Deepak Naorem, Assistant Professor, IIT-Bombay

The Long Second World War in India’s Northeast

Recent scholarship on the history of the Second World War has unsettled and challenged the traditional temporal and spatial frameworks of the war, while also exploring the interconnections between local and global histories of the war. In the case of India’s Northeast region, we can observe a significant historiographical shift away from the traditional military, biographical, and political narratives of the war, bringing forth alternative archives of war, local wartime experience, material and cultural studies, and entanglements with histories of empires, both old and new. At the same time, much of these scholarships either center the twin battles of Imphal and Kohima as the primary locus of historical inquiry and imaginations, or operate within community-based historical silos. This talk seeks to decenter both the twin battles and community-specific histories, in the process of rethinking the writing of histories of the Second World War in the region, and in the process also challenging the established temporal and spatial framework of the war in the region.

Moderator: Ningthoujam Suresh Meitei, PhD Candidate, IIT-Guwahati