20,000 Miles Across Arunachal Pradesh 

Speakers: Ajai Shukla, former military officer and columnist for the Business Standard on strategic affairs; and Sonia Shukla, former journalist and presently with the Institute of Chinese Studies 

 

In a talk illustrated with photographs, Ajai and Sonia Shukla will share their experience of a yearlong research stay in Arunachal Pradesh, and of several subsequent visits to that border state. It began in 2008 with a research project that required 20,000 miles of driving up and down the five major river valleys that comprise the state. From the 15,000-foot high Bumla Pass on the Sino-Indian border, to the implausibly beautiful Mechuka and Ziro, to Kibithu – the eastern tip of India where the sun rises on the cub-continent – they talked to locals to reconstruct an oral account of how the British-era “excluded area” of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) evolved into an Indian state