Tag: kanglaonline

The current spurt in interest in Burma and the growing popularity of its other relatively more recent name Myanmar, has thrown up some interesting debates relevant to even Manipur. Even after the former military junta in the country decided to change the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar, much of the conscientious section of the international media, including the BBC and CNN among many others, had been insisting on referring to the country as Burma. Perhaps this was meant as a support for pro-democracy champion and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who too continued to refer to her country as Burma. But in the past month or so, when Burma is seen as opening up to the outside world, and in equal measures the world too have come to acknowledge and accept this sleeping South East Asian country’s overtures, pledging among others the chairmanship of the ASEAN in 2014, Burma’s other name Myanmar is beginning to replace its old nomenclature. The argument by those within Burma for their preference of the new name is that the name “Burma” is inclined too closely to the Burmans, the overwhelmingly dominant community in the country, at the cost of somewhat excluding its many different ethnic minorities. Even Aung San Suu Kyi now seems soft on the idea of a name change. Perhaps her refusal to use it all this while was only an extension of her opposition to the military junta and now the military is seemingly making a voluntary exit from the country’s political forefront, she thinks shifting her stance is legitimate.

The debate is relevant to Manipur for almost identical reasons. While there is nothing seemingly wrong with the name Manipur, what becomes problematic is the derivative term Manipuri which is supposed to signify all citizens of the state. The problem as in Burma is, “Manipuri” has for many reasons, tangible and intangible, come to signify chiefly the numerically dominant community of the state, the Meiteis. Although there are many, including most recently the chief minister, Okram Ibobi, tried to clarify that “Manipuri” signifies or should signify all domiciles of the state, the truth is, such rhetoric have never been much more than weak attempts at being politically correct. Even educated and self-proclaimed liberated citizens more often than not relapse into the old mindset and continue to use the terms “Meitei” and “Manipuri” as synonyms. So try as many would to make “Manipuri” have a more inclusive connotation, another section of the population which is not sensitive to the issue have continued and would continue to ensure that the clock is turned back and this divisive inference of the name remains.

The moot point is, why not think of a more inclusive name for Manipur to which all the peoples of the state can identify with and share a sense of belonging. The overture would not be altogether novel even in this country. So many other states and cities have done so in the past. The state of Madras became Tamil Nadu and later on its capital city of Madras too became Chennai. Likewise, Calcutta became Kolkata, Poona became Pune etc. Come to think of if, the list of such changes of nomenclatures of places in India in recent times is indeed long. Manipur has many ancient names that predate the nomenclature “Manipur”. Of this many are also what other ancient feudal principalities in the region gave it. The new name, if at all, does not have to be any one of these, but preferably an imaginatively conceived one which draws from the place’s ancient heritages as well as modern challenges. The intent is to ensure a sense of belonging and identification to one and all in the state. If on the other hand, as the chief minister in his recent speech said, it becomes possible for everybody to internalise the notion of “Manipuri” as indicating not just the dominant community but every son of the soil of Manipur, then there cannot be a better way. However, as of now, this effort is not making much headway, all because of chauvinists amongst the dominant community as well as rabid and frenzied ghetto mentality of many amongst the minority communities.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/whats-in-a-name/

The current spurt in interest in Burma and the growing popularity of its other relatively more recent name Myanmar, has thrown up some interesting debates relevant to even Manipur. Even after the former military junta in the country decided to change the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar, much of the conscientious section of the international media, including the BBC and CNN among many others, had been insisting on referring to the country as Burma. Perhaps this was meant as a support for pro-democracy champion and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who too continued to refer to her country as Burma. But in the past month or so, when Burma is seen as opening up to the outside world, and in equal measures the world too have come to acknowledge and accept this sleeping South East Asian country’s overtures, pledging among others the chairmanship of the ASEAN in 2014, Burma’s other name Myanmar is beginning to replace its old nomenclature. The argument by those within Burma for their preference of the new name is that the name “Burma” is inclined too closely to the Burmans, the overwhelmingly dominant community in the country, at the cost of somewhat excluding its many different ethnic minorities. Even Aung San Suu Kyi now seems soft on the idea of a name change. Perhaps her refusal to use it all this while was only an extension of her opposition to the military junta and now the military is seemingly making a voluntary exit from the country’s political forefront, she thinks shifting her stance is legitimate.

The debate is relevant to Manipur for almost identical reasons. While there is nothing seemingly wrong with the name Manipur, what becomes problematic is the derivative term Manipuri which is supposed to signify all citizens of the state. The problem as in Burma is, “Manipuri” has for many reasons, tangible and intangible, come to signify chiefly the numerically dominant community of the state, the Meiteis. Although there are many, including most recently the chief minister, Okram Ibobi, tried to clarify that “Manipuri” signifies or should signify all domiciles of the state, the truth is, such rhetoric have never been much more than weak attempts at being politically correct. Even educated and self-proclaimed liberated citizens more often than not relapse into the old mindset and continue to use the terms “Meitei” and “Manipuri” as synonyms. So try as many would to make “Manipuri” have a more inclusive connotation, another section of the population which is not sensitive to the issue have continued and would continue to ensure that the clock is turned back and this divisive inference of the name remains.

The moot point is, why not think of a more inclusive name for Manipur to which all the peoples of the state can identify with and share a sense of belonging. The overture would not be altogether novel even in this country. So many other states and cities have done so in the past. The state of Madras became Tamil Nadu and later on its capital city of Madras too became Chennai. Likewise, Calcutta became Kolkata, Poona became Pune etc. Come to think of if, the list of such changes of nomenclatures of places in India in recent times is indeed long. Manipur has many ancient names that predate the nomenclature “Manipur”. Of this many are also what other ancient feudal principalities in the region gave it. The new name, if at all, does not have to be any one of these, but preferably an imaginatively conceived one which draws from the place’s ancient heritages as well as modern challenges. The intent is to ensure a sense of belonging and identification to one and all in the state. If on the other hand, as the chief minister in his recent speech said, it becomes possible for everybody to internalise the notion of “Manipuri” as indicating not just the dominant community but every son of the soil of Manipur, then there cannot be a better way. However, as of now, this effort is not making much headway, all because of chauvinists amongst the dominant community as well as rabid and frenzied ghetto mentality of many amongst the minority communities.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/whats-in-a-name/

There is a tendency in Manipur for things to always return to square one. The avenue for a way out of this depressing stagnancy eludes the imagination of one and all, including our leaders, intellectuals and the numerous NGOs in the field of social works. The shared obsession seems to be to analyse, dissect, scrutinize and then either rubbish or glorify the past compulsively and then blame each other or else some external agency or the other for all the misery and misfortune that is everybody’s fate. Maybe there is some truth in this vision but it certainly cannot be the whole truth. To think this is so would be to reduce the social organism that we all are part of, to a simplistic mechanics of stimulus and responses only. And this we know cannot be, for the being and the soul of any society is far more complex, and we would contend, infinitely so. The difficulty in sizing up a society or its mores completely lies in this complexity and not to any attributable flaws of the past, as the current intellectual tradition in social analysis in the state seems to suggest. If social issues were so clear cut, and there were no ambiguities about remedial measures, most social problems ought to have disappeared by now everywhere in the world. The greatest thinkers have discovered, or others discovered after they are long gone, that this has never been the case and cannot ever be so as well.

The linearity of our social analyses has had some very serious consequences. For instance we seem to be a society which sees salvation in the past, at the cost of even ignoring the future. From the point of view of this limited linear vision, this is totally understandable. At least in its structure as a chronological sequence of events, there is a definitiveness about the past and this makes it comparatively simple to grasp, or at least it does not make it seem out of grasping distance. We would not say the same thing about the substance that gave form to this structure, but even here the same definitiveness associated with past events thins out the desperation to get the diagnosis right. The unfortunate thing is, this approach in our effort to come to grip with the past, is often extended to our quest for an understanding of the future. This, we would contend is flawed, for one thing there is nothing linear or definite about the future. In fact, the biggest flaw in historical materialism of the Marxist variety is precisely this linear and deterministic view of history and the future. This modernist outlook it seems is infectious, and hence our problem solving efforts have seldom acknowledged that the future is about discovering previously unknown and unexplored equations. The foundations of our mainstream as well as the numerous prevalent alternate politics today have never been built on any such broad platform, negating in the process the well known, one line definition of politics as “art of the possible”. Unlike the past which is a dead process and circumscribed in time and memory, the field for the future is wide open. We cannot erase the Chahi Taret Khuntakpa chapter in our history, but creative vision of the future can prevent similar historical catastrophes.

While we cannot possibly forget our past, or ignore what we have inherited from it, we do feel there is an urgent need for our society to tone down some of its claustrophobic obsession with the past and develop a vision of the future that is not everything about undoing the past or based on any utopian ideal, but in the light of it as precisely “an art of the possible”. Only when this understanding becomes the standard, realistic terms for resolutions to most of our conflict situations, both internal and external, can begin to dawn. If the question is about past wrongs and their impacts on the present and the future, surely as creative, autonomous beings that all human individuals are, we can overcome these impacts. In structural terms, democracy guarantees this possibility. In spiritual terms too, the prison of “coloniality” of even formerly colonized worlds, cannot contain this same creativity that gives the individual the capability of sizing up his predicament and affect the changes necessary to overcome that state of mind. It is depressing that our public discourses seldom have approached the future without the past as the sole measuring tape. Let our future go beyond the status of being just a response to our past.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/art-of-the-possible/