The North-Eastern is a continuation of the decades-old tradition of Eelam Tamil transnational activism, in a collaborative effort by a broad collective of activists, thinkers, and writers.

The North-Eastern follows in the footsteps of The Saturday Review, Hot Spring and The North-Eastern Herald, all English-language publications that were based in the Tamil homeland and faced persecution by state forces.

In 2026, fifty years after the adoption of the Vaddukoddai Resolution, the birth of The North-Eastern is an act of persistence and resistance. It continues a long history of Tamil political journalism and cultural production that refuses to accept silence as survival. It also refuses the conditions that have sought to erase that history, including the soft violence of assimilation, the hard violence of state repression and militarization, and the numbing apathy of international structures that sideline the Tamil homeland and treat violence enacted on Tamils as abstractions. We inherit this moment not as passive chroniclers of loss, but as custodians of a living tradition of struggle.

Ours is a magazine committed to the principle of Tamil self-determination, not as a closed or parochial idea, but as a universal right. It is dedicated to the right of a people to narrate their own history and imagine their own future. The North-Eastern will publish art, reportage, and analysis that inhabit the world from this position of historical clarity and moral commitment. Our task is not to flatter the conscience of the powerful but to interrogate the stories we have inherited and to recover histories we have been denied the space to tell.

Though based in the North-East, we write across borders with the understanding that our audience is as dispersed as our people. We aim to connect generations divided by exile and time, to recover archives scattered across continents, and to remember that the freedom to think and to create itself is a political act.

The 50th anniversary of the Vaddukoddai Resolution is not just a commemoration. It is a reminder that the struggle for dignity, truth, and liberation is far from over. The North-Eastern is our contribution to that unfinished work, which has survived repeated violent disruptions, including the detention, exile, and killing of Tamil media workers. In the context of stifling institutional and social hierarchies, this magazine is a space where memory resists erasure, where language refuses defeat, and where the idea of Tamil nationhood remains alive, restless, and evolving.