Paradise Lost?

Not with an intent to deflate the pride Manipuris by and large take in the notion of their home Manipur, but definitely so as to make them not to go overboard with the idea that their land is a Paradise lost, we throw in the following cautions. So many are quick to jump to the passionate conclusion that to critique the so-believed “Golden Past” of Manipur is to be unpatriotic and blasphemous.

The wide spread nature of this passion and consequently the shared opinion that to go against this passion amounts to a betrayal of the revered past, and with it, our venerated forefathers, have in a quiet way, emptied our public domain of a discursive space critical enough of all and every agenda facing the state.

Nobody for instance would be able to question that this “Golden Land” may not have been as golden after all, or that the Kangla as the seat of a feudal power, would have to have been by its very definition, in some way or the other, represented the dark side of power, as indeed every seat of power must.

It for instance would have seen, and we also know from relatively recent history that it did see, political intrigues, patricides and fratricides in the struggle for sibling supremacy amongst the royalties etc.

It also would have seen extremely cruel, repressive penalties meted out to commoners for insubordination and other passive and active challenges and contestations to the reins of power.

These cruelties may have been acceptable logic at the time, and necessary strategy to ensure the existence of a centralised bureaucracy with the king at its apex, but by modern standards of human rights and democratic practices, these would have no other definition than a demonstration of despotism.

It is no consolation that no other pre-modern States would have fared any better.

Indeed if a human development index were to be taken of the pre-modern (ironically also often coinciding with the pre-colonial era), the findings would probably show abysmal records for most of these pre-colonial States, and the “Golden Land” of Manipur could not have been any exception.

For instance, as to what would have been the scenarios in child mortality rate, death of mother and/or infant at childbirth, average life expectancy, quality of healthcare, conditions of surface communication etc in those days is imaginable.

In fact these scenarios pass down as a legacy of collective memory edified in oral traditions of documentation, both formal as in royal chronicles etc, and informal as in the grandmother’s tales before the family hearth (phunga wari) etc.

From these inherited archetypal memories, we know for instance that simple water borne diseases such as cholera and other perfectly preventable and curable epidemics such as typhoid were terrors capable of decimating populations. Their causes were also often mysteries attributed to evil spirits or angers of deities etc, and hence their treatments too bordered on the occult.

Nobody is saying that the age of reason and enlightenment, with its strong belief in science as the only way to paradise that 18th Century Europe can be attributed to have gifted to the rest of the world, has solved every human problem.

Even within this same European frame, disillusionment with the promises of enlightenment is now commonplace in social studies, arts, architecture etc.

In fact the postmodern movement in the Western world in general is a child of this disillusionment. The point that one is making is, to presume that the past of our society was an embodiment of the paradise that the enlightenment age promised would be preposterous and untenable.

But something of this preposterous illusion is what is evident in the faith in the “Golden Past” of Manipur that so many so unquestioningly advocate.

The past was part of a process which had a logic only in the context of the time. A nostalgia for a return to it cannot be a solution for present problems. It is the present and the future that the present generation ought to make itself accountable to.

To admit that our forefathers were poor and archaic, if this indeed was the case, is to be brave. Instead to befool ourselves that they were children of scientific enlightenment when perfectly neutral human development indexes tell a different story, would be an insult to them for the very reason that we are unable to accept them as they were and be proud of them for what they were and their gifts to us.