Between celebration and humiliation: The exhausting existence of Indians from the North East

Two events that unfolded within days of each other tell a story that India has long preferred not to hear. At the BAFTA awards in London on Sunday, filmmaker Lakshmipriya Devi accepted the prize for Best Children’s and Family Film for her coming-of-age film Boong.

In that moment of triumph, she turned the spotlight not towards herself but towards her burning home state of Manipur and offered prayers for peace. India celebrated.

But back in India a few days before, three young women from Arunachal Pradesh in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar had been subjected to racial slurs, humiliation and public intimidation by their neighbours. A video of Friday’s incident circulated widely: a couple confronting the women, demanding to know who they are, what they do and accusing them of working in a massage parlour.

These events are not unrelated. Lakshmipriya Devi’s recognition was real and deserved, but it was also conditional. She was welcomed into the national conversation through cinema, through something mainland India could consume and applaud.

The three women in Malviya Nagar had no such entry ticket. They were young, preparing for the civil exams, they lived in rented accommodation, they existed in the city without the shield of fame or achievement. The city met them with its assumption women from North East India living in South Delhi must work in a massage parlour.

The people who confronted the women seemed to suggest that they were simply stating a fact.

The treatment that individuals from the North East face outside the region is often called “discrimination” or “prejudice”. But these words suggest that the problem is the consequence of individual attitudes. It presumes that such ignorance about the region will one day be corrected by education.

But the Malviya Nagar incident reflected something deeper. It was the result of the combined weight of race, gender, and caste – as forces that work together to push certain people to the edges of society.

Over the decades, Indians from the North East have been treated as lesser citizens, with a foreign quality that is acceptable to mock. The racial slurs now recognised as illegal capture this phenomenon precisely: they reduce a person to a single physical feature and say, this is all you are.

In the Malviya Nagar incident, gender and race were fused. The massage parlour slur that follows women from the North East across the country is not simply a racial insult: it implies that these women fall outside the idea of respectability, a category that society reserves for upper-caste, Hindu women who conform to norms of domesticity, modesty and a visible family structure.

Caste enters this picture not always visibly, but structurally. Indian society has long placed certain groups as being outside the circle of social protection. Women from the North East, alongside Dalit women, Muslim women, and migrant women, are frequently assigned such a position.

In Hyderabad, when I walk into restaurants, apartment complexes, malls, museums I am met with a particular line of questioning. Where are you from? Do you work at a restaurant? Are you a waiter? It sounds casual, but there is nothing neutral about it. It is the city trying to decide who I am based on my appearance – to put me in my place.

Living with such categorisation is exhausting. It requires constant self-assertion, insisting on one’s own complexities and of refusing the small boxes that others try to fit you into.

What happened in Malviya Nagar was extreme but it was not unusual. It was an escalation of attitudes that are ordinary.

We cannot celebrate Lakshmipriya Devi’s prayer for Manipur without considering the three young women being humiliated on a Delhi street. Belonging cannot be afforded only to those who win international awards. It has to exist on the streets and in neighbourhoods across India.

The accusation faced by the three women from Arunachal – you work in a massage parlour – is as political as any speech from a podium. It tells us plainly who India thinks belongs to the country – and who it does not.

We are all, in our own ways, asking to be seen as we are, not as what this country has decided to make of us.

Prithiraj Borah is an assistant professor of sociology in the department of law at NALSAR, University of Law, Hyderabad. His email address is prithiraj.borah@nalsar.ac.in.