Across the globe, in both the contemporary and historical development of human society, unity has been a crucial factor in sustaining the life and structural integrity of society, as well as the individuals within it. Unity is not confined to families or communities but is a broader principle that can be sustained among many despite their differences. In Manipur, various communities inhabiting the state make a vibrant ecosystem that has been one of the key factors defining the social, political, and economic aspects of the state, representing a unified co-existence throughout its historical development as a centuries-old political entity. It has embodied a diachronic unity in diversity, even in the face of the 19th century’s rise of nation-states in Europe and the subsequent divisive colonial policies of the early 20th century, as experienced in Manipur. However, this unity is not something that remains fixed in a flat temporal framework, a historical artefact that no longer needs to be reworked or is no longer in need of perpetual maintenance.
The unity, in any form, inherently comes with primary or internal contradictions as fundamental components of its nature, a driving force that perpetuates its motion through endless negotiations. Among several others, the contradictions between cultural identity and collective identity, equality and recognition of differences, majoritarianism and pluralism, economic integration and regional disparities, political representation and fragmentation, secularism and religious pluralism, and historical memory or grievances and a shared future are of great importance and need to be handled properly. They will never fade away unless they are addressed in a timely manner with proper methods, depending on the principal aspects of the principal contradictions among the particular contradictions at different stages in the process of development, which is the motion, the motion of unity itself.
These contradictions should not be treated as obstructions but as the necessary fuel to sustain unity among the communities and their differences, without which unity would become a distant imagination or a seemingly realistic hallucination, as Du Bois’s reflections on ‘two‑ness’ in The Souls of Black Folk suggest, for unity is not the absence of contradiction but its perpetual negotiation. It is quite interesting that solid obstruction arises in three ways: treating non-antagonistic contradictions among communities as antagonistic, mishandling the contradictions, and external interference. However, the last one, that is, external interference, is empowered and materialised only through the already existing mishandled contradictions, which means that external interference is not often the principal aspect of the principal contradiction at any stage in the process of development until it intensifies and transforms the whole struggle into a condition in which all the existing contradictions are blown into antagonistic forms. These imply that one’s understanding of unity is one’s understanding of unity in motion; likewise, the communities’ understanding of unity must be their understanding of unity in motion, that is, in constant negotiation through the proper handling of the primary contradictions with proper methods. Failing to properly understand the stages in the process would lay the foundation for dogmatic resolutions which no longer address the issues but rather intensify them. That is, the concept of brotherhood is not the prerequisite concept but rather the product of the proper handling
of the contradictions.
The concept of unity should not, in any way, be considered as taken for granted, since many dogmatists, without any credible practicality, and empiricists, with their fragmented experiences and perilous experiments, mechanically believe in it. Unity, in any situation, has been built and nurtured by a multifaceted social, political, and economic fabric among communities, and this further underscores the need to reject the notion of assuming unity as taken for granted. Unity lives only as long as it is cultivated, for its life depends not on sentiment but on the proper handling of contradictions and the conscious efforts of communities.
The writer passed out from the Centre for French and Francophone Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University
