The Decolonial Gazeand Northeast India: Sociology and theQuestion of Inequalitiesin Knowledge Production

What does it mean to think about decolonial theory and theory from the Global South from a region like Northeast India? Postcolonial practices of sociology in India were directed towards challenging colonial knowledge, simultaneously charting a distinct ‘Indian Sociology’. Exclusion of the Northeast from sociological discourse must be situated within the same power formations that make Western Sociology dominant. I argue that India’s Northeast is best understood as an academic periphery, underscoring the ways peripheries are products of power relations. I tease out its implications in two ways. First, while efforts such as decolonial theory seek to centre theories from the Global South, they fail to undermine the foundations of internal domination and hegemony in postcolonial countries such as India. Second, the unequal and uneven social science landscape produces ‘geographies of knowing’ and ‘geographies of ignorance’ (van Schendel, 2002), in which sociologists and the social science community have normalised ‘ignorance’ about the region.