How unbroken can the notion of progress so steadfastly held by believers in dialectical materialism be? A little deconstruction can demonstrate how futile the notion can be especially in considering humanities and arts. While history cannot be simply `one damn thing after another`, how far can we be justified in saying it has followed a linear locus? In the world of art, the ridiculous nature of the query was pointed out quite eloquently by one of the greatest historians of ideas `“ Isaiah Berlin. He demolished the unquestioned presumption that art too has always `progressed` with one era dovetailing the other and because of the advantage of hindsight, the latest era coming out on top at the end of this continuous progression. Since art has to do with human aspirations and inner urges, it should follow from the progress theory that what a great master like Rembrandt aspired to be, would be to a great extent what Picasso represented centuries later. Or Homer`™s epics `Odyssey` and `Iliad` were incomplete expressions of the writer`™s aspiration to achieve what John Milton in `Paradise Lost` achieved two thousand years later. This presumption obviously is ridiculous. For all they are worth, a Rembrandt may be a greater work of art than a Picasso, or Homer`™s artistic talent may be way ahead of Milton`™s. There can be no perfect scales on which these expressions in art can be measured and compared. Epochal achievements in these fields are definitely related and certain elements are definitely passed down generation to generation, but it is absurd to even imagine there is a progress in the manner it is presumed to in the sciences. Human aspirations and creativity are inextricably linked to the contextual backgrounds they spawned in, and often they cannot cross the boundaries of these backgrounds. Hence, it is quite likely an epic such as the Mahabharata can never be written again, as the creativity and imagination that gave it birth belonged in that epoch only.
This thought of postmodern `deconstruction` is often evoked when confronted with the question, sometimes posed to provoke and sometimes as honest query, as to what the boundaries of the presumably ancient `imagining` called Manipur were like. There is a similar flawed presumption of historical progression in this question. Who says a nation has always to have hard boundaries with boundary pillars, fenced off by barbed wires, guarded zealously by professional soldiers etc. The pre-colonial world outside of Europe did not understand nation and territory this way, as Lord Curzon noted in his well known Romanes Lecture 1907. In the Hindu epic `Ramayana` there is a particular ceremony Rama performed to demarcate the domain of his kingdom, whereby he released a white stallion and let it run free. If anybody stood in the way of the free run of the horse, he would have to face the might of the king and if he managed to stop the king, that would be where extent of the former`™s kingdom was deemed to end. Such and similar alternate understandings would have been more applicable in say the contest for ownership of the Kabaw Valley between the kingdoms of Ava and Manipur in the pre-modern times. If a king stuck his flag on the bank of a river and nobody dared oppose him, that point would have become the extent of his kingdom. These boundaries too would have been in a flux depending on the rise and fall of the powers of rulers. These understandings cannot simply be forced into the modern paradigms of nationhood.
It is however interesting that even in the 21st Century, very modern nations still are not free of this ancient principle of establishing domains of control. The idea of `no fly zone` and the muscle flexing last year over the South China Sea between the US and Japan on one side and China on the other is a demonstration of this. The US was used to flying its planes and pushing its airspaces domain as it pleased till rising superpower China claimed it was encroaching into its territory and prohibited it from further provocation.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam