Seven Sisters: identità etnica, tribù e nazionalismo all’ombra del conteso confine Cina-India

The Seven Sisters states are a region in the North-eastern India frontier comprising the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. After the 1962 Indo-Chinese war, China claimed territorial rights on this savage region, rich in resources and featured by a strategic position. Separated by the rest of the Subcontinent by the Bangladeshi border, the North-eastern frontier has suffered for decades a condition of administrative isolation from the rest of India, with particular reference to a chronic lack of development planning. Historically a region subject to inner tribal wars, the Seven Sisters host a number of separatist ethnic movements. The ethnical and cultural identity of indigenous minority groups has been often used to foster such pushes. Yet despite the exploitative nature of such efforts, indigenous tribes have managed to remain the only repositories of the local ancestral cultural heritage, including a form of archaic shamanism rooted in the most ancient forms of Indian religious tradition.