‘The Mongolian Fringe’ was the title of a 1940 official paper authored by Olaf Caroe, the foreign secretary of the British-Indian government in New Delhi. It referenced the Himalayan region, including areas such as “Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and northern Assam.†An unabashedly racialized view of the world characterized this genre of imperial geopolitical writing. Six decades later, those racial ideas are no longer publically articulated with the same confidence. In their place, however, there is a ‘racialized regime of visuality’ to borrow a phrase from Cultural Studies scholar Joseph Pugliese. In India this makes its presence felt via the use of derogatory words like ‘Chinky’ or ‘flat-nosed’ in the rough and tumble of everyday life, and words like ‘Northeasterner’ or ‘Pahari’ in polite conversation. In the summer of 2012, Indian elites had to come to terms with the reality of this racialized regime of visuality when, following reports of violence between Bodos and Muslims in western Assam and rumours of possible reprisals, there was an exodus of panicked Northeasterners from major Indian cities