Contributions to Indian Sociology 56, 1 (2022): 94–98 SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/ Melbourne DOI: 10.1177/00699667221106017 IV: Glimpses from villages in the Northeast: Traditional quarantine measures came alive during the COVID-19 pandemic Thongkholal Haokip During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities in the hills of Northeast India fought the epidemic by taking recourse to traditional preventive health measures, both sealing off villages and quarantining to combat the spread of the highly infectious coronavirus. These traditional emergency health measures grew out of local experience with disease but resemble the current practices of lockdown and quarantine. Quarantine measures, dismissed by the World Health Organization in 2018 as ‘no longer effcient’, were re-established in the course of the epidemic. However, these practices continued to be part of the oral tradition of villages in the Northeast and highlighted an aspect of their autonomy in this arena. Keywords: COVID-19, indigenous peoples, Northeast India, pandemic, quarantine I Introduction When the frst case of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported in the Northeast from a foreign returnee student of Manipur on 24 March 2020, many localities and villages in the state closed the roads leading to their localities and villages. These localities were the frst in the country to voluntarily enforce a lockdown and community quarantine at the village level. Knowledge of these strategies here is part of the cultural understanding of epidemics which is passed down from generation to generation. Thongkholal Haokip is at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. E-mail: th.robert@yahoo.co.in