The prospect of writing history, especially when it involved wars, must be so much the simpler for those who won. In fact, it is often said, and convincingly too, that in wars nothing else matters but winning. A powerful outlook, not easily refutable, but nevertheless one which is behind very mean approaches to life, such as the conviction held by so many that the end justifies the means, or everything is fair in love and war.
So much has changed ever since wars were the primary determinants of the progress and status of nations, and now, even the vanquished are back on their feet, writing their own histories and providing perspectives which once were never given the place they deserve. The decolonization process of colonies established by conquests is complete at least physically and politically, and all former colonies are now liberated, although psychologically colonial legacies still remain as dark shadows.
The abiding spirit in these modern democratized times is no longer one of “end justifies means” but of equality and empowerment as guarantors of justice. But if historiography of the conquerors was marked by a general arrogance, the prospect of history writing by the newly arisen vanquished, is beset with other problems. The need of the latter is to resurrect a dead and defeated spirit. The effort must hence also be to overcome the trauma of defeat, and to rediscover lost pride in the self (or manhood for the want of a better term).
The understandable resort is often to lionise almost unconditionally their heroes and with the same brush vehemently demonise their vanquishers. The danger is, this path to rediscovery of the self may not be always truthful. Not only can this leave gaping holes in scholarship trends, but also make the resurrected self still not enough in grip of reality, increasing in the process the complexes suffered by this new self.
Manipur’s rewriting of its own postcolonial history has not been free of this inherent scholastic weakness too. A metaphorical journey to the past and a date with the subjects of today’s history, just as Ratan Thiyam does in his much acclaimed “Nine Hills One Valley”, awakening Manipur’s Maichous (scholars who wrote the puyas) from their graves for a discourse on the times, may be the kind of purging that is essential today.
Overcoming the trauma of a vanquished past is not by any means an easy task. For it to be successful, it must involve intense, even painful, internal discourses before the final liberation can happen. This liberation can come about only when the subject is able to face the truth without any camouflage and then build from that foundation.
Few have argued this point more convincingly than Prof. Cathy Caruth of the John Hopkins University in her book “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History” (John Hopkins University Press 1996). In the chapter “Literature and the Enactment of Memory”, she does a critique of the documentary “Hiroshima Mon Amour” by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras.
The story is about a French woman who went through an agonising experience during the German occupation of France, who comes to Hiroshima after the war to try and understand the horror the city went through, in a bid to quiet her own soul.
She had during the German occupation, fallen in love with a German soldier, and the day France was liberated, her lover was lynched before her very eyes, so that the day France was liberated was also her day of personal agony. On the days that followed the killing of her lover, France was celebrating victory, providing a cruel contrast between joy and agony, and in the process accentuating her own personal trauma. Not long after, France and rest of the world celebrated again, this time the news was of the atoms bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marking another historic victory.
The documentary revolves around her discourse with an intimate Japanese friend in Hiroshima. All the while the memory of her previous agonising love affair remained a private memory, until at one point she narrates it to the Japanese lover. The experience was at once of relief at shedding a load from her chest, but also of an intense sense of betrayal to her past lover. The problematic question that Prof. Caruth poses at this point is, just how do you tell a history of personal trauma truthfully without this sense of betrayal? It is a question relevant to all nations and communities whose histories have seen the trauma of defeat and humiliation.
Rightness of Things
Ratan Thiyam grapples this dilemma in another of his celebrated play, “Kurukshetragi Peerang”, (The Tears of Kurukshetra). This revolves around just one word of Panchali (Draupadi) – “dharma”.
The play is based on the Mahabharat, but it is not straight out of the narrative of the Hindu epic. On the other hand, it is an extrapolation of what might have been the nature of the agony suffered by those who survived the war, especially women. The chief characters are hence, Gandhari the mother of the 100 Kaurava brothers who lost the war and their lives, Kunti the mother of the victorious five Pandavas brothers but lost a son, Karna, born out of wedlock and therefore abandoned at birth, and Panchali, the polyandrous wife of the five Pandavas, who made her five husbands vow revenge for the public humiliation she received in the court of the Kauravas, triggering off the devastating war between the cousins.
The grief of the three ladies are awesome and convincingly portrayed, but in the fight to overcome this grief, it is the younger woman, Panchali, who stood tall. While the two elderly women wanted to leave the palace and seek refuge from their misery in exile in the forest, Draupadi remained firm in her resolve to stay back, take the full blast of the consequences of the devastating war, and do her best to heal the wounds not just to her immediate family but to the people of the kingdom her five husbands now ruled. This, she comes to the conclusion, was what she and her family owed to the people who went through the war for no fault of theirs, and hence her “dharma”, following which will be the only salvation for her as the queen.
We write because the play’s exploration and its reminder of the understanding “dharma” and its relevance in politics, not the least today’s politics is still extremely relevant in Manipur’s moment of extreme conflict and post conflict anxietiea. We are not trying to understand the term within the caste Hindu parameters where each caste category is expected to be satisfied with doing well what their respective castes supposedly destined them to do.
On the other hand, we are interpreting, as much as we believe the director of the play was conveying the audience, that the term was used more in the universal sense of doing what is “right” and “fit” in any given circumstance. The understanding “dharma” is not strictly religious but there is a definite ring of religiosity in it, and in the same sense, in the understanding of “right” action in any given circumstance, there is the same ring of religiosity without being religious.
This understanding would be more akin to the concept of natural justice and because of the commitment to justice and truth, its proximity to religiosity. Very often what we do may not be “wrong” but at the same time the same action may not be the “right” thing to do. It may not be “wrong” for legislators to switch party loyalty, but beyond legality and conventions, we also know intuitively that this is not “right”. Hence, while it may be well within the permits of religion and morality for the virtuous Pandavas to destroy their wrongdoer cousins, there was something simply not “right” about the devastating war that razed a kingdom so totally.
The magnitude and scale of the physical as well as spiritual devastations simply dwarfed any justification of the war even on moral grounds. This was the reality Thiyam made his characters confront on stage. This is also the reality of any war anytime although it is difficult for anybody in a war situation to see this because wars and hatred make those involved so myopic to the larger ethical question of the “rightness” of things.
To be ethical then, in our opinion, is to be able to see this “rightness” of action and deed not just through the prism of any defined religion or legal frames, but through a filter fashioned from the realization of the common human predicament. It will also not be easy to hit this “right” decision for it is a moving target. The only to way to arrive at this truth will have to be through relentless, sometimes agonizing self-questioning, as indeed the women in Thiyam’s play are made to go through.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
