‘Travel in some sense is complete only after the experience is recounted,’ writes Pradipta Borgohain in his introduction to Wanderings in the Northeast, and Elsewhere.
Edited and largely translated by Borgohain, the anthology spans more than a century of travels, across the hills and rivers of the Northeast, through the Indian subcontinent, and into distant parts of the world.
The journeys begin close to home…on the Brahmaputra, in the high passes of Arunachal Pradesh, in the Naga Hills, and the valleys of Meghalaya, before widening outward into Kashmir, Japan, Kenya, Paris, Birmingham and beyond. Yet even when the writers travel far from the Northeast, the sensibility they carry remains deeply rooted in the region’s landscapes and histories.
The anthology features pilgrimages and solitary wanderings, journeys shaped by curiosity, scholarship, love, work and chance. Some essays are meditative, others humorous and sharply observant. Taken together, they capture how writers from the region have encountered the world, and how in travelling outward they have repeatedly returned to questions of home.
