A new book titled – Insider Outsider, which addresses the issues faced by the northeastern states of India, has been released recently.
The book has been edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat Choudhary. The book is a collection of short non-fiction, essays and poems.
The summary of the book describes North-East is a complex mosaic of multiple ethnicities, languages, religions and tribes.
Apart from the groups that lay claim to indigeneity, there are minorities here from communities that are majorities elsewhere in the Indian mainland.
These are people who are typically viewed as outsiders in the North-East, though they may have been living there for generations. Theirs is something of a mirror image of the experience of North-Easterners in mainland Indian cities such as Delhi, who have often had to deal with an outsider tag they did not relish, in the capital of a country against which many of the picturesque, remote hills and valleys they called home saw armed insurgencies. These shared twin experiences of being simultaneously insiders and outsiders is the subject of this anthology.
The book is a collection of short non-fiction, essays and poems.
Preeti Gill is an independent literary agent who has more than twenty years of experience in the publishing industry. She is the founder of Majha House, a literary and cultural space in Amritsar, as well as Café Kikli—a unique pop-up book café and library, which holds curated events every Saturday.
Samrat is an author and journalist. Some of his literary essays and short stories have appeared in translation in German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He is the 2018 Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan in Tokyo.