3 Review(s)

This is the story of the kidnapping of a Delhi-based management consultant by insurgents in the North East of India in the mid-1990s, told from the perspectives of the kidnappee, his wife in Delhi, and the commander of an insurgent group that has him in its captivity. It spans events from the 1960s onwards and takes the reader across India and its North East, with occasional forays into Bangladesh, Myanmar, and British India’s northwestern frontier. The story delves into questions of ethnicity, identity, nationalism and sub-nationalism in the North East, explores their connection with insurgency, and describes the assumptions, compulsions and motivations of the time. In the process, it introduces the India of the twentieth century, and its North East, to twenty-first century Indians.