In A Resurgent Northeast: Narratives of Change, Ashish Kundra offers us not merely a book but a window—partly open, partly misted—into a land that has often been seen through a distorted or distant gaze. The Northeast of India, long relegated to the margins of the national imagination, is here re-centred with earnestness, optimism, and bureaucratic intimacy.Kundra, a seasoned civil servant who has spent the better part of two decades in the region, assembles his narrative like a mosaic—shards of memory, snippets of policy, and anecdotes of struggle and resilience come together to form a vibrant portrait of a region in flux. But unlike the usual government white papers or journalistic dispatches, this work pulses with the personal. Here, lived experience complements official insight.
What emerges is a tale of two Northeasts: one historical and haunted, the other emergent and hopeful. He charts the arc from the days when the region was deliberately kept at arm’s length by Nehruvian policy, to its current position as a theatre of strategic engagement and developmental aspiration. The “mainland-periphery” dichotomy—often the fulcrum of alienation in the Northeast—is both interrogated and gently, sometimes prematurely, set aside in his telling.
The heart of the book lies in its human encounters. Kundra lends his ear to entrepreneurs, farmers, sportspersons, and health workers—each voice bearing testimony to the slow churn of change. These are not romanticised figures draped in exoticism, but agents of transformation grounded in the texture of their terrain. We meet weavers adapting to digital marketplaces, athletes who rise above odds, and students negotiating ambition with rootedness.
His admiration for the resilience of the people is palpable, and rightly so. But the narrative occasionally bears the weight of over-eagerness. At times, Kundra’s desire to project “transformation” flirts with triumphalism. Connectivity, for instance, is positioned as a panacea—roads, bridges, mobile towers, and airports form the arteries of this new Northeast. Yet, readers familiar with the region may question the efficacy of this infrastructural optimism. The map may show new routes, but the terrain still resists easy passage—logistically and emotionally.
Where the book shines is in its treatment of identity. Kundra does not pretend that the Northeast is a monolith; he gestures toward its bewildering diversity and internal frictions. However, the very act of subsuming eight vastly different states under one regional banner—the “Northeast”—remains a tension he does not fully resolve. There are times when the reader yearns for a deeper, more textured treatment of these internal distinctions.
To his credit, Kundra does not sidestep the fault lines. He acknowledges the historical wrongs—the “parallel governance” by underground groups, the frailties of healthcare systems, the corruption embedded in public service delivery. But the acknowledgment is often brief, and the segue into “solutions” swift. The writing, though elegant, sometimes skims when it should dwell.
Notably, the book’s tone mirrors that of a bureaucrat who has seen too much to be naïve, yet retains just enough idealism to believe in the machinery of reform. The prose is lucid, occasionally lyrical, but mostly functional—more administrative memoir than political anthropology. This isn’t a lament; rather, it underscores the book’s genre-defying quality. It sits somewhere between policy reflection and personal essay, between field diary and forward-looking manifesto.
Kundra’s invocation of the “Act East” policy as a pivot for regional transformation is both strategic and symbolic. The shift from “Look East” to “Act East” marks, for him, not just a linguistic evolution but a new moral geography—one in which the Northeast is no longer India’s neglected backyard but its gateway to Asia. And yet, as the recent tragedy in Manipur reminds us, the architecture of change remains fragile, and resurgence is not linear.
The book opens with a nod to Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel speech—a literary flourish that signals Kundra’s ambition to transcend the reportorial. But unlike Márquez’s magical realism, Kundra’s vision is rooted in the pragmatism of policy corridors. What he attempts is no less important: to narrate hope, without completely losing sight of history’s weight.
In the end, A Resurgent Northeast is both a document of hope and a mirror of contradiction. It is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on a region that demands more nuance, more attention, and more truth-telling. Kundra may have chosen to err on the side of optimism—but in a nation starved of good bureaucratic storytelling, that optimism, tempered though it may be, is welcome.
(Anoop Verma is Editor-News, ETGovernment)
