The “Indian Face,” India's Northeast, and “The Idea of India”

This article introduces the concept of the “Indian Face” as a discursive and somatic image, or a face-scape, that represents the Indian nation with the aim of rendering legible the existing confusion between Mongoloid phenotypes, preponderant in India's Northeast, and Indian citizenship. We posit that Mongoloid phenotypes have not found a place in the common imaginary of the “Indian Face,” although the latter is itself a highly diversified and inclusive concept. Northeasterners are often nonrecognized and misrecognized, or mirrored back by the wider Indian society as foreigners, hailing from such places as China, Nepal, Thailand, or Japan, and this withholding of “Indianness” works to discriminate against and marginalize them. To theorize this predicament we propose to substitute the logo-map, central to much theorizing of nationalism, with a “physiognomic map,” drawn on the imaginings of what a co-citizen might look like. The nonrecognition, or nonacceptance, of Northeasterners as equal Indians extends, we will show, into the sphere of certain Northeastern vernacular cultural practices, which are deemed “Un-Indian” and subjected to “cultural policing.” Taken together, the “Indian Face” and “cultural policing” work to delineate the physiognomic and cultural boundaries of “Indianness” and hence Indian citizenship.