Dr Samir Talati
The recent online angst shared by a young woman from Meghalaya over the racial slur she experienced in Delhi has once again brought to the surface the question of racism against the northeasterners in peninsular India. The incident occurred first in Kamla Nagar and again, on the same day, in a metro station. The abusers hurled racial slurs at her, ostensibly referring to her ‘un-Indian’ looks. Narrating her pain in a video, she remarked, “In my own country, fellow Indians made me feel like I don’t belong here.” Through her painful experience of being ‘othered’, she reminds us that “racism thrives in silence” in our country and that this racism needs to be conquered through love and not revenge.
Such incidents are not only isolated interpersonal attacks but symptoms of structural othering that normalises the exclusion of Northeastern people in many mainland Indian public spaces on the basis of their race. Racism in India manifests itself in subtle and covert forms. Despite the claims that it does not exist, racial considerations shade, particularly for the northeasterners, various aspects of their experiences. Such ‘colour-blind’ ideology has shaped how the Meghalaya woman’s experience was perceived, responded to, and negotiated by obscuring race as a legitimate factor that minimises collective social responsibility towards the victim and limits effective institutional and social remedies. Most Indians in peninsular India have developed, following such colour-blind ideology, powerful explanations that have become justifications for the racial and exclusionary attitudes towards northeasterners, which exonerate them from any responsibility towards the plight of the latter.
The harassment that northeasterners face outside North East India operates through an immediate act of categorical perception: visible phenotypic difference that rapidly translates into a social category (“foreign,” “Northeastern,” or “not-Indian enough”) by the perpetrators and bystanders. Such cognitive framing is used to make northeasterners targets of racial violence. The abusers use pre-existing mental schemas about what an “Indian” looks like and then place them outside it. In addition, the verbal slurs and mocking laughter help perform boundary work: they signal who belongs in that ‘national’ space and who does not. The Delhi incident was thus also a public ritual of boundary maintenance. The aggressors’ words and the bystanders’ responses reproduced social limits on belonging.
Roger Brubaker’s processual lens in understanding racial projects helps us to see the Meghalaya woman’s assault not as an isolated expression of prejudice but as the activation of cognitive categories and boundary-making performance. The result is the exclusion and otherisation of the victim. The verbal abuse and public mockery have acted, in the words of Omi and Winant, as a small-scale racial project: they encoded and reproduced a social meaning that people who look like ‘Chinese’ are “foreign,” undesirable, or outside the national self. That project, consciously or unconsciously, reproduces boundaries of belonging and signals who counts as an insider in mainstream Indian public space.
The Meghalaya woman’s experience, and that of several others, is shaped by at least three overlapping identities: being from the Northeast, appearing phenotypically different from dominant North Indian norms, and being a woman in public spaces. These intersections – regional, racial, and gender - increased her vulnerability manifold: gender shaped where and how she moved, visible racialized features made her a target of xenophobic slurs, and regional stigma in mainland narratives rendered her “not belonging.” It is this intersectionality that explains why the harm is layered – verbal slurs are experienced alongside social exclusion, diminished sense of safety, and potential limits on mobility and economic opportunity.
The northeasterners’ experience of being ‘othered’ stems largely from the cultural mechanisms that sustain such racial abuses. For instance, everyday cultural practices–mocking speech, ethnic jokes, and coded slurs – function as boundary maintenance that signals who belongs in the imagined national community. In this national imagination, the northeasterners often do not find space due to their looks, food habits, cultures, customs, traditions, and languages. Moreover, tropes like mocking northeasterners’ pronunciations or calling them “Ching Chong China” perform symbolic violence that normalizes exclusion. The men’s laughter, after passing racial slurs in a public setting in Delhi, amplified the humiliation and reproduced a cultural script that left the Meghalaya woman with the choice to endure, record, or confront, each with emotional and safety costs. Such abuses have psychological and social consequences. Racialized public abuse produces immediate emotional harms – shock, shame, anxiety – and longer-term effects on identity and belonging as well as trust in public institutions.
One is reminded of ‘double consciousness’ that W.E.B. Du Bois expounded in his classic The Souls of Black Flock to refer to a divided sense of self in which individuals see themselves both through their own eyes and through the lens of a dominant, often oppressive, society, measuring their own worth against standards that exclude or demean them. The Meghalaya woman’s reaction – feeling alienated, exposed, and unsafe after racial abuse – illustrates this double consciousness at play in her mind: she simultaneously experiences her own identity and the degrading view imposed by aggressors, which forces her to calculate how she will be seen and treated in mainstream North Indian spaces. At the same time, recording the incident on a video and publicizing it through social media is an expression of political consciousness that both resists the imposed gaze and signals the psychic cost of living under that gaze. This was evident in the way the Delhi victim expressed herself through a post on social media: “To the guys in Delhi who thought ‘Ching Chong China’ was a joke – you didn’t just insult me. You insulted every person who’s ever felt ‘othered’ in their own country. India is diverse. Our faces, our languages, our cultures – all valid. You don’t get to define who belongs and who doesn’t.” Recognizing double consciousness, thus, shifts responses from treating abuse as only interpersonal wrongdoing to addressing the broader social and cultural structures that force marginalized people to constantly reconcile selfhood with stigmatized pubic perceptions.
The rising number of cases of racial abuse faced by the northeasterners call for immediate remedial measures. Remedies may include supportive services that validate identity, public education that challenges exclusionary narratives, and institutional reforms that reduce the need for marginalized northeasterners to constantly negotiate their safety and belonging. First and foremost, institutional responses need to be strengthened, which may include strengthening proactive policing, bias-awareness training for civic authorities, and clearer complaint pathways that do not rely solely on viral exposure, as in the case of the Meghalaya woman. More importantly, attitudinal change on the part of “mainstream” India, supported by public-funded awareness campaigns, is the need of the hour. Instilling a more inclusive and broad-based ‘national’ narrative, especially through school curricula that include histories and representations of Northeastern peoples, can help contest exclusionary national narratives. In brief, addressing the racial discrimination faced by the people of North East India requires coordinated institutional change, sustained cultural representation, and comprehensive victim-centred supports to ensure accountability, restore dignity, and prevent future harm.
(The author is a senior research associate at North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati and can be contacted at stalatinesrc@gmail.com)
