) in western and northern Assam, viz., Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa, and Udalguri (p. 14).