For Whom the Roads Toll: Narratives of (Im)Mobilities in Northeast India

Abstract

Roads presuppose connection and connectivity. Yet, even as roads create connections, they also bring new disconnections. In this article, I select road narratives from Northeast India, where highway construction has been going on at a furious pace since the early 2000s—roads being seen as the conduits for inter-regional and international connectivity in a region considered the borderlands between South and Southeast Asia. While road narratives can focus on the liberating potential of roads as spaces of self-expression, or as avenues for mobility, I am interested in the dissonances in these narratives. Roads can have both generative and destructive effects. What are the stories of dispossession that emerge from the people who live along the road? What are the transactions, material and social, that people make as they participate, often involuntarily, in the visions of progress through connectivity? How do they cope with fast disappearing familiar landscapes, and earlier channels of communication? As roads are expanded into four-lane expressways, villages become bifurcated, and social bonds unravel to give way to new forms of social relations in the countryside. As toll gates come up to both check and charge movement, mobility becomes compromised. By focusing on narratives from Northeast India, this article attempts to study the effect of roads where rapid transformations are unfolding and evolving. This article is based on fieldwork conducted on NH 36 and 37 in 2014 and 2016.