Between Memory and the Reel: How Digital Media is Reshaping NorthEast Tourism

Some places enter our imagination long before we ever travel to them. Not dramatically, but slowly-through conversations, shared meals, passing references, photographs, music and now increasingly through Instagram reels that appear between the routines of everyday scrolling.

For me, the Northeast was never entirely unfamiliar. Growing up in West Bengal, there was always a quiet presence of the region around us, even if we did not consciously recognise it. In school, I remember spending lunch breaks with my friends Sharon Lyngdoh and Samantha Elwin from Meghalaya, and what began as ordinary school conversations gradually became windows into another world. Stories about Shilling’s rains, church choirs in the hills, music cafes, family gatherings during Christmas and foods cooked with bamboo shoot and smoked meat that somehow felt both new and strangely familiar. At that age, I did not realise, those conversations were shaping my understanding of the Northeast in ways textbooks never could. The region stopped being a distant corner on the map and became human, lived something which is I could also connect emotionally.

The familiarity was perhaps also something historically construed. For decades, Kolkata functioned as an educational and cultural hub for students from across Northeast India. Young people from these regions came to the city for education, music, medicine and trade. Their presence shaped Kolkata’s social and cultural fabric in subtle but meaningful ways. Shared spaces -classrooms, hostels,cafes, churches and college festivals fostered everyday relationships that made the Northeast feel familiar rather than distant.

Over time, these older cultural connections began to weaken. As Kolkata gradually ceded its place to cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad as major educational destinations, the everyday interactions that once connected Bengal and the Northeast became less common. For many younger Bengalis today, the Northeast feels geographically close yet socially distant-

encountered more through digital screens that through everyday relationships. And perhaps that is why Instagram reels have become such a powerful cultural force.

Today, in the age of digital media, a few seconds of scrolling can transport viewers into the hills of Meghalya, the cafés of Shillong, the festivals of Mizoram, the vibrant hornbill festivals of Nagaland, the monasteries of Arunachal Pradesh, the lakes of Manipur, the streets of Tripura, or the tea gardens of Assam. Influencers have undeniably made the NE more visible to mainstream India than it has been in decades.

This visibility matters, as for years, Northeast India remained underrepresented in national tourism narratives despite its immense ecological and cultural richness. Social media has challenged that invisibility by making people curious about the region. It has encouraged travel beyond predictable circuits and drawn attention to places ignored by conventional tourism campaigns. Yet, this new visibility also warrants scrutiny. What kind of Northeast are these reels presenting to us ?

Too often the region is packaged through familiar digital cliches-”hidden paradise”, “untouched landscapes” or “offbeat escapes”. While these descriptions may seem celebratory, they quietly exoticise the region by presenting it as a spectacle to be discovered rather than as a complex, lived social world. In the process, mountains become visual aesthetics, and communities risk being reduced to consumable content for the travelling gaze.

As I watch these reels, I often find myself caught between attraction and discomfort. Attraction, because they awaken the same curiosity I once felt listening to my friends speak about their homes. Discomfort, because social media often transforms places into spectacles rather than spaces with layered histories, political realities, and everyday lives.The Northeast should not have to exist as India’s “exotic frontier” to deserve attention.

Travel to the region must emerge more organically—from cultural curiosity, historical ties, shared food practices, music, education, and human interaction. In many ways, the cultural similarities between Bengal and the Northeast already challenge the idea of distance. Rice-based

meals, smoked and fermented flavours, fish curries, mustard-based cooking, community-centred eating traditions—these are reminders that eastern and northeastern India have always shared deeper continuities than mainstream narratives acknowledge.

At the same time, influencer-driven tourism is changing the nature of travel itself. Increasingly, destinations are approached not as places to engage with but as content to capture and monetised. The logic of the reel rewards spectacle, immediacy, and visual consumption. But regions like the Northeast—with fragile ecologies and layered ethnic histories—cannot simply become viral aesthetics without consequences.

The challenge, therefore, is not visibility itself. Northeast India deserves visibility, investment, and meaningful engagement. The real challenge is ensuring that visibility does not become commodification.

Perhaps that is also what these reels have made me realise personally. The more I watch them, the more I feel the need to step away from the screen and encounter the region differently—not through drone shots or curated itineraries, but through conversations, shared meals, local stories, and unhurried travel.

In many ways, I feel I owe that journey to the memories that first introduced me to the Northeast—not to algorithms, but to friendship.

And maybe that is the deeper question social media leaves us with: can these reels become gateways to genuine understanding, or will they only encourage us to consume places visually before moving on to the next destination on our feed?

For me, at least, the answer lies in eventually travelling there myself—not to “discover” the Northeast, but to see through my own eyes the places that first entered my imagination years ago during ordinary lunch breaks in school.

About the author:

Dr. Priscilla Namrata Rozario is a social historian and Assistant Professor of Historical Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts, School of Social Sciences at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore. Her scholarship investigates the intersections of historical consciousness, collective memory, and the shaping of identities in both urban and rural contexts