It’s Time to Become Butterflies
By Angomcha Bimol Akoijam
Perhaps, on the face of it, extraordinary challenges of an extraordinary time need an extraordinary life, stuff that leaders are made of, to lead the people to redemption. This thought can strike the troubled minds and hearts in the state of Manipur today. Indeed, expressions of such a need do come up in private conversations and public domain, in the collective acts and cultural forms. To think of it, the contemporary collective investment in the memory of Hijam Irabot is, perhaps, fueled by the same need. After all, he was one figure who stood out amongst his contemporaries in his efforts to shape the destiny of the state in its recent history. And that history and deeds of the man have not acquired an irrelevant character of being ‘facts of the past’ for the contemporary. Besides, he is not a living person who constitutes a threat to anybody’s claim to ‘leadership’ in the present but a versatile historical figure that can be deployed and or appropriated. But beyond the legends and historical figures, can we expect leader or leaders in flesh and blood amidst us, in the present, inspiring and guiding the beleaguered population of the state towards a life with dignity and well-being? I suppose, answer to the same shall have crucial bearing on what we can do about Manipur today and her future.
Mami Sami: Murky World of Manipur
Longing for an extraordinary life, something akin to a legendary leader, to lead us out of the present mess, extraordinary challenges of our extraordinary time, is understandable. After all, the situation that we face in Manipur today is no ordinary one; it’s a murky world that has produced debilitating trauma and paralysis, a world of Mami Sami, if one likes to call it so, which has been so poignantly captured by the contemporary Manipuri film by the same name directed by Lancha Ningthouja.
Ours is a world wherein any search of a ‘real’ picture shall throw up anything but clear, distinct or anything that one associates with ‘normal’ order. Take for instance, the notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). If one expects the military not to be an instrument of regular administration or the elected executive to have the final say as the representative of the people in a democratic order, Manipur is not a place to look for that kind of ‘normality’. For, the ‘extraordinary’, which was meant to be a ‘temporary measure’, has become an ‘ordinary’ piece of legal fiction that has telling influence on the way the state is administered. Strange as it may seem, the people whose national emblem talks of ‘satyamev jayate’ (Truth shall Triumph) seeks its legitimacy by telling white lies (such as there is no ‘armed conflict’ or ‘armed rebellion’ in the state). Indeed, for the state as well as the public, it seems ‘public conscience’, as it were, is a vocabulary that can only be found in the ‘dictionary of the (impractical) fools whose souls can easily get bludgeoned by the brute force of the grotesque violence that has come to preside over the state.
Indeed, amidst the sounds of the mimicry of the revelry of the rich and famous and their ways of life in a donor driven economy, a ‘spiral of silence’, or a defeating silence, becomes the loudest voice amongst the denizens of the state. Beyond that, the voice that one can hear in between can only be that of the shrieking madness of a traumatized soul like the main protagonist (Tayal) in Mami Sami. It is a voice that can be meaningful insofar as one recognizes that voice as that of an ‘angaoba’ or ‘angaobi’ (insane). Of course, there are also dissenting voices, including those which some people called ‘official dissents’ that do not fundamentally challenge the status quo of the governing structures, and a language wherein ‘cynicism’ can stand for ‘criticism’ and ‘rhetoric’ can easily substitute ‘analysis’ comes to rule the roosts.
It’s a murky world in which deficit of trust marks the relationships — between communities, amongst individuals, and citizens and institutions. If you expect members of the law-enforcing agencies will not engage in criminal acts, Manipur is not the place to look for as you will hear cases of criminal acts, such as extortions, planting bombs and drug trafficking over and above the normalized ‘extra-judicial killings’, being committed by the personnel of the security forces in the state.
Indeed, the ‘little paradise’ is a place wherein the expression of injustice or absence of justice that the saying ‘give a bad name to the dog and hang him’ suggests has been re-rendered as ‘kill the dog and give him a bad name’. And the offenders who practice the same are no longer a matter of state or non-state forces/entities as both are implicated. In fact, nothing could convey murky state of affairs as the news of allegation that the ruling elites, who defend the Indian State against the ‘underground’ forces in the state, have links with the latter or that arms have been recovered or ‘insurgents’ being arrested from the official residences of the members of the State Assembly and that the members of ‘rebel outfits’ are being sheltered in the army camps etc do come up in the media and private conversations. To think of it, in a conflict ridden state wherein the legitimacy of Indian State over Manipur has been challenged, one cannot even expect those who do not believe in the legitimacy of the ‘Indian Constitution’ over Manipur not to get openly involved in the matters of the ‘Indian Elections’ in the state.
Indeed, the world of Manipur today is Mami Sami, a haziness of a murky world. And distinctions between ‘law-enforcer and law-breaker’, ‘predator and protector’, ‘public and private’, ‘oppressor and oppressed’ and ‘resistance and resisted’ refuse to fall in distinct and separate categories.
It is a world Mami Sami in which ‘the observer’ is also simultaneously ‘the observed’ (as exemplified by the male protagonist, Wangthoi, as an editor whose wife was caught in the violence as the printing machine was rolling with news prints that carry the news of the ongoing violence itself) and the promise of a secured private/domestic life (represented by Tayal and her husband, Tombi) which cannot be touched by the ongoing conflict can only remain a myth. Incidentally, many, if not majority, in Manipur seem to hold on to such a myth with their misplaced efforts to secure a ‘private world’. And more importantly, one does get a disturbing and traumatic haziness as one begins to think of the aftermath of the ongoing conflict (represented by the factional fight between Khaba and Wanglen) that has disrupted the private citizens (represented by the domestic life of Tayal and Tombi).
Can the normal life (such as that of Tayal and her husband, Tombi in the said movie) be recovered and restored after the conflict? What is this conflict all about? One begins to ask as Tombi was found to be with Khaba at the end of the movie and Tayal ran away to give a shirking sound that bothers between frustration and madness (Khaba had earlier accused Tombi and Tayal of being with Wanglen, and Tayal’s assertion as a ‘Meitei Nupi’ to save the life of Wanglen had led to their domestic life getting inextricably embroiled in the conflict).
Rajarshi Bhagyachandra and Butterfly: Beyond Waiting for Godot?
The chaos of that the murky world will not ask for ordinary leader; for, it can only produce a longing for an obstinately rebellious and extraordinarily creative and versatile leader like Meidingu Chingthangkhomba, alias Rajarshi Bhagyachandra, as interpreted by a soul searching Manipur play Rajarshi Bhagyachandra (written by MC Arun and Directed by MC Thoiba). The play reminds us of the fact that the state in its history had faced similar, if not identical, situations in the past such as the socio-politically fractured polity and society with the imperatives of an evolving and expanding state in 18th century. And the figure of Rajarshi Bhagyachandra appeared as an extraordinary ruler who had responded to the extraordinary challenges to create a unified and stable polity through his political, military and, more importantly, cultural responses. And the play ends with a return to the contemporary Manipur with an expression of a wait, “Bhagyachandra Lakhigani’ (Bhagyachandra will come again), in order to deal with the present chaos in the state. It’s the ultimate longing of an extraordinary leader to take us out of the murky Manipur today.
However, one suspects that it is a misplaced longing. Incidentally, the movie Mami Sami also ends with a similar tone: Tayal nang-gi naral natte, matamnani (It’s not your fault but time). It denies the agency of the ordinary citizen in a world which is shaped by the normative and institutional mechanisms of modern democratic and republican ethos. In such a situation, I suspect, the wait for an extraordinary leader or blaming ‘time’ will be nothing more than an artistic wish for the coming of Godot at best or a longing for a Hobbesian Leviathan at worst. Hence, the need of the hour is to invent the butterflies of the ‘Chaos Theory’, whose acts of flipping their wings can produce hurricane, in each one of us to find the core of our moral existence and agency as individual citizens. Only then, the agency of the individual ordinary citizens can be restored for a collective change. It is time for us to become ‘ordinary’, just like people like you and I, and keep flipping our small wings to go beyond the ‘chaos’ that life is in Manipur today!