First of all, thanks are due to all our readers and well-wishers. To our mind, response to the first edition of the Eastern Quarterly (EQ) from readers in Manipur, Northeast and beyond seems to attest to a deeply felt need for a platform for an informed and honest dialogue on the affairs of the state and the region. We feel happy that the EQ has been accorded a warm welcome.This also gives us a tremendous sense of responsibility. It is a challenge we have already accepted when we decided to start this venture of connecting and sharing with you certain issues that are important to us. The present edition of the EQ is the continuation of this venture. We hope that you are as enthusiastic in reading this edition as we have been in bringing it out for you and ourselves.
The theme for this edition—Modernity, Tradition, and Contested Space—was chosen primarily to address a living paradox in our society. A longing for ‘development’, ‘progress’ and some ‘valued’ future(s) seems to coexist with a yearning for ‘lost past(s)’, reliving legacies and embarking on nostalgic journeys. The paradox of these two seemingly opposites marks the contemporary as the ‘contested space’. Northeast India, and Manipur in particular, has been the explosive site of this contest. While at one plane, there are assertions of traditional values amidst the modern idioms used in various forms of social movements, there are, at another plane, contests between forces rooting for development fetishism (e.g. Capitol Projects, Flyovers) on one hand, and cultural heritage (Kangla) on the other. Coexistence of fascination with science and technology, and mushrooming of mystics and shamans seriously calls for a better understanding of the paradox. This anxiety involves a range of complex issues, which are not specific to Manipur/Northeast India alone. We ought to understand and negotiate these realities. This is being attempted, within the constraints of the present edition, by positioning the ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, not in exclusivity but in complementarity.
In contemporary social theory, the word most associated with modernity is multiplicity. The concepts and practices of modernity, often contradictory, incorporates order and chaos as modern twins. While some theorists see modernity as a process of self-critique going beyond geographical and historical points of origin, yet holistic; others accept the existence of multiple modernity. Nevertheless, discourse on modernity and tradition ought to profitably start with tracing the historical origin of these concepts. This would enable us to understand the specific periods and places where the practices of being ‘modern’ are created, challenged and changed.
The origin of ‘modernity’ as a set of intellectual currents is popularly located in Europe between 17th and 18th century. It was a period that heralded an ‘age of reason’ or ‘enlightenment’ highlighting individualism, critiquing religious and traditional authority, separating private from the public domain, and prompting emergence of liberal, secular, and democratic ideals. ‘Rationality’ became and continues to be its catchword. Not only the world, but also each individual, as the repository of rationality, can get access, autarchically, to these laws through the ‘light of reason’.
‘Tradition’ is usually understood in terms of a set of social practices which seek to celebrate and inculcate certain behavioural norms and values usually associated with rituals or other forms of symbolic behaviour. In itself, ‘tradition’ gives to a community or people a sense of ‘authenticity’ in terms of its ‘origin’ and ‘continuity’. However, as a reciprocal ‘other’ of ‘modernity’, it is also associated with being backward, primitive, non-scientific, and emotional. For instance, ‘development’ is often positioned as the demise of a traditional society and a movement towards ‘progress’. Cast as binary opposites, the relation between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ is laden with value judgement, which produces descriptive and prescriptive behaviours and ways of life. This is clearly embedded in the sociologist Talcott Parsons’ schema of social behaviours (pattern variables), both in the individual and societal level—particularism/individualism versus universalism, achievement versus ascription, specificity versus diffuseness, and neutrality versus affectivity.
Another aspect of the debate is on the question of power. The assertion of the primacy of human reason and of its right to rulse other aspects of reality led to a certain conceit within the power dynamics in societies. This left out the questions on slavery, women, minorities’ rights, environment and colonisation. Assertion of colonial Europe at one point of time in history has led to seeing modernity with colonialism leading to coinage of the concept ‘colonial modernity’. However, the critique of modernity by the ‘East’ is articulated in terms of resistance to modern Western hegemony. This is often accompanied by celebrations of the ‘traditions’ or ‘invented traditions’, and their own ‘modernity’ which is ‘rediscovered’ and articulated as alternative to the ‘western modernity’. Thus, the differential experience of modernity in different space and time locations has led to the idea of ‘multiple modernities’. It is within such diverse intellectual and political currents of time that we intend to initiate a dialogue on the contested space—both in its social and physical sense of the term.
We initiate this exercise with Meera Nanda’s essay ‘How Modern Are We? The Cultural Contradiction of India’s Modernity’ wherein she problematizes and critiques the ‘relativism’ of a ‘counter-Enlightenment’ enterprise in India. Taking the European Enlightenment ‘as the true beginning of modernity’, she explores the nature of what she calls the ‘incompleteness, superficiality, and… schizophrenia’ of ‘Indian modernity’. Terming the ‘counter-Enlightenment’ enterprise in India as ‘reactionary modernism’, she contends that instead of ‘bringing religion within the limits of scientific reason, [it] has tended to subsume scientific reason into the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of the Vedas’. This reactionary modernism incorporates the ‘[m]odern ideas and innovations’ into ‘traditional Hindu worldviews, without diminishing many of its starkly irrational and pseudo-scientific tendencies’. She concludes her assessment by asserting that ‘[i]f modernity means differentiation between science and religion, between sensory experience and mysticism, we in India have a long way to go’!
Given such a view on modernity, does ‘tradition’ as the ‘other’ of modernity become a problem as well as a problematic? The second article ‘Receiving Communities: The Encounter with Modernity’ by Bhagat Oinam takes up this aspect of the ‘tradition’. Terming the encounter between western ‘modernity’ and what he calls ‘receiving communities’ as a dialogue between ‘unequal’ powers, he draws our attention to the ‘bundles of contradictions’ in the marrying of ideas. He argues that contradictions, such as the emergence and contradictory assertions of certain form of identity consciousness amongst the communities, are the results of Manipur’s encounter with ‘modernism’ as introduced by the colonial British in the later part of 19th century. Citing the changes that came about in economic and political spheres through the encounter with British colonialism, he traces the conflict and contradiction of ‘ethno-nationalism’ in contemporary Northeast to the continuing sway of group exclusivism. Further, he maintains that this tussle of exclusivism is consciously or unconsciously nurtured by the Indian state in its attempt at forging a nation out of former British colonial territories. While drawing attention to the contradictory relation between ‘modernity’ and ‘colonialism’, he provokes us to think whether there is a distinct form of modernity which is colonial in nature or whether colonialism is incidental to modernity.
Ritupan Goswami gives some insights into this question in his article, ‘Nature and the Nation-State: Towards a History of the Modern River’. He insists that ‘[c]olonial modernity is distinct and mediated’ and is the result of a historically traceable ‘archaeology’ of knowledge and politics. This ‘archaeology’ ‘make[s] a particular regime of truths possible’. Tracing the various facets of this ‘regime’ in a ‘history of colonization of people and Natural spaces’, he shows how the ‘truths’ about the Brahmaputra as the ‘problem’ river is made possible. In the process, he reveals ‘the purposes… these truths’ serve and who ‘exercise[s]… the power’ for whom. In such a view, the truth of ‘modernity’ is a historically and politically contingent ‘regime of truth’ in which the interests of the ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘class’ are implicated.
Are these dynamics and consequences of such a historically and politically contingent ‘regime of truth’ present in Manipur? This is analysed by Yengkhom Jilangamba in ‘The “Priestly” State: Flyover Development, Politico-Aesthetics, Protests in Manipur’. Stating that ‘modernity needs aesthetics of the past, manufactured in the present, he interrogates the nature of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in Manipur. Looking at the ‘flyover in the middle of Imphal’ as a ‘means of entering modernity’, he analyses the fractured self of Manipur. Thus, ‘The simultaneity of the two [flyover and Kangla] at the same locale is’, he contends, ‘a manifestation of a society in transit, waiting for a coherence of vision... one self is for the enigmatic past… which seeks to tell a history of a moment to cherish… [while] 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.’ He concludes that Manipur as a ‘society… bitten by a consciousness of being modern’, seems to prefer ‘shoddily imitated forms’ of the modernist ‘fetish of the gigantic, big grandeurs’ of the postcolonial period in India.
We have two more articles in the Kaleidoscope section. In ‘Armed-Conflict and Women’s Well-Being in Manipur’, Homen Thangjam looks into the transformation of the experiences and roles of women in Manipur. In the other piece, ‘Manipuri Literature in History’, Thingnam Kishan Singh captures the transformation and cultural encounter of Manipur through Manipuri literature.
Two new slots, Take Two and Book Review are being introduced with this edition. Take Two is intended to carry forward the debates initiated in the theme section of a preceding edition by a commentator other than the writers. In ‘Inconvenient Facts: Thinking about Democracy’, Peter Ronald deSouza takes a look at how ‘tussle between the State and non-State forces’ and ‘politics of ethnicisation’, has led to fracturing the spirit of democracy in the region.
Keeping tract of the debate on democracy, H. Khogen Singh reviews the book Durable Disorder by Sanjib Baruah.
We hope our readers will continue to take forward the debate initiated in this edition.
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