Another front, another story: relief and rehabilitation in post-second World War Northeast India, 1944-1955

This paper examines post-WW2 relief measures in Northeast India. It employs two registers of aid - first, donor's (colonial state) and recipient's (the tribes) narratives of aid, second, the ripple effect of aid intervention in subsequent periods. The official assumption about aid was governed by a non-humanitarian political contingency of embedding rule more firmly in the frontier. Tribal recipients perceived charitable aid as a 'rightful and legitimate claim' against their loss in the war and hence demanded 'full compensation'. Straddled with frustration in between 'minimum' relief and 'full compensation', the tribals eventually took to an armed insurgency in the postcolonial period.