The northeast frontier of the British Empire framed within a reconceptualized geography of the Himalayan borderlands forms the focus of Indrani Chatterjee's book Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. This book prefigures the transformation of this borderland region into a colonial frontier with an innovative approach and compelling arguments. The thematic concerns raised in the book are of crucial importance for historians and also for sociologists and political thinkers invested in the region. The book attempts to recover lost or forgotten narratives of monastic orders and their social, religious, and political networks spread across the northeast, thereby dislodging the rich and varied histories of this borderland from homogenizing national histories.
Chatterjee's project can be located within the dominant trend in recent historical literature on the northeast, which emphasizes the spatial reconfiguration of the Himalayan borderland region into a colonial frontier. She examines colonial processes of spatial...
