The Postcolonial Language Game that Pushes Meitei to the Margin of Extinction: A Simple Reading Using Lyotard’s Idea of Differend

Jean-François Lyotard gave us one unsettling idea. He said some wrongs cannot be said in the language of the court. He called this a differend. It is when you feel the injury, but the tribunal that judges you has no words for it. You become a victim twice — once by the wrong, and again because you cannot even prove the wrong.

In the meta-narrative of Indian governance — its legal-rational, post-colonial language game — the Meitei people of the Imphal valley are trapped in precisely this differend.

We feel the injury every day. But the available national and legal vocabulary — Constitution, court, commissions, national media — has no idiom to express it.

We can see this differend in three language games.

The Land-Language Differend: Our Shrinking Homeland

Our phrase is simple: we are 53 percent of the state’s population, confined to about 10 percent of its land in the valley. Hill protection laws stop us from buying land in the hills. Yet anyone from the hills can buy land in the valley.

Our big worry is not about property. It is existential. Our land is shrinking and we fear we will become stateless in our own ancestral kingdom, Kangleipak. We have no other homeland.

But what does the tribunal hear?

In the dominant legal phrase of tribal protection versus general-category privilege, the court, the Constitution, and the national discourse hear something else entirely. In that language, Meiteis are coded as dominant, Hindu, general, valley-centric majority.

Here is the differend: our fear of territorial shrinking cannot be translated into the language of tribal rights. When we say “protect the valley,” the dominant discourse hears “encroachment on tribal rights.” Thus our real anxiety — of being an indigenous community with no other homeland — finds no legitimate phrase in the Indian tribunal that judges us.

The Identity-Language Differend: A Kingdom With No Category

We were a Scheduled Tribe before the 1949 merger. Now we are not. We say we need ST status and constitutional protection now, to protect our religion, our land and our identity, like other indigenous communities of the Northeast, just to survive.

But the dominant national language on ST hears this through its own language game: affirmative action, quota, backwardness, benefits. It reads our claim as a dominant group wanting to dilute tribal benefits.

Our own narrative — of an indigenous kingdom community needing protection from globalization, narco-economy and migration — has no space in the ST verification form. The form asks if we are primitive. It does not ask if we are about to disappear.

Thus, although we suffer a wrong, we cannot argue it in the court’s language.

The Victimhood-Language Differend: Who Is Allowed to be a Victim?

After May 3, 2023, it became more than clear: we are victims of narco-infiltration, of demographic change due to influx of illegal immigrants from the Myanmar border, of loss of sacred hills and shrines — Koubru and Thangjing. The valley is not safe.

But the dominant national media already has a pre-set post-colonial language game. In that game, hill tribes are always the oppressed and valley people are always the majority oppressing the hill tribes.

So when violence happens, Meiteis suffer in the valley. Meiteis were displaced from Moreh, from Churachandpur. We are unable to go to the hills we worshipped for centuries. Yet all this suffering remains inexpressible in the already set minority-majority frame.

Even when we speak of being a victim, it sounds illegitimate, because the judge — the national media — has already recognized the other as victim. Thus our suffering remains unarticulated and unaddressed.

Inventing a New Idiom, or Facing Extinction

In the end, what I want to say is this: justice for the Meitei is not about winning the argument in the opponent’s language game. It is about recognizing that a differend exists. The conflict is not about land or ST list. It is about incommensurable language games:

1. The language game of an indigenous kingdom with a singular homeland vs. the language game of Scheduled Tribe protection.
2. The language of valley as all people’s land vs. the language of hills as protected tribal land.

The Indian state as tribunal only speaks the second language in each pair. Therefore the Meitei community experiences Lyotard’s formula in full: “I suffer a wrong, but I have no means to prove it in the language of the tribunal, so I become a victim.”

To resolve it, I would not suggest consensus. Consensus inside a dominant idiom is just forced translation. What we need is invention of a new idiom — a new legal and political phrase that can hear both valley protection and hill protection together, without translating one into the terms of the other.

Until we invent that new idiom, the postcolonial tribunal will continue to do what it does best: it will keep translating our extinction into its own administrative categories, and declare that nothing happened.

KH. IBOMCHA