As with Kasmir, it has been the ill luck of the north-eastern Indian state of Nagaland to be located on the borders of a cynical colonial withdrawal.
Unlike Kashmir, much of the area's murderous unrest has gone largely unreported inside and outside India.
The borders of the isolated highland territory, at the centre of the administrative car crash left by the British empire, runs along the Burmese border and lies strategically close to China and Bangladesh.
Guardian journalist Jonathan Glancey's account of its travails since independence is engaging if somewhat idiosyncratic.
The book's fragmented nature is a reflection of the diversity of its subject matter. Part ethnographic study, family history, political analysis and travelogue, it's certainly well written and accompanied by startlingly beautiful photographs.
Much in the same way as the British empire patronised other remote, ethnically "pure" peoples under its control, the 16 Tibeto-Burmese tribes comprising the nearly two million Naga people were protected and their lifestyles were largely left unmolested.
The Naga reciprocated by being at best unimpressed if not hostile to the Congress-led independence movement.
Soon after the creation of an independent India in 1947, the Naga decided to seek their own freedom and this fight rumbles on today.
Currently it's in the more familiar Indian guise of a Maoist revolution, albeit one with Christian overtones thanks to industrial-scale conversions by Baptist missionaries.
Both Glancey's father and grandfather were ruling- class functionaries of the imperialist system in India, which is presumably why Glancey frequently falls into reverie.
He goes all misty-eyed about this Shangri-la, explaining how family tales suggested Nagaland was one with Kipling's Kafiristan.
The Naga come across as the plucky and noble underdogs while the giants of the independence movement - Nehru, Bose, even Gandhi among them - are evaluated much more harshly than they in fact deserve.
Glancey glosses over the desperate early years of the first Nehru administration, beset by British and US-backed chicanery in the Punjab and Kashmir in their support for Pakistan as the civil war in China played out just to the north.
The new state needed security on its flanks and it couldn't afford to see those further weakened by acceding to Naga independence, although internal statehood was granted in 1963.
That doesn't excuse the resulting years of repression and conflict, but it does offer a more politically balanced - and less ethnographically romantic. - explanation.