Eight states guard India’s first oil well and a WWII battlefield
Northeast India—the North Eastern Region—joins eight states at the country’s eastern tip: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim, a council member since 2002. Some 262,184 square kilometres meet 5,182 kilometres of borders with China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.
The region covers nearly 8 percent of India’s land but holds about 4 percent of its people, 45,772,188 in all, linked to the rest of the country only by the narrow Siliguri Corridor. Its languages rank among the most varied anywhere. Digboi in Assam saw India’s first oil well dug in 1865, and petroleum and gas here may equal a fifth of national potential. Two-thirds of the land is hill country, rising from near sea level past 7,000 metres, with Kangchenjunga at 8,586 metres on the Sikkim–Nepal line. Cherrapunji on the Meghalaya plateau receives about 11,777 millimetres of rain a year.
Austroasiatic speakers probably came first, then Tibeto-Burman groups, with Indo-Aryan and Kra–Dai speakers arriving by 500 BCE. The Periplus describes the Sêsatai trading malabathron leaves, and Ptolemy called the land Kirrhadia. Kamarupa spanned most of the area in the first millennium, and the monk Xuanzang visited in the 7th century, noting that its people knew of Sichuan beyond the mountains.
Burma overran the Ahom and Manipur kingdoms early in the 19th century, and the First Anglo-Burmese War handed everything to Britain. Welsh missionaries converted many in Mizoram, Meghalaya and Nagaland. Nagaland became a state in 1963, Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya in 1972, and Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram on 20 February 1987. Journalist Jyoti Prasad Saikia coined the Seven Sisters nickname in January 1972 during a radio talk in Tripura, and the development council formed in 1971 admitted Sikkim in 2002.
Japan attacked Imphal and Kohima in March 1944 to cut Allied supply to China, but William Slim’s troops held out in defensive boxes until relief arrived, a decisive Japanese defeat. China claims Arunachal as South Tibet, and in the 1962 war seized much of the frontier agency before declaring a ceasefire on 21 November.
Source: Northeast India
