It is a truism that human aspirations and conditions, like everything else, are moving targets. What one generation conceived as their prized collective goal, hated adversary, or trusted ally may not remain so for the generations that follow. In fact, they seldom do.
However, indigenous societies—which most in the Northeast belong to—often refuse to acknowledge this, trapping themselves in peculiar time warps. They may have moved on in the real world. But mentally, they often allow themselves to remain stuck in eras several decades gone, the departure points from which are etched in their collective memory by pivotal historical events.
This is the broad profile of the region’s grapple with modernity—brought in first by the British administration, and refined and democratised by independent India. The dilemma is reminiscent of iconic Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, where he conceptualises the agonising predicament indigenous African communities faced at the advent of modernity, represented in that case by the arrival and spread of Christianity.
Without doubt, the new world brought with it dividends in terms of education, health, wealth and science. But it also replaced the older, familiar ways of life and their entrenched values.
Much of the ethnic unrest the Northeast witnesses today has this at its roots. The resistance against replacing customary land laws with modern revenue administration or the violent clashes over claims of primacy of one tribe’s customary law over that of others are just some examples of this complex maze of conflict scenarios in a multiethnic geography.
Manipur is where this dynamic is playing out most prominently. But nobody in the Northeast will doubt that similar faultlines lie dormant in every Northeast state as frozen conflicts with fuses still practically intact.
While change is inevitable, as Nari Kaikhosru Rustomji, a civil servant who worked in the Northeast during the turbulent years of India’s transition from a colony to a republic, recommended, these changes must be paced out so that those affected can absorb the changes without detriment to their own social organism.
Such empathetic and academically-detached observations are helpful in deciphering the volatile situation in the Northeast. But today, a multiplying number of self-ordained experts, who presume patronising foreknowledge of the region’s issues, are spoiling the broth. Annoying paratrooping reportages of the prolonged Manipur crisis demonstrated this.
The bigger challenge, however, is for the region’s communities to introspect and come to terms with their new reality. All must change—preferably on consensually evolved terms of law that leave no party feeling like a loser. Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson’s seminal 1983 book arguing that the nation is an “imagined community”—and therefore also given to reimagining—is a helpful reminder. A century before him, French scholar Ernest Renan also anticipated this necessity for change in his 1882 lecture ‘What is a nation?’, where he concluded that the nation is a “daily plebiscite”.
At the time of Indian independence, upheavals broke out among many Northeast communities who were outraged over their traditional notions of sovereignty being overturned. Many of them hardened into violent insurgencies. After the lapse of eight decades, should it now not be time to rethink and realign to the shifts their original targets would have undergone? Are the grievances of that era still those of the present generation?
The past is very much real—and a traumatic past is even more unforgettable. The important and difficult question, therefore, always is how any society with a painful past would leave it behind—without disowning it or its contributions—so that the present can move forward unfettered.
Sigmund Freud’s famous 1917 essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, addresses this problem to identify two broad strategies that people use to cope with grief and loss. Some get trapped in melancholia, by taking perverse gratification in their very idea of victimhood and by pointing accusatory fingers at the perceived perpetrators of their grief.
In Freud’s mourning, loss is born differently. Unlike in melancholia, the mourner keeps the dead past and living present apart, so that the living can bid farewell and move ahead.
There have been many outstanding explorations of this psychological theme in literature and cinema. In Cathy Caruth’s collection of essays, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History—which critiques Alain Resnais’s 1959 film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour—does exactly this. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 thriller Marnie and Christopher Nolan’s 2010 Hollywood hit Inception are a few more prominent examples.
Inception is illustrative. In this science-fiction thriller, beyond the cinematic adventures, the protagonist is shown as burdened with guilt that the idea of a better world beyond the present, which he held and communicated to his wife, may have been a factor behind her death by suicide. He comes to be haunted by her in his dreams.
Technology is available for travelling deep into the subconscious mind through layers of dreams within dreams. The deepest is beyond the fourth layer, but is dangerous because the dreamer may not be able to awaken back to the conscious world. The protagonist does it nonetheless and meets his wife there, where he tells her he was wrong about the life beyond life, that he was sorry, and that he will love her always—but they cannot be together because she is dead and he is still alive and has to move on. That journey to the past comes to terms with a painful truth, and becomes his purge.
Communities in the Northeast, too, must find the way to leave behind their past with disowning it, and reconcile with their present. Their targets of 80 years ago would have moved, and they must readjust aims to not be destined to always miss them.
Quite naturally, there will also be vested interests of many who are benefitting from the status quo as hurdles, and these too would have to be overcome. The wisdom in the thought that the Northeast is an ‘imagined community’ needing the metaphoric periodic plebiscite cannot be ignored. Otherwise, the region would end up perpetually fighting symptoms of the larger malaises characterised by Freud’s melancholia.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)
