Is identity primordial or is it a dynamic construct that’s constantly evolving? The fact is, different identities are formed at different stages of history, but can there be anything as a primordial identity? Did the Chinese of today always consider themselves Chinese through the ages, or were Indians always Indians? Of course, if this timeline were to be pushed back far enough, all without exception were once unicellular amoebas living in ancient oceans.
This friction between constantly evolving identities, each presuming they were in existence from ‘time immemorial’, shows up in intriguing ways—even in many of the micro canvases of conflict in the Northeast. In 1929, when the Simon Commission visited Kohima, Naga leaders of the time presented a memorandum to the commission explaining why Nagas were not Indians. Interestingly, among the Naga leaders who signed the memorandum was a gentleman who is no longer considered a Naga, but is identified as a Kuki.
Similarly, in 1756, when King Alaumpaya of Ava (Burma), founder of the powerful Konbaung dynasty of 11 kings, raided Manipur to avenge past raids from this kingdom toppling his predecessor dynasty Toungoo, he brought along an interesting map of Manipur that showed two principalities, Moirang and Kangla. The former was marked as a friend and the latter as a foe. After the Burmese were repulsed, it was King Bhagyachandra who united the two principalities to ensure both ultimately acquired a common Meitei identity.
Such stories are aplenty in every community and all indicate there is nothing organic or intrinsic about identity. Its mystic is often compared to an onion that no doubt has a definite presence, but if anybody tries to find out what is at its core, the discovery will be of nothing inside.
Yet, the idea of community identity as primordial and not acquired cannot be dismissed easily, for the roots of many of the most bitter and violent conflicts history has seen stem from the imagination of exclusive and primordial community identities. Affiliation to a community identity, as Jolle Demmers quotes from several scholars and scientists, represents the individual’s longing for permanence.
In the world of arts, few works have more convincingly portrayed the absurdity and uniqueness of racial and nationalistic identities than the French existentialist author Albert Camus. In his short story, The Guest, set against the backdrop of the Algerian resistance movement against French colonialism, he poignantly shows how.
A white school teacher, a Frenchman by ancestry but in every other sense a son of Algerian soil who even disowns the colonial French government’s overtures to co-opt him in the fight to subdue local insurrections, discovers to his profound sorrow how unbridgeable the divide between the races is in a graffiti message on a school blackboard written by his own students issuing a veiled threat to him that all oppressors will soon be shown the door. The tragic reality of exclusionary nationalism could not have been told better.
Sudhir Kakar’s Colours of Violence, in many ways, is an explanation of this divide. Kakar, who calls himself a “pragmatic liberal and an agnostic mystic”, studies the phenomenon of communal riots in India between Hindus and Muslims. He comes to the conclusion that there is something much deeper and more fundamental in the identity divide than the usual explanation that these are a fallout of sinister machination of colonial politics. Why else would the identity divide persist among communities after generations of sharing and living together, as Camus shows in The Guest? Why would familial and social bonding remain after generations of separation and radically different social engineering as in the case of the East and West Germans, Kakar asks.
The multiplication of identity assertions in modern times also has to do with the democratisation of education, for it opened up the mental horizons of previously closed worlds of backward and illiterate ethnic communities whose social affiliations did not extend beyond clans and villages. Their awareness of themselves in relation to the new and larger world changed and the answer to the Hegelian question ‘Who am I?’ would have acquired new significance as well. New experiences, new visions, new vocabularies and a new understanding of the self would have deepened the query.
The problem is compounded. As the previously ‘non-state-bearing populations’, as James C Scott described them, wake up to the reality of nationhood, they invariably find themselves enclosed in previously formed national identities. This has been at the root of many insurgencies in the Northeast as also the competitive ethnic identity assertions, and with it, claims of ancestral territorial domains, imagined or otherwise, often leading to violent conflicts. Manipur is no stranger to this. The obvious challenge before India as well as almost all states of the Northeast is about how these multiplying identity affiliations are to be accommodated into a larger consensual identity.
Of the Northeast states, it is probably the three erstwhile kingdoms—Assam, Tripura and Manipur—that are burdened the most with this peculiar identity crisis. The problem is evident in the ambiguity in the answer to the question of who is an Assamese, Tripuri or Manipuri, for these identities generally point to their once-ruling communities, often at the neglect of the newly awakened identities within them. Their challenge, therefore, is to redefine their collective identity to make them consensual and representative.
Eric Hobsbawm in Fractured Times could not have said this better. In several of the essays in this collection, one idea recurs. German Jews before the second world war were eager to integrate with the German identity. However, they wanted to assimilate not with the German nation but with the German middle-class. Hobsbawm does not deny the importance of the power nationalism commands, nonetheless feels the need for its moderation.
The middle-class, which generally cuts across community lines, and is united by professional pursuits and driven by a desire for achievement and excellence, can be the hope in this project of striking a balance between nationalism and a consensual, constitutionally-determined identity even in the most diverse nations.
(Views are personal)
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics