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Traditionally travel literature has been a genre known for boosting colonial expansionist projects and the construction of the European ‘Other’. Travel writing as an imperialist discourse serving to connect with the ideological apparatus of the European nation-state has been explored in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992). But contemporary travel literature is more subject-oriented, focussing on both the place and the people therein and the politics involved in the formation of their identity. It assumes the form of a cultural critique, called the ‘countertravel’ writing. Countertravel writing, then, aims not to delight the readers in its presentation of the exotic ‘Other’ but rather serves to transport the complacent reader causing the “unmapping” of “mapped” worldviews. (Richard Phillip, 1997). Within this paradigm of the ‘countertravel’ narrative, my engagement with Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) will be to show how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. Travelling through the ‘chicken neck’ which is a narrow strip of land connecting the Northeast with the rest of India; this paper will show how the apparently homogeneous Northeast has a diversity of stories and histories to tell. Burdened with histories of secessionism and insurgencies, Haksar’s exploration exposes how these histories are subsumed by the larger national narrative.

Writing Northeast: Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck