Caring Matters: Northeast Writings on Bodies, Care, and Ecologies is a powerful and thought-provoking anthology that brings together diverse voices from India’s Northeast to explore the deep interconnections between the body, care, community, and the natural world. The book moves beyond conventional ideas of care as a private or purely emotional act, presenting it instead as a political, social, ecological, and cultural practice rooted in everyday life.
Through essays, reflections, and creative narratives, the contributors examine how care is shaped by histories of conflict, marginalization, gender, disability, migration, and environmental change. The body emerges as a central site where pain, survival, memory, and healing intersect. At the same time, the landscapes of the Northeast—its forests, rivers, hills, and ecosystems—are portrayed not merely as backdrops, but as living participants in human existence, deeply affected by extraction, militarization, and development.
One of the strengths of the book lies in its ability to weave personal experiences with broader socio-political realities. Stories of caregiving within families, communities, and across generations reveal how tenderness often coexists with vulnerability and loss. The book also highlights indigenous knowledge systems and ecological wisdom, reminding readers that care for the land is inseparable from care for people.
Caring Matters is both intimate and expansive. It speaks to the resilience of communities that continue to nurture life amid precarity, while also questioning dominant narratives of progress and growth. By centering the Northeast, a region often marginalized in mainstream discourse, the book offers a vital intervention in contemporary conversations on care, justice, and sustainability.
Ultimately, this anthology invites readers to reimagine care as an ethical and ecological responsibility—one that binds bodies, communities, and environments in a shared web of survival and hope.