It often seems as though the regional in the SAARC acronym is oddly devoid of a history, other than the one prescribed to it by the dominant memories of its constituent states. It is as if SAARC's representatives are little more than what the tourism and finance departments want them to be: good, postcolonial folk with an urge to forge economic growth. There is little room, therefore, for places within the region that have discordant histories. Places that do not conform to pliable pasts often find themselves pushed outside discussions on regionalism in Southasia. Thus, SAARC constituents would like to view the entire Southasian region within an antiseptic security lens, where incompatible noises and memories are not part of the 'region-making' process. Northeast India, with its colourful and chaotic history, is such a place. In contemporary discussions, the region is portrayed as a place full of malcontents of various ethnicities.
The presence of renegades of different ethnic origins in a particular region is also a sign of a distinct kind of cosmopolitanism. Such figures point towards a corresponding set of events and processes that draw people and material into a particular area. Below are two incidents that took place in the Northeast during the 1940s. These are not ordinary events, as we will see. They are incidents that could have only happened in places where peoples and politics were bursting at the seams with contradictions and expectant possibilities.
On a cold January morning in 1946, a disabled Chinese soldier, decommissioned from the 38th Chinese Division, was found dead with several stab wounds near an unused ammunition dump in Tirap, near the town of Margherita in eastern Assam. The police report stated that the deceased had lost his legs in combat in Burma, and had since built a small hut near an ammunition dump controlled by the US Army at Tirap. The American soldiers would give the disabled man their tinned rations out of charity, while he went about collecting food and unused ammunition, which he then sold to his Chinese compatriots from the Kuomintang tank division stationed nearby. The deceased was said to have been antisocial and without many friends in the area. Local people reported seeing three unknown Chinese soldiers enter the hut on 24 January 1946. The following day, an American soldier, on his way to the dump, came by the body of the Chinese soldier, who was holding a US-issued army pistol with three live rounds still in the cartridge.
The same police report, now lodged in a file at the former India Office Collection, housed with the British Library in London, tells a delightful tale about a case of swindling, reported by a Silchar police station during the same year. An individual claiming to be an American assistant manager of a local tea plantation had persuaded a leading merchant in town to part with goods worth a bit more than 150 rupees, on credit. Weeks later, when the bill had still not been cleared, the merchant approached the manager of the estate, only to be informed that there was no such assistant manager. A case of swindling and fraud was registered against the missing individual.