SYMBOLIC CAPITAL AND/OR SYMBOLS OF CAPITAL:

Once the assumption of assessing the form of a social formation has been understood within a scale that measures the material, scientific, technological developments, it is not a difficult task to seek for manufactured artefacts, which could symbolise the 'civilisational hierarchy' of the society. Along with an emphasis on the materiality of a society as a marker of civilisation in modern worldview, is a strong emphasis on 'tools and cannons and conceptions of time and space'5 as means of classifying the hierarchy of civilisation. By making a conquest of time only perceivable in the form of a unilinear, progressive chronology, the evolutionist impinge on progress is established. For any society to reach civilisation it has to follow and be a part of this ladder; every stage being a station from where the possibility of both promotion and demotion is open. Once these values are inherited and internalised, 'bringing home' those artefacts as representatives-big, tall buildings, flyovers, mega-hydro projects, big dams, shopping plazas-is a means of entering modernity; these structures become the legible signs. It's a reorganisation of space as a layout of the representative element of the time.

City development in the modern world has been imagined to be only possible within the paradigm, which embraces the 'huge, machine, hierarchical, centralized city with a vengeance.'6 In the new imagination of a city the magnitude itself is a statement, which is planned to have a visual shock as a form; the gratification or acknowledgement of that impact is made possible only when physically distant from the site. It may be added that the distance, which is needed to appreciate and have a proper vision of totality of the new city, is both metaphorical and physical. If one stands, except on a neighbouring hill or a high building, one would not be able to have a complete vision of the whole structure of the flyover in Imphal. It is in being able to produce this impossibility of having a clear picture of the whole structure that a new aesthete would be created, along with the symbolic power that it would carry.

Moreover, in the gigantic imagination of a city in modern developmental paradigm, it is inherent that the socio-economically weaker sections of the society would be displaced. For them what would replace their earlier habitat is made to be seen only with that blurring vision of estranged distance. As a result of a new form of relations that is involved in the production process, the powerless would be alienated from being able to participate in the celebration of a symbol of power. It is not merely the aesthetic of appreciation, which calls for a movement away from the site of the object of the gaze but simultaneously with the process of constructing these monumental structures, there is withering away of intimacy between the onlooker and the object. Those who do not own automobiles, say rickshaw pullers and the cyclists, would not experience the 'joy-ride' that their richer comrades would benefit from. Psychologically also, the possibility of an intimate relationship between the two is sapped, merely by the size.

MODERN TRADITIONS:

The case in Manipur, however, seems to go beyond the debate on the modern form of development. There is an overshadowing of packaging the modern forms of urban development in a smart marriage with an invocation of the traditional. Or rather, it is by slotting modernity in the 'tradition' (a larger practice which has already seeped in the psyche of the people) that the flyover is a reflection of more than the structure. The new politico-aesthetics is stuffed in the imaginative ordering of space of Imphal by demolishing the old remnants. However, within the process of making a nation it is a collective feeling of being ancient, from a location of 'time immemorial' past that holds together the romantic celebration about the past and a call to make a beginning. Kangla is sought to stand as a reminder of the 'glorious past' and by constructing the flyover just next to it is a reflection of a 'national' self-assertion.'

Moreover, modernity needs aesthetics of the past, manufactured in the present, without which its contrast and progress would have no meaning. It is by maintaining the strain relationship between an illusionary forward march away from the past and an elusive artefact from the past that modernity thrives. Obstructing the sight of the Kangla fort as a result of the construction of the flyover in front of the fort, the epitome of history and power in the imagination of Manipur, symbolizes the triumph of technology, and modernity over the uninhabited trace of the past.7 This contradiction between a vision that looks at the site of Kangla as a trace from the past and its erasure from visual presence is allowed when history is woken up from its slumber only when it serves an immediate goal in gaining power, as a legitimising motif for political contingency. From the issue over the more authentic script to the question of the boundary of the state, politics in the name of the past has been about possession. The complexities of the past, the heterogeneity of social relationships, customs and institutions have been subdued as manifestations of factional political gains. When dogmatism in the present political consciousness seeks its legitimacy from the past, the past is turned into monochrome. In fact, it generates a refusal to look into past, except as a rendering in the name of the past. The selective and opportunistic nature of mobilising history is visibly obvious. Kangla has been seen as the site of history whereas Ima Keithel and other sites of the Khwairamband Keithel have been made to go down under the sprite of the flyover. The composite organic linkages have been sapped, in a process which chooses history as artefacts. One way to understand this selective appropriation of history could be to see how the former is the centre of power whereas the latter is a site of the public. Since all those who are in support (or partially opposing!) of the flyover are struggling to maintain a share of power, their choice of the site to be 'preserved' and memorialised has to be a symbol of power from the past.

The simultaneity of the two at the same locale is a manifestation of a society in transit, waiting for a coherence of vision, conflicting within the self of the two mentalscapes of making a beginning. One self is for the enigmatic past, the harmony of nature, the glory of the past, which seeks to tell a history of a moment to cherish. But at the same time, the other half of the self is enamoured by an imagined future, breaking the shackles of the past and acquire into the mainstream of modern life. Here, science, technology, and industrialisation, the flyover through which this is supposed to be reflected, would be the only way to usher nationalistically imagined community(ies) in Manipur into the age of the future. For a society which has not witnessed these modern forms of flamboyance in the urban cityscape, 'domesticating' the signs of progress is a way of asserting power for a society that is bitten by a consciousness of being modern.

The Manipuri society occupies a site of anxious space in a self-narrative of civilisational scale, which has come down from colonial enterprise of anthropological classification. Since there has been an industry of 'autoethnography' it creates a conflict of self-representation. Over the last few decades with more information flow, (through cable TV, soap operas, MTV types, internet etc.) different cultural systems have been imbibed to be more modern and civilised. Since more people are moving away from the geographical confines of the state to other areas, they have witnessed various forms of social formations. Amongst those myriads of experiences, what is interesting is how an evolutionary model of civilisation/modernisation has been imbibed as the narrative of progress. As a result of the experiences in which they are still looked down upon for being 'inferior', as 'tribal', there is an impetus to prove of their being modern in their forms of attitude, fashion, language etc. What used to be inflected as a personal affair could now be transposed as a collective cultural practice by investing in the symbolic capital of modernity, for instance the flyover. It is in participating within the frame which has been set for them that a hope of deflection is inserted. These 'developmental' artefacts, by impersonating as symbols of 'progress', seek to conceal the hardship of the individual or the internal conflicts of the collective. The imagination and fascination of the big structures sanctions to compensate for the loss of the self because of modernisation and a compromise for the problems faced in the everyday. It glosses over the inherent repercussions of human suffering in the name of 'greater common good'.

The form of the 'developmental' projects is closely related to the way in which the purpose and the beneficiaries are visualized. For a newly enriched middle class in Manipur, which has a close relationship with state power, with enough economic resources, who owns automobiles (largely second-hand), they feel a need for convenience as well as to bolster their image through representations in the form of an amplified socio-cultural order. Constructing more 'modern' indicators like the flyover becomes a marker of being 'civilised' when encountering their compatriots from the same class in different regions.

THE NATION-STATE, SOCIAL CONTRACT, & THE EPOCH OF 'MAN':

The formal manifesto of the Revolution, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, promulgated in 1789, announced its hostility towards the hierarchical society embedding noble and 'divine' privileges, and laid the foundation for a constitutional, secular state that would 'guarantee' civil liberties, private property, competitive enterprise, and a government by tax-payers and property-owners. In return it claimed for itself the paramount right over man and matter, the subjects and the objects existing within the confines of its frontiers. This entailed a 'contract among the citizens of the new political organism, the nation-state, where every 'individual'-'free' and equal before the law-would willingly and voluntarily participate in the formation and functioning of this new political society. Within this newly constituted political society, capitalism found the expression of its fundamental ideals, and the condition of its further development. The legal provisions and the institutions of this new state-form ensured the furtherance of the liberal-bourgeois aspirations.

In man was now invented the 'individual', which signified the coming of a new epoch by the beginning of the nineteenth century. He is 'only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge,'9 and born at the threshold of modernity, also of the Nation-state and industrial capital. This modern man would emerge as the engineer of Nature; ironically though, he would also bear a 'nature' that had been 'engineered' to the needs of this new epoch through the formation of a new subjecthood.10 This emergence of the subjectivated individual, and his subjugation to regimes of property, alienated labour, institutionalized family, regulated 'freedom', and a mechanistic and objectified worldview could later be read as an 'infringement of the impersonal norm of the group and the species, of an imprescriptible rule....'

MODERNITY SET APART:

There is certainly a need to distinguish between the big, gigantic monuments of the earlier times in history and the modern forms of big monuments. The former is a celebration and marking of institutional power - monarchical, or other forms of state power whereas the latter is marked by a culture in which the big becomes a form of expressing progress, scientific development by implicating power in its structural organisation of modern society - a symbolic capital. The 'pre-modern' forms of structure is the embodiment of the power, in the sense of the individual and the institution clubbed into one, whereas the modern forms of structures seek their legitimacy from the discourse, which legitimizes and makes them legible.

Within a 'democratic' social structure there is the difficulty of proposing the mega-structures as an embodiment of institutional-individuals. The only possible means to utter them as a part of the self is to represent them in the vocabulary of development, progress and science. But it is the privileged sections, whose socio-economic standing in the society are implicated in the mythification of celebrating these structures that have given rationale and legitimacy to be bought by others as the paradigm of imagining development. The unrealized dream of attributing a structure as personification of the individual in modern society to demonstrate power creates a restructuring of denominating meaning to those structures. Instead of presenting it as an individual's exposition, there is a pretension of collective sharing of being a part of the powerful community. So, one can have the names of eminent personalities as the individuals who inaugurated the structures, not as somebody who built it. From a concentrated demonstration of power there is a seeming transference of the possibility of a sharing of power; for a common individual by accepting it as a manifestation of development, it elects and legitimizes the continuance of that power; s/he imagines being a part of the larger collective that has created the structure.'

One point of difference that could be noted in the pre-modern artefacts of the institutional-individuals in some of the famous examples, which are known always in association with the individual, and the case of historical monuments like Kangla is that Kangla, for the modern Manipur represents a trace, or rather a symbol of the imagined 'glorious past'. Ima Keithel is understood and meaningful without its historical context; by decontextualising the site from its historical locale and by inscribing it as a representative of 'the grand old days', its meaning and value is made intelligible. It becomes a symbol of pride for those populations who would believe in its ahistorical significance, which is getting more momentum within a narrative of nation-making.

LACK OF FIT:

It is an irony that the cash starved Government in Manipur which does not have the money to give its employees the monthly salary in time is planning the mega project of constructing the flyover in the middle of the capital along with other major changes as a part of urban renovation. Put the flyover within a context where there are not even the basic necessities of drinking water supply, electricity, proper road (forget public transport system)! What is conspicuous in the development paradigms that are employed in places like Manipur is that the material and production process of industrialization has not changed substantially whereas the cultural import has changed drastically. There is a misfit between the materiality and the paraphernalia of the 'superstructure'. This is a classic case of what I would call 'floating culture syndrome', without any base to anchor. The creation of the 'modern secular temples' of development in the industrialized societies, especially in the West, was a part-cause/part-effect of a particular form of economic organization in the society. These big structures are not just an appendage to industrialization, especially in the post World War II western countries; it rallied round in creating the condition for such monolithic vision of progress. In the context of the flyover in Manipur it has been transformed into a force that has a relationship with the changing socio-economic configuration-the nexus between contractors, builders, bureaucrats, politicians, in fact all those who want a share in the package of the money that has been pumped in the name of developing the state, in order to buy off a section of the society by the Indian state against the opposition by the people. What has happened in the non-industrialised societies like Manipur is that the aesthetics of those societies has been imbibed without any major change in the means of production of the society.

The construction of the present flyover, recreation of the site of Ima Keithel, and other 'infrastructural constructions' have to be seen within the structure of change in the realm of economic transformations raging in Manipur. The coming of the new edifices is a part of the already ongoing process of changing the site of market places in Imphal, for example Moreh market, and more prominently, the new fascination of the mega shopping malls, which could be seen in its crude, shoddily imitated forms already in Imphal, for instance, Gambhir Singh Shopping Complex. The flyover, imagined within a new economy, is rationalised as a solution, whereas what is happening is creating more problems so that it could generate a mood to seek for more 'solutions'. We cannot but notice that the flyover as a 'solution' has to be seen within a policy of the state government that does not have any public transport system in the state. It's a part of a new economic force that has seeped into Manipur. Super markets have already been constructed at the outlying areas of the Imphal market area. In fact, if the outlandish plans of building more flyovers in Imphal go unopposed, (the present flyover is the beginning of a series of planned flyovers) perhaps, Imphal would be a 'floating' mofussil town.

WHO IS PROTESTING?

Contained by the hegemony of a developmental paradigm, even the voices of opposition is sought to be located and regulated inside the system. As a result even while opposing the flyover by asserting to change one 'traditional' script over another in the plaque that records the name of the individual who inaugurates, it exposits a claim to seize power by evoking 'tradition'. The first premise of a challenge to do away with these monuments is absent. Once these monuments stand to symbolise progress, development, by asserting for a particular script against the other, it brags about the 'historical' people with their own history of a literate culture. It is a ploy in which the modern is made meaningful, only in juxtaposition with the 'traditional', which is allowed within the politics of an imagination propelled by process(es) of nation-making in Manipur. In contending to historicize, it participates within the logic of a narrative of allocating written script as a marker of civilized people against those who do not have.

It has been much criticised by now that these development gimmicks are not merely arbitrary but in fact they serve an ideological impetus, which attempts to create a society according to a universalised logic.9 It has already been challenged that the rules of development followed in the capitalist countries of the West and the Soviet Union are not the only solvents for a better future of material imagination. This model of development is observable for their notoriety in being centralised, top-down, undemocratic and anti-people consequences. (10)

In fact it is an irony that those 'futuristic looking', 'forward marching' 'rationalistic' modernists, who would detach themselves at the mention of history/past and those who celebrate on the mention of 'tradition', 'time immemorial' are married in the flyover under construction in Imphal. The poetical affinity of the two marches along with the political recruitment of motifs to prove to others of being a modern nation. Architecturally, the two symbols would have a sharing of the consistent spatiality, in the middle of the centre of power as signatures of the politico-aesthetic imagination of Manipur. The physical conjugality of the two is more than metaphorical. When Kangla, which of late has been a site of Meitei nationalist pride, goes along with the flyover, it will demolish the sense of historical existence.11 Moreover, it is also clearly visible that this project of urban renovation is a very Greater Imphal centric enterprise (forget valley centric!).

The flyover is a reminder of reverberation that tries to rebuild the much criticised and highly problematic junk of developmental logic in the backyard of a country which is engrossed in a dream to gain a superpower status in the global strategic politics. The internalisation of the garbage rhetoric has reached to such an extension that those who oppose the flyover have been targeted as 'typical non progressive, close-minded and very conservative mind-set of we Meiteis, the sheer inability to open up our minds to new ideas.'12 In times like this the need to change the way we would march in future seems very urgent.

1. I am using the term not as the mundane, repetitiveness of the daily, but as a practice of ideological structure. See Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, (New Brunswick: Transaction Books), 1984.

2. Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, 'History Under Flyover', www.kanglaonline.com

3. W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Introduction', W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 1994, p. 1-2.

4. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1973-1977, ed. and tr. Colin Gordon, (New York: Pantheon), 1980, p. 70.

5. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance¸ (Delhi: OUP), 1990, p. 68.

6. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1998, p. 104.

7. For an analysis which argues for the triumph of Enlightenment symptom of reason, science in colonial India, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, (Delhi: OUP), 2000.

8. The 'modern world' is a society of what Henri Lefebvre calls a 'bureaucratically controlled consumption'; the system of its operation to control and conform the individual consumers lies in its ability to transmit a sense of fear-'fear of being out of fashion, of not being young and attractive being odd, out of it, the subtle terrors through which advertising motivates.' See Philip Wander, 'Introduction to Transaction Edition', Lefebvre, op. cit., p. viii.

9. For a passionate and engaging critique against the high-modern obsession with the megalomaniacal 'developmental' projects in India, especially concerning the Sardar Sarovar Dam, see Arundhati Roy, 'The Greater Common Good', Outlook, May 24, 1999. Development, despite being a discourse of rational planning, has an inherent limitation because of the impossibility to locate the 'external' agency in its execution, since the supposed external body is already implicated in the configuration of power. See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2002.

10. From a sense of despair of humans vis-à-vis nature's unmanageable power, it gave way to European condescension of the capability to 'possess' nature as the marker of civilization, distinct from 'savagery', in the light of industrialisation. For an account of the ways in which science and technology became very dominant in the way the Europeans started looking at the outside world, see Adas, op.cit. Because of an inability to come out of the state of a colonized mind, most of the developmental paradigms in the 'Third World' have been following the scientific-industrial model, with a commitment to heavy industrialisation, big and centralised mega-projects as the only model for economic and social construction, without considering whether it suits the environment, thus, blocking the search for a more viable alternative.

11. I am not pleading for a celebration of the 'harmonious' past against an intruding modern state. It is an attempt to rethink the given universal and critique the system, which produces, circulates, and consumes a rule of 'totalitarian' rule and monopolized violence.

12. Mee Ama, 'A Rejoinder to Imphal City: Traffic Congestion and the Wrong Solution', www.kanglaonline.com