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Narrative Agency and Thinking about Conflicts is an essay written by Nandana Dutta appearing in the book, Beyond counter – Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India edited by SanjibBaruah. The essay presents Ethnicity as a socio- political fabrication, and examines the role of ‘narratives’ in shaping the consensus concerning a given issue in a given society. It addresses the politics of representation by underlining the way in which the panoptic nature of narratives can lead to a unilateral engagement with significant social concerns and problems, and thereby result in a rather low sustenance span with regard to the depiction of these problems. ThroughNarrative Agency and Thinking about conflicts, NandanaDutta attempts to bring to light, the presence of the ‘narrative of neglect’. The ‘narrative of neglect’ refers to the key repercussion generated by factors such as agential narratives and the politics that essentially accompany them. While iterating the notion of national consciousness in India, Dutta opines that the representations are often made through the discourse of Neglect, wherein the realities and experiences of certain contexts are ignored while speaking about the issues faced by a particular community. This essay argues that the relationship between the concept of a ‘narrative’ and Psychoanalysis is a material to study the socio- cultural and political biases of several national institutions. It explains the relations between narratives and psychoanalysis, the most useful element of which is the model offered by the talking cure. It uses the example of the Assam Turmoil by referring to its connection with the narrative agent as a manipulated and unjustly politicized component. Dutta also emphasizes on the distinction between ‘narrating’ and ‘narrativizing’ by saying that the latter is what brings in the problems of agency and in turn causes a type of contemporary colonization. With this, she poses the questions about the side- lining of individual problems and as a result depriving the reality of individual subjects. This correspondingly raises questions about our (the Indian academia’s) belief in the history that was scripted by the political predominance of institutionalized narratives. Furthermore, a viewpoint that the validity of representations are vital to sustenance is articulated in the essay. It also strives to describe how the ethnic diversity of the country hampered the developmental process in general, and national integration in particular. The older and less modernized modes of living were represented by ethnic groups as necessitated by the Globalization of the economy. The example of South Asia being well known for its ethnic popularity in its nation- building process is paralleled with India’s case by suggesting that a unified national identity coincides with the state but does not reflect on its ethnic divisions. Dutta says that the nation- building process in India exclusively happened to focus on achieving a unified identity based on common political values, a shared idea of citizenship, and the like. Although this kind of a unified sense of identity for the nation was engineered to promote and facilitate co- existence in the background of the Indian consciousness of diversity, it has caused a homogenization that has framed the invisibility of a number of communities and of alternative narratives. The essay scrutinizes the scope of New Narratives, revealing that the possibility of their coming is challenged by the continuous and compelling drawback of having to think along the fundamental binaries laid down by the long- existing narratives which in some ways take to channel the conception of national ethos in India. Transnationalism in Dutta’s words is a conceptual equivalent of the Look East Policy where migrants are institutionally free to go through shifts across cultures and social systems. This again, is seen as a concept that disregards the currently surreal expectation for national integrity. The relationship exercised between Assam and the constructed and consensual Indian sense of ‘Indianness’ is evidently strained and controversial right from the nineteenth century. And even during the period of the Assam Turmoil, political, ideological and intellectual mediators had structured the situation of the engagement of the outsiders in Assam’s concern. The essay points to the Four Paradigms as stated by Jairam Ramesh in Northeast India in a New Asia, and talks about how the supposed ‘approach’ towards the north- eastern states of India is subjected to a utility- based and function- oriented association.Narrative Agency and Thinking about Conflicts strives to look at the grievances against the majority community as a self- standing narrative which is not heard in the context of national resolution- making. It also highlights the important the trouble created by the failure to recognize the identities of the different tribal groups in the Northeast, and the incompetence to take note of the Northeast as a space of diversity in itself.