The salience of home often comes into being in the wake of its loss. The loss of home for me was engendered by a physical departure from the place of my birth as well as the uncertainty of return posed by escalation of ethnic violence in the region. That loss became the impetus for my ethnographic journey engaging with issues of identity, belonging, conflict, and resistance in my home community—the Garo Hills region of Northeast India. In this article, I draw from my autoethnographic journeys to offer a more nuanced and discursively complex understanding of ethnic antagonisms in Northeast India. Challenging dominant security-driven perspectives, my article is foregrounded in the everyday experiences of ordinary citizens in the Northeastern borderlands. Dissolving strict boundaries between ethnography, oral history, testimonials, and storytelling, I open up discursive spaces to explore alternative framing of home and belonging for people located in Northeastern India.
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