As India and the world are roiled by questions of nationalism and identity, this book journeys into the history of one of the world's newest and most fascinating regions: Northeast India. Having appeared with the stroke of a pen in 1947, as the British Raj was torn asunder and partitioned into India and Pakistan, this is a region of hills inhabited by myriad tribes. Until colonial rule, they had lived in their ancient ways. In this book, Samrat Choudhury chronicles the processes by which these remote hill-tribes, and the diverse people inhabiting the valley of the vast Brahmaputra River below, became parts of the 'imagined nation' that is India. Taking a long view, this absorbing political history chronicles the separate pathways by which imperialism, Christianity and the British love of tea brought each of the contemporary region's constituent states into modern India. About the Author: Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist from Shillong, and a former editor of broadsheet newspapers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. He currently divides his time between India and the Philippines and writes op-eds, analyses and occasional reportage for a number of national and international publications. Samrat’s previous book was The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra (2021). He has earlier authored a novel, The Urban Jungle, which was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He also co-edited an anthology titled Insider/Outsider on Northeast India. His other projects include Partition Studies Quarterly, an online journal focused on the forgotten causes and experiences of the Partition of India in its Northeast, which he co-founded along with two others. Samrat was the Asian Leadership Fellow from India at the International House of Japan in Tokyo in 2018 and a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, London, in 2019.