In school classrooms across mainland India, generations of students grew up tracing the perimeter of the nation. Most hands moved with practiced certainty along the jagged crown of Kashmir, curved smoothly along the western coastline, rounded the southern tip of Kanyakumari, and swept back upward through Bengal. Then came the narrow pinch—the fragile, twenty-two-kilometer span known administratively as the Siliguri Corridor, or colloquially as the “Chicken’s Neck.” Beyond that sliver, pencil strokes often turned hesitant. On wall maps and weather broadcasts, that eastern thumb of land was routinely folded into an inset box, shrunken in scale, or cropped out entirely to save printing margins.

For the people who live there, this cartographic omission is neither a technical accident nor a benign design choice. It is a visual manifestation of a deeper estrangement. In her address titled “The map that forgot us,” author and poet Janice Pariat takes this cartographic grievance as a point of departure to interrogate how colonial bureaucracy, state convenience, and linguistic laziness have reduced an astonishingly diverse ecological and human landscape to a single, directional abstraction: the “Northeast.”

The Tyranny of the Cardinal Point

To name a territory purely by its direction is an act of geographic narcissism on the part of the namer. Directions do not exist in a vacuum; they exist only in relation to a vantage point. When a land is designated the “Northeast,” the immediate, unstated question must be: northeast of what?

The answer, inevitably, is New Delhi—or the Gangetic heartland.

Pariat observes that this directional framing permanently anchors the region to the periphery of someone else’s center. It denies the land its own core. Rather than existing as an autonomous geographical and cultural entity bounded by the Eastern Himalayas, the Patkai range, the Brahmaputra and Barak basins, and longstanding historical routes into Southeast Asia, the territory becomes merely an outlying coordinate on a centralized political grid.

This naming convention carries direct lineage from British colonial cartography. The British Raj treated the frontiers of eastern Bengal not as sovereign lands with deep, inter-tribal continuities, but as volatile buffer zones—marchlands that needed pacifying, surveying, and cordoning off to protect commercial investments in tea, timber, and oil. The colonial administration drew inner and outer lines, classifying entire communities through racialized ethnographic catalogs and military gazetteers. The post-colonial Indian state largely inherited this administrative lens, preserving the catch-all moniker for governance, security deployments, and financial subventions.

The Erasure of Plurality

The primary consequence of this directional umbrella is the violent flattening of complexity. The label “Northeast” compresses eight distinct federal states—Meghalaya, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim—into a singular, monolithic category.

Within this expanse exist hundreds of distinct indigenous communities, speaking languages that span Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, and Indo-Aryan roots. A Khasi matrilineal settlement nestled in the cloud forests of Meghalaya shares little in common—linguistically, spiritually, or historically—with an agrarian Vaishnavite community in the riverine plains of Assam, or an Ao village perched atop the ridges of Nagaland.

Yet, in national politics, mainstream cinema, literature, and everyday discourse, this immense mosaic is routinely homogenized. Its residents are spoken of as possessing a generic “Northeastern” culture, eating a generic diet, and playing guitar or singing in choir. When individuals travel outside the region, this homogenization turns malignant: they are frequently treated as foreigners in their own country, confronted with racist slurs, exoticization, or bewildered inquiries about whether they require a visa to enter their own national capital.

Pariat’s critique exposes how the term functions as a bureaucratic shortcut. By allowing an administrative label to stand in for cultural comprehension, society absolves itself of the labor required to learn specific names, listen to distinct oral traditions, and reckon with varied political aspirations.

Cartography as a Political Weapon

In both her essays and her fiction—most notably in novels like Boats on Land and Everything the Light Touches—Pariat returns repeatedly to the philosophy of science, cartography, and cataloging. She contrasts indigenous understandings of the earth with the rigid, utilitarian taxonomies of the Enlightenment and European colonialism.

To colonial explorers, botanists, and surveyors, to map was to conquer. A map laid grid lines across undulating terrain, turning living ancestral soils into private property, state reserves, and border lines. It operated on the premise that space is flat, static, and easily contained within lines drawn on vellum.

Yet, as Pariat demonstrates, the map has always suffered from selective memory. It remembers where the borders of jurisdiction end, where the rubber plantations begin, and where administrative outposts stand. But it systematically forgets sacred groves, memory stones, nomadic trails, shifting river islands (chars), and the oral landmarks that have guided generations without the need for ink.

When modern political cartography crops out the region or relegates it to an appendix, it simply completes what colonial cartography began. It declares that whatever cannot be easily reconciled with the center’s self-image does not truly belong.

Reclaiming the Landscape

What does it mean, then, to resist “the map that forgot us”?

For Pariat, the response is not merely lobbying for better representation on television weather boards or printing larger maps in geography textbooks. Instead, it requires an epistemological shift—a refusal to accept the terms of the label itself.

It requires speaking of specific valleys, specific rivers, and specific clans rather than defaulting to the bureaucratic shorthand. It demands recognizing the region not as a peripheral cul-de-sac of South Asia, but as an energetic, historic crossroads connecting the sub-Himalayan belt with China, Myanmar, and Southeast Asia. Before colonial borders cut through hills and severed riverine arteries, this region was a dynamic corridor of migration, trade, and cultural exchange.

Resisting the label also involves embracing storytelling over cartographic finality. Maps demand hard lines and fixed frontiers; stories, particularly oral traditions, remain porous, shifting, and deeply relational. They can accommodate contradiction, migration, and the fluid movement of people across landscapes that defy rigid borders.

Moving Beyond the Margin

Janice Pariat’s interrogation of the “Northeast” label serves as an invitation to look again at what we consider standard, objective, and neutral. The words we use to describe space are never innocent. When we accept a directional coordinate as an identity, we participate in the erasure of the people who inhabit it.

The map that forgot the region did not do so out of clumsiness; it did so because cartography has always served power. Moving beyond that forgetting means setting aside the broad brush of the “Northeast” and learning to see the region on its own terms: not as an isolated cardinal point clinging to the margins of an empire, but as a plural, living, and self-contained world.

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