The intriguing nature of identity continues to fascinate scholars and politicians alike even to this day. Endless reams of newsprint spent on the subject as well as endless series of scholarships on it haven’t been able to bring about a conclusive answer to what must be one of the most vexing problems of the modern world. If it were not so, there would be no need and reason why new thoughts and books on the subject still has a huge market. Identity still matters, and sometimes for what are seemingly unintelligible reasons. What then are the deciding factors of identity? Is it language, race, ethnicity, religion, geography, culture? While all of them are constituents, none or any permutation and combination or them, seem to be sufficient explanation for the phenomenon of identity.
Every year, speeches at the memorial function of the 18 young men and women who lost their lives in the June 18, 2001 uprising to save Manipur’s territorial integrity never fail to be revealing in this regard. Leaders of many smaller tribes in the state especially have always been emphatic about identity being a matter of choice, asserting they would in the present juncture neither want to be identified with any generic group classifications, and instead remain as themselves independently. We also know how many others in the past have, by the same principle, chose to belong to any one of these generic groupings, and these choices have today come to stay. The point however remains identity at one point of other has been rather a volitional choice than destiny.
Benedict Anderson, in his influential 1983 book “Imagined Communities” has more examples of this paradoxical idea of “choosing or else assigning identity”. The question of the Caucasian European settlers in Latin America, especially the Mulattos who are mostly Spanish and Portuguese, who immediately lost not just their citizenships of their mother countries once they settled in the South American colonies, but also their primary Spanish or Portuguese identities is one such. Although speaking the languages of their mother countries, belonging to the same race and espousing the same cultures, they were presumed to have acquired a separate identity, and the distinctions came to be rigorously and sometimes brutally maintained. Similarly, it would be worthwhile noting that the war of independence that Americans fought was against their own forefathers.
It is also noteworthy that in 1947, when India was partitioned, some Bihari Muslims opted to migrate to the then East Pakistan, believing idealistically they were choosing to be part of a Muslim nation. They soon found out they had walked into what was primarily a Bengali nation. Their dilemma is written large in the fact that when the Bangladesh war of independence commenced in 1971, they ended up siding with Pakistan. Today these Bihari Muslims, numbering about 10,000, are an issue for international human rights organisations like the Amnesty International to tackle, having been deprived of even Bangladesh citizenship, although bona fide residents of the country since the time of its birth. We in the northeast also know of how a conflict between religious and linguistic identities at the time of the Indian partition led to the unfair situation of the Sylhet and Manmesing with a huge Hindu population ending up as a part of East Pakistan.
The point again is, there is nothing intrinsic about identity. It is a matter of choice and acceptance by others. Let us then stop all these cock and bull stories of “time immemorial” affiliations and blood brotherhood as the basis of identity. If a genetic mapping of the peoples in the region were to be done, let here be no doubt a lot of the identity myths would be blown apart. Let the separateness of identities remain, but if everybody was open enough, these differences should be no cause for any fundamental conflicts of interests, as many are making it seem to be. “Identity as a choice”, also offers hope. It means, we can evolve rational choices rather than the blind, impulsive ones adhered to by most.
Once this issue is put up on the rational, discursive space, meaningful discourses and negotiations can begin. The postulate of layered identities by Amartya Sen in “Identity and Violence: Illusion of Destiny” says as much. For instance a Meitei can be a Meitei, a Manipuri, a Northeasterner, an Indian, an Asian, a human etc, in widening concentric sets, without any one of these components coming into conflict with each other. If everybody begins to see identity in this light, conflicts, probably all conflicts everywhere, will begin to transform for the better.
This however is not easy. Identity question has in the pat always fired the wrong passion and continues to do so. Few works of art have more convincingly portrayed the irreconcilability of racial identities than in French existentialist author Albert Camus well known short story, “The Guest” set against the backdrop of the Algerian resistance movement against French colonialism.
In it, a white school teacher, by ancestry a Frenchman, but in every other sense of the word a son of the Algerian soil, who even disregarded and disobeyed government overtures to coopt him in the fight to subdue the rebellion, discovers to his profound sorrow how unbridgeable the divide between the races are in a graffiti message on the blackboard written by his students and directed at him. It is a beautiful picture of the human spiritual and psychological landscape the artist paints, bringing out its complex nuances without attempting any serious analysis as to how or why things were as they were.
Then along came the scientists to do the reductive and deconstructive analyses as it were. Sudhir Kakkar’s “Colours of Violence” in many ways is an explanation of such a divide, although his term of reference is neither Algeria nor Camus’ writings. Instead, Kakkar, who calls himself a “pragmatic liberal and an agnostic mystic” studies the phenomenon of communal riots in India between the Hindus and Muslims, and comes to the conclusion that there is something much deeper and fundamental in the identity divide than the usual explanation that it is a fallout of sinister machination of colonial politics.
He does not align with the rabid hatred and paranoiac sense of persecution preached by fanatical religious leaders and politicians, but all the same takes pains to point out the shallowness of the liberal view of history as a function of the present – that the past is malleable and the shape it takes will depend on the interpretation of the present to suit its conveniences. While this does happen, it fails to explain too many problematic points. Why would the identity divides persist amongst communities after generations of sharing and living together, as Camus so poignant brings out in “The Guest” or affinities in familial and social bonding remain after generations of separation and radically different social engineering as in the case of East and West Germans that Kakkar cites in his book.
In the wake of an increase in the concern for ethnic identity question often bordering on xenophobia, this debate is extremely relevant – both to understand the dynamics at work that led to the cataclysm, but more importantly, to build the foundation for future government policies to prevent more such tragedies. A bit of such debates does happen occasionally on the public forums such as those provided by the media, but it needs to be taken further. Does the divide exist only at the instrumental level or is there something more fundamental?
The answer to this question is important, for on it would depend on the soundness of government policies, and consequently the health of future relations between the communities. We are of the opinion that it is important for the government to acknowledge both the instrumental as well as primordial factors in the making of group identities, and then evolve effective administrative policies. Integrate what can be integrated immediately but give time to other areas that require more time before the idea of a gradual but inevitable coming together of identities becomes acceptable to them.
This also means, there must be graceful allowance for distinctness where total integration cannot be achieved without detriment to the social organisms. In the emphasis on making only politically correct statements, the danger is of neglecting (or else ignoring) uncomfortable but all the same undeniable constituents of the problem. Such deliberate or unintended oversights can only come to be stumbling blocks in the way of a lasting resolution to the problem.
We can think of the picture of the ostrich hiding its head in the sand to describe the situation. In tackling this problem, the bull must be taken by the horns, and this would entail acknowledging and addressing the uncomfortable realities as well. One of these is the often-expressed apprehension that a radical alteration in the demographic profile of not just Manipur, but the entire Northeast region, may end up marginalising local populations. This is not a question of being subversive to national interest, as many slavish loyalists so fastidiously claims is the case. In fact, Manipur and the other Northeast states must engage the Union government in this debate for a more comprehensive future demography policy.
So then, what must our understanding of the Manipuri identity be? Should the term be seen as denoting a culture, a domicile status, ethnicity or a language? On the last proposition, there ought not to be any dispute. The term does signify a language. But it is in any attempt to interpret it beyond the confines of the language it represents, that we begin skating on thin ice.
The postmodernist approach to the problem of identity as elucidated by French Philosopher, Michel Foucault, should throw valuable light. Foucault, author of such classics as “The Birth of the Clinic” was basically reinterpreting the extremist feminist movement in Europe of his time and the Marxist class-based social structuring. However, the logic he arrives at in his analysis of these issues should be quite comfortably applicable in the ethnic situation as well.
Very briefly, Foucault diagnoses the problem of the traditional understanding of identity to be in its being necessarily linked to power. The assumption has always been that there will always be a binary between the strong and weak with the strong grabbing all power, and this power equation would be linked up or else colour the identity issue. Hence there would be the male-female, proletariat-bourgeoisie, oppressor-oppressed dualities, and within these broad categories there would also be a numerous and progressive sub-fragmentation of categories: hill-valley, tribal-non-tribal, Meitei-Mayang and so on, so that the identity question becomes an extension of these concentric circles of power struggles. In Foucault’s model, power politics and identity are de-linked. He even flags the idea that there is nothing intrinsic and permanent about identity and that it is a free floating, perpetual negotiation with the ever-evolving social reality.
Let us try applying the postmodernist scale and indulge in a little deconstruction of some of the traditional understanding of identity in our situation. As for instance, if we de-link the term “Manipuri” from its traditional ethno-political connotations and then view it through the postmodernist prism, what would it mean? Would it still be ethnic specific? The same approach may be employed in trying to understand the term Indian, and indeed a lot many liberals have been doing just this.
It is also true that there have been counter currents to such approaches to the issue. An analogy perhaps will place the proposition on firmer grounds. The contrast between the term “Manipuri” or “Indian” linked to all their traditional ethno-cultural-political connotations and the same terms as free-floating processes of negotiations that Foucault calls identity, would be similar to the contrast between the concepts Hindutva and Hinduism or Zionism and Judaism. While Hinduism is open-ended and free-floating, Hindutva is not. The first is religion, the second is a politics of power at its core. The same is the truth in the contrast between Judaism and Zionism.
Hence, the term “Manipuri” in the traditional understanding is linked inextricably to its own politics of power, and the proposition that this column is putting up before all interested in a discourse on the issue is, we should introspect and see what it would be like if we genuinely tried to deconstruct our traditional understanding of the term and make it a free-floating negotiation into which all of us clubbed into a common predicament by history and geography can find a respectable place. What we run into may in all likelihood be a new reality purged of many of our festering and endemic problems. The same experiment may conjure up a new visage of the Indian identity as well.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
