By Ibomcha
While traversing through the phases of human history and in the endeavor to search for a completely new phase, there is a need to think about what values should be retained and what should be purged. The necessity of resorting to this act is to enable the society to flow along with the current and to enable all to steer the current to the direction as desired by the people for a collective future.
This necessity also entails translating thoughts into practice by raising “critical questions” pertaining to the position of the society. For a society on the edge of transition that requires new dreams, hopes and aspirations, tackling obstacles that come along the way of translating ideals into reality would need the obligatory tasks of the people.
It is people’s cognition level that determines their response-giving-capacity to “epochal questions”, the challenges of this phase of history. How sensibly people respond to the challenges that define the period would measure whether the society could pass through the transition period or not.
Would we be navigating the current or are we being carried away by the current like mere floating mass sans gravity? If the people do not act as the agency of change, they would soon be annihilated. The one who knows the dimensionality of time can rule over the emerging forces. And those who do not know the historical development of the force would be submerged without any trace.
We must equip ourselves with comprehensive power of fathoming the dialectical relationship between today and yesterday, so that we can produce a better tomorrow we are dreaming of.
For a society like ours caught into the vortex of transition, there is always a need to understand the dimensionality of time as mentioned above so as to enable ourselves or the people of the time to fruitfully cope with the contradiction between the ways of understanding and appreciating norms, values and beliefs pertaining to yesterday and other ways of perceiving values, norms and ideals pronouncing a tomorrow qualitatively different from the one we had before.
In fact, being change agents or actors fortified with critical capacity for understanding the forces driving complex events defining the era in which they are living, rather than being mere onlookers unresponsive to the problems tying them down is all what the people standing on the edge of transition need to be in order to reproduce a productive society where they can grow and develop.
So we need to be aware of questions typifying the spirit of the era while trying to drive down a society stuck in the cross-road of transition on the right track of history, for if we fail understanding the spirit of the time, then we will be eventually thingified as a group of people incapable of intervening in the realities that have locked us up like caged animals in zoos.
Besides what has been pointed out above, it is also pertinent for the people of the time to correctly answer the question ‘what do they need to have to make themselves acquainted with epochal questions of the time in which they are living?’
From Freirean pedagogical point of view, we can call it ‘the capability of doing critical thinking’ with which the people of the time should be equipped so that they can understand critical questions governing the time. With that weapon of being conscious of things happening around them, they can effortlessly withstand the enormous speed of transition-current having the potential of rendering the society asunder.
Based on the ideas gained so far from our preceding discussions, we can unhesitatingly infer that the historical vocation of uncaging a society or a people trapped in the bog of transition needs a group of committed knowing actors who would signpost the nation the path on which it should go leading towards a qualitatively new future. Yes, a group of thinking actors who know ‘what is what’, and I preferably call them intellectual leaders.
So the people living in the particular era need to free themselves from being clasped motionlessly against the static pole called today. They need to free themselves from their own mental bondage. If they do not do so, they will never be able to withstand the current of the time. And consequently they would eventually be carried away like pieces of wood drifted by the torrents of flood water leading to what we often call ‘khongul mutpa’ (extinction or national death).
Now we can sum up that man’s ontological vocation is to be a subject or agency of change who acts upon and transform his world, and in so doing they will move towards possibilities of richer or fuller life.
And this philosophical take of course can be applied to a culturally or economically marginalized social group struggling to open their people’s eye so that they can see who are sitting on their neck preventing them from becoming more fully human. Yes!!! In their struggles of changing themselves from being-for-others to being-for-themselves.
At a certain point in the process of marginalization , the marginalized will land up in a by-road where their likes and dislikes begins to be gradually diluted and replaced by that of others, that is, by the likes and dislikes of the group riding roughshod over them.
In the long run, living such a life will make them completely disorganized about their own identity, often misleading the idea of ‘to be’ as ‘to be like others’ thus ending up with a situation a frog might have faced when it was about to be swallowed up by a snake.
If the trend continues without intervention for a decade or two, they will be entirely cut off from where they should be linked to as a group of people, active and thriving. By that point, they would become a mere bunch of schizophrenic people—spiritless and disintegrated, not even trying to raise above those marginalizing them.
Looking at world history, particularly the history of the oppressed, one could understand how the oppressed survived oppressive structures by opening their eyes to what was happening around them, that is, the way in which they had been suppressed. That is how a marginalized group of people began voicing against the practices of marginalization or dehumanization.
My point is that, the marginalized people must be taught to identify themselves as a member of a dehumanized group of people so that they can launch a war to take back their humanity from those who stole their humanity.
Quite the contrary, you might come across human groups who easily gave way to those who were dominating them instead of pushing way through obstacles coming along the way leading a new historical phase. As often witnessed in history, such social groups annihilated leaving without any trace.
So, while trying to push an incarcerated society forward by untying its people from being psychologically lassoed, the society would need a critical group of people dispassionately dealing with problems outlining the era based on ideas translatable into practices. Besides they must be knowing actors unlike those living-deaths I often mentioned who are always ready to give way to the power warping the society into pieces.
Making the ideas we have found out till now as springboard we can shift our locus of discussion to a more rationalistic and higher level. It is said that History is time filled with possibilities, but the marginalized will never see the possibilities to grow and move forward, for they have been blinded to what is going on to their lives by imposing absolute control over them by those marginalizing them.
Whenever there happens dehumanization or marginalization of a group of people by other more powerful groups, at that time the society need a few men—transformer of the world—having critical consciousness of things surrounding the reality of the state of domination.
They are the people who would teach the marginalized or rather the oppressed lessons on how they ought to live surviving the oppression? Unlike uncritical members of the society, they will never remain as mere onlookers. Instead, they devise solution and give fitting response to the challenges gradually absorbing them. They discern if they are not responding correctly to the set of challenges they are facing, they would eventually be annihilated so they give responses to the challenges.
So transition from being-for-others to being-for-themselves requires a rise of a new action unit or knowing actors committed to the set goals to reset social codes dehumanizing them by reactivating the suppressed as a group of people aware of their identity, their being acted upon, their ability to act and their power as well.
Using the principles gained so far, we can proceed to the second part of this write up, which is looking at the case of Kangleipak.
With the creation of a number of Nationalist Organizations in the post-annexation or post-merger political landscape of Kangleipak, many Kanglei sons and daughters who have often been dubbed as outlaws by the state because of the structure and contents of the organizations they are in have been protesting against the annexation of Kangleipak into the union of India in 1949 hollering out rallying cries like “Bharat na Kangleipak pu Namphuda lousinkhibani” or “Eikhoigi saktam kangadabani”.
Cutting into the catchphrases, one can obviously perceive the message overtly flagged up by Meitei Nationalists ringing in the minds of Kangleiyeits signposting “what is to be done” as the theme of our time.
But while pulling out all the stops to translate these dreams into reality, Kanglei society caught in the quagmire of Indian colonial juggernaut often faces the dilemma of mistaking “being others” for “being themselves”.
Lamentably, over the last few years illusions of mistaking ‘being others’ for ‘being themselves’ evidently seen among Kangleiyeits seem to have reached acme of distortion, landing the society up in critical states describable as culture-of-silence typically exhibited in societies withering and crumbling down.
That may be why we see many Kanglei people remaining cool, indifferent and comfy as though nothing goes wrong while watching Radha, Krishna and his Gopis dancing ‘Maibi jagoi’ off-tracking Kanglei cultural articulation besides linking our Cultural life with Hindu scriptures such as ‘Bhagavata Purana’ and ‘Geeta Govinda’.
Having seen such “crow with the peacock feather mentality’, I was pretty confused trying myself clear to the question “what would a nation get by making our people totally delinked from the soil, where their umbilical cords get buried, instead of letting them grow with forefathers’ shadow on them and anchoring their social psychology to their cultural realm not deviating from normative values grown on their own actual way of living.
Meanwhile, there have also been increasing number of Kanglei literati who barefacedly claim the dance form as continuation of Kanglei ‘tradition making’ even though they understand well how it twists our roots showcasing us before others in terms of ‘what we are not’.
This can be taken as the worst form of cultural alienation where the alienated are enthusiastically mutating their tissues and nerves into that of the alienator blurring the line between ‘we’ and ‘them’, also replacing the values constituting the alienated with values heavily based on ideals pertaining to the alienator besides annihilating their own being—the self, using their body as murder tool.
Thanks to such extremely biased ideas of culture, churning out of alienator’s highly rationalized projects of cultural and knowledge industries like television networks, universities and Research Institutes, all our attempts to identify ourselves as a group of people distinct from the alienators in terms of history, culture, racial origins and features seem to be going nowhere.
Here, it is worthwhile to recall Kanglei cultural vigilante’s strong resistance against Indian attempts pegging away to complete its unfinished nation building process in the north eastern part of India, where the people of the region are having phenotypical assets totally different from that of Indian mainlander, taking up range of policies, both the soft and the hard ones, solely aiming at to homogenize and assimilate the people living there into their larger superstructure through education, mass media and other means including the use of armed forces selling fears.
If current central government’s communally loaded and religiously wired policies outlined by dogmas such as ban on beef, intolerance, moral police, religious fanatics and rabid communalist are anything to go by, then it is safe to come to the conclusion that India keeps on putting itself out trying to put hegemonic control over small ethnic groups imposing single culture and language at the cost their identity—the socio-cultural uniqueness of ethnic groups inhabiting the region.
Asking why they grant us individual rights while denying collective or group rights, we can easily comprehend how Indian elites imagined India as a community that would share a common cultural identity based on Vedic ideals depriving NE dwellers of their rights to survive as ‘who they are’ having unique distinctiveness although it is said that India was conceived on notion of ‘unity in diversity’.
At face value it may seem skeptical while one naively try to gauge the point I’m trying to make, but a critical observer will see the hard truth that knowingly or unknowingly into the mouth of death all the ethnic groups constituting NE including Kangleichas are descending flaking off every single trait making them a group, unique and distinct.
Chafing under force of cultural domination and contingent on mistaking ‘being others’ for ‘being ourselves’, we have filled up ourselves with elements, be it cultural or ideological, constituting mainland people whom we call ‘Meetop’ symbolizing human groups standing poles apart from us.
In the process, this domination seems to have reached a complete stage where it no longer appears to be domination at all to us. Now, we no longer perceive the domination as damaging and alienating. It often seems as if what is happening to us is the way it is supposed to be.
Speaking frankly, we seem to have been so much dominated and inured to their image corrupting ‘the self’ that I sometimes feel like to look into the mirror to check if I still look like a typical Meitei having phenotypical assets like pug nose, small slanted eyes etcetera and etcetera.
Let’s relook at the specific aspects of domination we have so far discussed from angles not so new but which has often been ignored to understand it from a different perspective.
As of now ours is a society lacking capabilities of resisting these vicious cultural onslaught of the metropole as there has been severe lack of studies linking cultural atrophies with its political economy, entirely dependent on Delhi.
Yes!! That political economy making our hands to extend more and more in supplication so that more and more we become dominated and caged.
Of course, we all love to have a land of our own where we could live through our lives again like real humans without fears of losing identity, holding heads high and reliving lives laden with values making us more and more ourselves, but we often fail, why?
The answer to the question may be given as under: because we fail to develop revolutionary consciousness among us as we fail to take off the pervading impact of Indian political economy on every aspect of our life beginning with politics, ideology, economy, arts and culture and even social mores.
Transforming our self-sufficient Kanglei pre-merger political economy to a dependent economy arresting practices as respects creating her own ‘world of products’ through insinuations of a centralized economic policy deceitfully crafted by mandarins at Delhi, we have been economically trapped making us a group of people not only caged but also living at the mercy of benevolent Delhi.
So, to understand why we often fail to develop revolutionary consciousness among ourselves to render obligatory task of letting Kangleipak out of the quagmire of socio-politico domination entails such studies and analysis as finding out how Indian economic policy effects on Kanglei way of life over the last few decades.
The post-annexation Kanglei political economy is such that its productive force is completely destroyed and in the process we have been made mere bunch of people disconnected to creativity—the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality, without which we could not perceive the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connection of seemingly unrelated phenomena and generate solutions.
In such economy what they can do for living life is to embezzle or siphon off crores funded by Delhi. And you know we all are doing this, ‘we all’ means ‘we all’ including every Tomba, Chaoba and Ibobi. Yes, all of us in one way or the other.
The trend becomes even worse with every set of means of production falling off our hands. Here neither efforts nor entrepreneurship is needed but it encourages corruption and indiscretion which breeds plunderers and hostile components in the society. Now you may successfully imagine what could be the destiny of a group of people whose society is based on ‘khuju-muju’ or ‘loot-pat’.
With the process of economic strangulation where we have been shut into a dark dungeon of productivity-suppression type of economy asphyxiating the idea of ingenuity we once had when we lived with our own agro economy, the idea of dependency have come to grow tall and taller taking roots in the mind of Kanglei people and making them less and less human as time goes by.
The Economic dependency has reached an unsurpassed domination that it no longer requires deliberate actions on the part of Indian leaders. The people of Kangleipak have become a group of people heavily hooked on the economic doles of India that they cannot even think of a life without Delhi. And this can be taken as one of the many reasons why our people cast their votes for the party holding the rein of power in New Delhi as recently seen in the by polls recently held in Manipur where BJP candidates Thongam Bisorjit singh and Khumukcham Joykisan won the Thongju and Thangmeiband seats respectively defeating the candidates representing state ruling party congress as it is the BJP, not the Congress, which is now holding the reins of power in Delhi.
Chafing under such economic realities coupled with cultural assimilation, at a certain point in our existential experience we seem to be irresistibly attracted towards Indian socio-cultural life, although we feel the need of developing a revolutionary consciousness among us in order to allow our minds understand the negative impact of the socio-economic realities on every aspects of our life.
Now living like mainland Indians has become an overriding fashion among Kangleiyeits that in the recent past we came to witness a new form of exogamy popularly known as emerging trend of “Mayang da yum panba” distinct from the ones we had known earlier in its context where eligible Meitei Nupis are getting married outside the community negatively impacting on Kanglei reproduction process which has already been threatened by the onslaught of migrant population.
Living with such socio-economic structure making them live for others can be taken as the highest form of alienation —being estranged from being oneself, leading Kanglei people to a psychic state fervently internalizing values preventing them from becoming ‘beings for themselves’.
Now this trend of ‘Mayangda yum panba’ becomes worse with every set of means of production falling off our hands that we have seen many meitei parents giving their approvals of arranging marriage of their daughters with mayang nupas in their own summang transgressing cultural barrier.
As I framed my argument, this trend can be viewed as a phenomenal offshoot of a colossally distorted thought about almost every social behavior as a by-product of the fast-track collapse of economic base of Kangleipak.
Going back to the post-merger socio-cultural contours in Kangleipak, you can successfully make heads or tails of how we had been disconnected to our roots linking Kangleichas to a neatly boxed set of values thrived on the political economy associated with Vedic culture preventing us from living as who we are.
Submerged in a completely dependent economic reality where every set of our means of production has fallen off our hands, we have landed up in such a situation where we cannot help but accept mainland Indian culture, religion and philosophy lionizing their way of life and also justifying the domination they have over us.
And it was them, Kanglei political elites, who traded in, lionized and promoted mainland culture in Kanglei societal set-up only to facilitate their easy access to the crores funded by New Delhi in the name of development.
This is the way how the identity of group of people locked in the proverbial lasso of ‘critical dependency’ has been transmuted into the group of the people spoon-feeding them. This critical dependency reduces them into things and in the process they destroy their humanity. In other words, critical dependency prevents the people of Kangleipak from being more fully humans.
This barrier imposed on Kanglei people preventing them from being a group of people having a distinct culture and linking to their own roots can be termed as limit-situation—a situation limiting them from being a Kangleicha.
A critical situation it is, where Kanglei people’s choice has no longer been their own choice but misplaced and disconnected to heart—the inner being. Deprived of their own power of decision, they only follow the prescriptions prescribed by mandarins in Delhi who are riding roughshod over Kanglei people including political elites.
Overshadowed by the delusion of ‘being for others’ as a product of fast-track collapse of the economic base of Kangleipak, they do not see the new man as a person to be born from unshackling the economic hawser putting them in irons.
Here we can recall what Rajen Toijamba, a famous Kanglei playwright, said in his play ‘Lanpung gi pungkol’ which was one of the most popular Shumang leela of the late 1980s, where it sparked up flickering flames of nationalism in the minds of young Kangleichas. The dialogue goes as: Meechak Chare, Mephi Shetle, Meetou Tamle, Meewa Ngangle.
A rough translation of the dialogue goes as: ‘feeding ourselves with imported grains, wearing clothes woven outside, speaking foreign language, imitating others.
Having Reached at such a point of critical dependency Kangleichas can no longer discover themselves as a human group oppressed and dominated as their perception about themselves as a caged people has been obliterated submerging into the reality of domination.
Here half of their being hates being dominated, while the other half loves to merge them. This is how the ruling classes co-opt the parties in opposition thus artificially obliterating the principle of contradiction.
Impending result of the current situation is that the oppressed will turn into sub-oppressors oppressing his own people as we have how politically uneducated class in the lowest stratum of Kanglei societal set-up collaborators of the oppressor.
This is a condition marked by ‘those whose humanity has been stolen (common people) and by those who have stolen it (ruling class) which leads to both oppressor and oppressed living a dehumanizer and dehumanized life which prevent both classes from developing their full potential reducing both to the state of animal—one being too cruel, and the other too crushed and crumpled.
And the above idea of dehumanization, where one group steals other’s humanity by making the latter completely dependent on the former, can be referred to while one tries to find out the reason why Kanglei people are looking so compressed, hollowed, fearful and disintegrated.
As the people of Kangleipak including political elites located in the uppermost most stratum of the society have completely adapted to the purpose which the Delhi mandarins prescribe for them depriving them of the right to their own purpose, Delhi mandarins can easily continue to prescribe perpetuating their domination over kagleichas leading to a situation where all Kangleiyeites have been alienated from their own being, the self. Under such situation they will never get a chance of see their individuality or creativity in objectified form.
For instance, the elected representative of Kangleipak cannot even make the armed forces special powers act (AFSPA) more human to make peoples they represent regain their lost humanity warped in decades long process of dehumanization where many Kanglei sisters had been raped and thousands Kanglei ‘Maparis’ killed, for the mandarins at Delhi do not want ‘the act’ diluted.
So the only thing left within their capacity is doing farcical things like spreading out an umbrella when it is raining there in Delhi besides indulging in mores not accepted normatively or going away from ideal norms and acts driven by animal instincts like having concubine and more than one wife, spending conspicuously their ill-gotten money and being drunk and disorderly in public places as we often done by Kanglei THIKEDAR and RAJNITIWALA.
Consequent on the process pointed out above, they (Kanglei elites) become frustrated and exasperated that their inner beings have gradually started to die out inside them .They have hands but chained; Feet have they, but never took a walk; neither can they voice or reason out what they like.
This can be taken as the worst form of alienation men ever had in history—being alienated from their own being—where they can neither create their own material world nor a world of idea that involves the products of arts, aesthetics, science and religion—all the creations having ideational existence—objectifying their individuality rather than indulging in activities driven by animal instincts like gratifying carnal desires , keeping more than one wife, drinking like swine, playing ducks and drakes with their ill-gotten money and the like.
Being sub-oppressor, Kanglei bureaucrats and political elites become more of a tyrant towards his own people (Kangleiyeits) than the real oppressors themselves. They have, in order to make sure of the job entrusted to them by Delhi mandarins, need to be as cruel as Indian armies or more so.
The recently revealed fact that the ‘Police Commando Units’ popularly known as “Manipur Commando” in Manipur has involved in more than 1500 cases of fake encounter killings in the last few decades bear testimony to how our own people can be crueler than Indian security forces.
As already pointed out, the people of Kangleipak not excluding elites, shaped by the death –affirming climate of domination, have been devastated in their socio-economic and political life precisely because their existential situation of complete dependency on economic doles has reduced them to things. We have been thingified. In order to regain their humanity they need to cease to be things.
In a land like Manipur where a group of people who are sub-humans by every definition rule over semi-humans—thingified and compressed— it is more than clear that the total energy that the society has is too small to propel the society through the whirlpool of transition answering ingeniously to the challenges of the era..
To surmount these critical situations, we need to reeducate ourselves rearming with aptitudes for critical thinking that would probably enable us to pull ourselves out of the jaws of death— the wide opening jaws of domination. For this, people must recognize the critical economic dependency with which they are living as its cause, so that through transformation action they can create a new situation making us a human group who are no longer feeding ourselves with imported grains, wearing clothes woven outside, speaking foreign language and imitating others.