Destroying Manipur: All Round Jeopardy

By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Dec 2:

As a student of Social Science, I recall many things of our growing up. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, I did see the exchange interactions between the Meeteis and the Khongjais. This interaction was of course qualitatively and frequency-wise different from the one between the Nagas and the Meeteis, but it was there of course. Secondly, during the late 1960s, as a growing-up boy, I could witness the enthusiasm and collective participation in the Green Revolution of the elders in my locality. Thirdly, what we have witnessed in sports performance of our athletes during the last sixteen months belie the high social disturbances during this period. In fact, a senior Economist of international repute, and who have been in significant commissions of India, just remarked to me that “Amar, this is the core strength of your society. These politicians cannot destroy your society completely.” I felt good to hear this kind of a comment. But simultaneously, I am afraid that it cannot be so for long.
Going back over centuries and decades, we all know what is being stated everywhere in the globe that Manipur’s is a society founded on culture. Without getting into the debate on what ‘culture’ means, we can assert definitively that Manipur has been following certain ethos (call it cultural behavioural mannerisms) evolved over the millennia. This ensured social stability and establishment of foundations for socio-economic activity. In this ethos, we need to take note of two things. First, the emphasis on quality is unmistakable. Second, doing for doing’s sake has always been socially rebuked: “Mit naba thabak khuttou touganu (Your activity/performance should not be an irritant to the viewer)”.So, an emphasis on quality in every performance was the established social ethos. The sustenance of this emphasis can only be achieved if there is a focus on knowledge of things and performance of activities.
In fact, the early achievement on Green Revolution and the high performance in sports can only be rationalised by acknowledging the innate emphasis on knowledge.
When the contemporary emphasis on knowledge economy emerged, Manipur was not taken by a big surprise; there was some surprise, but not a big one incapable of addressing by the land and people of Manipur. Looking at the historical experience of participation in the struggle for survival in the comity of nations, Manipur is a prime example of having digested quite early in social evolution the Nobel Prize Winner Kenneth Arrow’s (1962) dictum: “Every country or firm must have education and training in technology and science, even if the research is not on par with that being conducted elsewhere. Knowledge cannot be absorbed unless some knowledge is already possessed.”
In this background, culture has been emphasised as either the facilitator or inhibitor of imbibing knowledge. Knowledge is now understood as the process of change instead of as a static concept. This is exactly what has happened in the larger frame of culture of Manipur where the beauties of ethos and components from distances have been absorbed and followed in the dailiness of social functioning. While wars could have been there in the past, this new culture is more of a culture of peace. To put it in a different way, the peace component and orientation of culture have been the dominant social ethos and practice for the Manipuris for more than a century. While talking of culture, what Rivera (2009) has said: “it might be more accurate to speak of building cultures of peacemaking. Further, we are referring not only to things such as language, or a set of beliefs and common practices, but also to complex wholes that include governmental policies, economic and justice systems, relations with the environment, social inequalities, etc. In this sense, culture is a system with interacting parts; we cannot change one element without affecting others.”
Manipur immediately and necessarily comes to mind while Reading Giblett’s (2008)The Body of Nature and Culture: “Land and body are intimately inter-related. The ways in which we talk about one are often drawn from, or couched in, the ways (and terms)in which we talk about the other. Both are a rich source of metaphor for figuring and understanding the other. We talk about tongues of land, of a mountain range as a backbone, of rivers as arteries of commerce and communication, of arms and legs as limbs like tree branches, of torsos as trunks, of mouths of rivers, and so on. Clichés like ‘the bowels of the earth’ referring to aquifers and wetlands, and ‘the lungs of the city’ referring to parks and recreation areas are not only the stock-in-trade of the creatively bereft and stylistically outmoded but also indicative of the major source we mine for metaphors of land and places on, or in, it.”
But everything seems to be collapsing in Manipur. First, the inherited social strength of orientation towards knowledge has been made to look like almost disappearing. In knowledge, the most important agency is learning, and it is exactly this learning which has been terribly compromised. While terminal education can be adjusted to matters of convenience, early education is to be invariably provided at the appropriate ages of the emerging new generation. Second, this de-emphasising knowledge creation and learning is accompanied by ignoring the culture of peace which facilitated the shared social advancement. Third, the offshoot of multiple negative interplays has been the unfortunate social decline in the credibility of the Civil Society Organisations. Fourth, very painfully at that, the public do not now have a belief in the government as it was earlier.
This immediately attracts the question as to who is to be blamed for this transition from development with a culture of peace towards devastation oriented culture of war. Without wasting time, we can say that the State (in the political-economic sense) has failed in Manipur. The solution to the Manipur social crisis lies in the State rediscovering herself. Manipur is now, unless corrective actions are immediately taken, what Dante feared in his the Divine Comedy: