Negotiating Transnational Identities on Indo-Myanmar Border

The identity of the people in the Indo-Myanmar border in Northeast India is that they belong to the Indo-Mongoloid racial stock and speak languages belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group. Most of these groups trace their origin to some part of Southeast Asia. The historical routes both constrain and empower movements across borders and cultures. But traffic across borders has been controlled by the articulation of homelands or safe spaces assigned to a group of a particular identity. Inspite of political division, the ethnically and culturally similar people inhabiting both sides of the international border have maintained constant cross-border movements. It is a shared landscape divided politically. This people with lives on both sides of the international border often find themselves victimised for crimes against the state. For this people besides the territorial road, there is also an extraterritorial road to the other side of the political border. This is a reality which is the basis of their identity. This article proposes a framework for international trade between ‘local border points’ in the Indo-Myanmar border, where only the residents in immediately neighbouring provinces/states can cross borders and trade freely. It is a hope that this will negotiate the conversion of a common shared space to a transnational space in this globalised world.