The 'Priestly' State: Flyover
Development, Politico-Aesthetics, Protests in Manipur
By Yengkhom Jilangamba
Within the context of a modern form of infrastructural
edifice, capital drives and derives its legitimation
from a vocabulary of constructed consensus, positing
socio-economic changes-big, tall buildings, flyovers,
mega-hydro projects, big dams, jumbo shopping plazas-in
the name of development for the 'larger common good'.
Contained by the hegemony of the developmental paradigm,
even the voices of opposition is sought to be located
and regulated inside the system.
INTRODUCTION
In the recent past
a flyover has not got so much snarled up than the
one which is under construction in Imphal. This flyover
has come to represent an intriguing encounter of electoral
politics, developmental rhetoric, politico-aesthetic,
sectional interests and 'nationalist' politics of
various kinds. Situated at the heart of the capital
of Manipur on the Bir Tikendrajit Road, cutting beside
the historical emblems of the Ima Keithel (literally
mother's market), Mapal Kangjeibung (the present polo-ground),
then throws out in front of the Kangla fort, the present
flyover measuring 600 metres, is what would represent
a modernity counterpoised with tradition even in its
spatial distribution. The everydayness1 of the flyover
seems to have been turned into an episodic event,
or rather by making it as the need of the 'everyday',
concealing the ideological baggage, the construction
of the flyover has been represented and rendered.
It is in examining
the imagination of the new cityscape in Imphal that
we find the (un)realised dreams and realities of the
situation in Manipur; the flyover has to be located
within a larger politics. As A.B. Akoijam writes,
'[T]he question here is not merely the flyover per
se but what it conveys: the cultural and historical
insensitivity, the murky politics,... the culture
of sharing the spoils and 'commissions', lack of inertia
and the general decadence that has come to define
what Manipur is and what it stands for today.'2 Understanding
the landscape that is going to give a 'modern' taste
and texture allows for a possibility to interrogate
the cityscape as located within a natural and social
environment, with a history of its own intercepted
with the other changes and continuities that generate
as constitutive elements of the entity as a living
whole. And let it be made clear at the beginning that
the flyover in Manipur as a part of a larger urban-building
is power-both for and about; besides signifying or
symbolizing power relations, 'it is an instrument
of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power
that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent
of human intentions.'3 The urban as the centre of
concentrated state power has been enmeshed with diverse
issues and politics in Manipur and there is a need
to look at the changing urban space in Imphal to uncover
the implanted ideologies, as a social structure with
its localised meaning and not only for its forms,
not as 'the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the
immobile'.4
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.
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.
The 'rootlessness'
of the new change has produced its own inherent anxiety
manifested in various forms. The misfit between the
material and the cultural change has seen its repercussions
in the debates and banning of cultural artefacts,
especially on the dresses of women and school children.
The anxiety of loss, an erosion of 'tradition' erupts
because what has been happening as a changing process
is neither natural nor from within, but at the same
time it has not been engineered by some powerful alien
force. The way in which it has developed is a result
of being at the zone of interface-politically, culturally,
historically and geographically. The misfit that has
come into being could be witnessed in various forms.
On the one hand, there is a 'de-historicisation' of
the sensibility of the past; on the other hand, because
of the erasure of this sensibility there is an investment
to seek for symbolic representation of those expunged
past.
One could, perhaps,
visualise the situation in Manipur in a more allegorical
form of a religious order. The 'political' class of
the state has been propitiating the godly figure at
the centre in order to gain benefits, and not making
them angry by following the dictates. Since the revenue
of the state is not generated from the people through
taxes and other means but rather through the 'gifts
of grants' from the central authority, the accountability
of those who are in power in the state towards its
people weighs less than towards the source of income.
Because the state is the major source of employment
without any other source, its importance in the running
of the society is also heightened as a structure of
monopolised power. If this is one face of the divine
spirit of the Indian State, it makes its appearance
in the form of the devil as well-the armed forces
running the daily organisation of the society. In
a sense, the cultural manifestation in Manipur is
what could be described as fetishism of commodity
culture, manufactured though the power of the state.
Capital does not operate merely in its obvious manifestations
of industry; the power of capital is to command.8
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.
NOTES & REFERENCES
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
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