The stage curtain parted in the Jawaharlal Nehru Manipuri Dance Academy theatre. People from all over Imphal, the capital of Manipur, filled the auditorium to see a renowned dance company perform Chitrangada, a dance drama by Rabindranath Tagore. The dancers came on stage to enact the first scene – Princess Chitrangada setting out on a hunt with her friends. Weaving together song, dance and theater, the love story and eventual marriage of Arjuna, the third Pandava prince from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, to the Princess Chitrangada of Manipur are recounted.
Alhough it was a beautiful performance, when I recall Chitrangada today, I cannot help but revisit a scene from my own past. I was travelling with a Manipuri colleague from Kolkata to Mumbai by train to perform in a dance festival the following week. As I had observed many times before, a passerby made a derogatory remark to my friend concerning her South-east Asian appearance. She turned red but did not react, accustomed as she was to having racial slurs directed at her and her Meitei companions by those of non-Meitei descent. The relationship between the Meitei people of Manipur (and some other ethnic populations from north-east India whose appearance is similar to that of the Meiteis) and other Indians can be very tense and often unpleasant.
Today, each time I recall Chitrangada and the eventual wedding of the Meitei princess to the Indian prince Arjuna, I am reminded of this tension. What stands out in the drama after all is not the story of the nuptials between these two characters but the wedding of two cultures – a wedding not necessarily freely chosen. For me, the story unfolds as a highly charged political text, given the realities faced by Manipuri people in contemporary India. Arjuna is a prince from the Hindu Mahabarata, and Chitrangada is a princess from Meitei folklore; the different backgrounds of these characters has generated many differing narratives concerning the story's origin. Is the myth of Chitrangada the syncretised result of a king forcing conversion on his people? And, if so, does this tale, like many others of its kind, result in a historical consciousness wrongly regarded as an absolute truth? My own memories and these lingering questions are the impetus for the present investigation into what I have dubbed “genealogical folklore”. In the text that follows, I shall investigate how religious folklore has been utilised to promote notions of racial identity among the Meitei people of north-eastern India.
After the Meitei were forced by royal dictum to convert to Hinduism in the early eighteenth century, a number of popular stories arose regarding the origin of this ethnically South-east Asian community. These narratives combined Hindu and indigenous Meitei deities and myths. However, the rise of anti-Hindu sentiment – spurred by a movement to revive indigenous religion, as well as the strained political relationship with India – has led Meitei academics to question these traditional origin tales. These scholars are developing a new literature, linking the community's origins to its South-east Asian roots. To discover the racial identity of the Meitei people has been the motivating factor behind this change.
A controversy involving “mythology” and “history” brews along the border regions of South Asia and South-east Asia as a new historical consciousness comes into being among the peoples of this region – a development similar to the Ayodhya crisis, which occurred in the early 1990s in north India.Footnote 2 Commenting on the relationship between mythology and history, Ashis NandyFootnote 3 has argued that the elites of “older civilizations” regard their narratives as histories. These are used in a totalising fashion to establish the identities of the societies in question with respect to the rest of the world. Nandy has also emphasised how the same groups turn mythology into history. In his exploration of historical narratives, Ranajit Guha suggests that while Western narratives are initiated by the narrator, in South Asia they are initiated by the listener.Footnote 4 Even though this distinction reeks of essentialism, I do find the notion of historical narrative being generated by the listener tantalising in reference to the Manipuri case. The story of Chitrangada from the Mahabharata found a large audience of sympathetic listeners during the period of Hinduisation. As the nature of the government changed from a monarchy to a colonial princely state, modern history slowly entered Manipur. Given the situation of a monarchy placed under colonial supervision, there remained, however, a divide between the academic discourse generated by Westerners and that generated by local scholars. Hence, Pemberton's observation (discussed in detail below) concerning the eastern origin of the Meitei people never entered the traditional discourse of itihasa (indigenous Indian word for history) in Manipur. In more recent times, however, the troubled political relationship with India, the controversial merger agreement and today's militarised Indian state have contributed to creating an audience ready for a new kind of story in Manipur. Now conscious that tales of their Indic roots may be fraudulent, listeners receive the story of Chitrangada in a new light.
With regard to Nietzsche's The Gay Science, Foucault has commented that “Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is. . .situated within the articulation of the body and history”.Footnote 5 In my reading of debates surrounding Meitei genealogical folklore, the racial body comes to the forefront in the nationalistic enterprise of reconstructing the roots of the community, and the Manipuri example thus confirms Foucault's assertion. Building on Partha Chatterjee's “political society”Footnote 6 , I argue for a “racial society” marked by bodily ethnic features common among a population at the margins of India. I will also outline how contemporary politics of the region led this community to address issues of nationalism in folklore and expressive cultures.
Aside from the polemics of history, the equally important question of nationalism must be addressed. Partha Chatterjee, in speaking of Indian nationalism, has postulated “inner” and “outer” domainsFootnote 7 , as of the spiritual and material, and has claimed that nationalism is a product of the “inner” domain. Joshi in his thoughtful critiqueFootnote 8 however, refuses to accept religion as a monolithic entity without political significance. Through his case study, he demonstrates that the narratives of modernisation, wherein religiosity is seen as declining and the “modern West” as rising, do not happen the same way. Following Joshi, one can observe a fusion of religion and politics in the conversations surrounding the Chitrangada story in Manipur. Similarly, there does not appear to be a clear division between “outer” and “inner” domains; instead, religious myth in this case is seen as a fluid entity that connects the spiritual and political in the context of the story and its place in Meitei society. Religious mythology thus becomes a dynamic entity with changing significance in different contexts. Andrew ShryockFootnote 9 has discussed the role of genealogy in nation formation in tribal Jordan. In the case of Meiteis, it is not genealogical tables but genealogical folklore that has taken the central place in the academic debate of contemporary Manipur.
Michael HerzfeldFootnote 10 has studied modern Greek endeavours to create a common Greek history by analysing Greek folklore. This common history is meant to unite disparate parts of the population – for example, the farming population and the educated elites. We see similar attempts on the part of many voices surrounding the current analysis of the Chitrangada story. In this case, however, starting from a single story, the historical narratives diverge in different directions.
The Field Site
The state of Manipur located in the north-east corner of India is home to the Meitei people. For many years it has been a contact point for diverse traditions. The Meitei are a linguistic group, all speaking the Meitei language as their mother tongue. There are several subgroups, and these can be divided into two categories: the Nongchup-haram from the western side of the Manipur Valley consists of the Meitei Brahmins and Meitei Muslims, while the Nongpok-haram are Meitei settlers from the east.
The Meitei community has had a complex religious history as the region has long been home to indigenous traditions as well as BuddhismFootnote 11 and HinduismFootnote 12 . In 1729, however, the Manipuri king Garib-Niwaz formally converted to the Hindu sect known as Vaishnavism and ordered the entire community to follow suit.Footnote 13 Myths and controversies abound concerning this disruptive moment in Manipuri history. It is said that the king assembled many of the puyas, or religious manuscripts, of the pre-Hindu religion and burnt them. The ancient script fell out of use in the community, and the people who refused to convert, referred to as loi, were exiled. The loi living on the outskirts of the valley still attest to this history today.
This new official religious tradition brought with it a radically new lifestyle that has had an immense impact on the sociopolitical history of the region. Hindu rites of passage and festivals were introduced. The Meitei clans were given names of Hindu clans or gotras. A rudimentary form of caste system was introduced, and some Brahmin men emigrated from Bengal and Orissa to Manipur. Even though many of them married into Manipuri society and adopted the Meitei language as their mother tongue, they still looked ethnically different from the Manipuri people and more closely resembled the majority of Indians. As the higher caste, Indian Brahmins (commonly referred to as Bamons or mayang Bamons) both then and now have religious and sociopolitical authority. Thus, Hinduism introduced ethnic disparity into Manipur society. Ironically, outside of Manipur, Meitei devotees of Hinduism often experience discrimination from Indian priests when they make pilgrimages to sacred cities around India.
Manipuri economy is based largely on agriculture and must, therefore, rely on trade with the rest of India for all other commodities – a trade run entirely by non-Manipuris that has grown increasingly more expensive in recent years. The sharp rise in prices has aroused scepticism among Manipuri people toward mayang businessmen. The relationship between Manipuri people and non-Manipuris is, in general, riddled with suspicion, the relationship existing only in designated areas of life; free intermingling between Meiteis and non-Meiteis has never occurred.
In the capital city of Imphal, most non-Manipuri businessmen live in a designated area called the bazaar. The geography of ethnic neighbourhoods associated with peoples from different regions of India is related to the history of migration of those peoples. During colonial times, a number of Bengali clerks and managers came with the British agent to assist in administration. The babupara, or the neighbourhood of the babus (Bengali clerks are normally referred to as babus), along with the Bengali High School (where Bengali was taught as a first language), attest to the large Bengali population that once lived in Manipur.
During the anti-British nationalist movement in India, Manipur remained isolated to a large extent. Oral accounts indicate that the king of Manipur forbade important Indian nationalist figures such as Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi to enter his country, as he feared that his subjects might be incited to rebel against him if exposed to the new political ideals.Footnote 14 The rising social consciousness of the middle class in post-war Manipur nonetheless led to the formation of several activist groups – the complex history of which is beyond the scope of this essay – as Manipuri society is not homogeneous and there were serious ideological divisions among social activists within the state. Elite Manipuris formed the Manipur State Congress. Meanwhile, Hijam Hirabot, a pioneer member of the Indian Communist Party from Manipur, rallied the uneducated masses against colonial policies implemented by the colonial agent and the king. The state congress fully supported the merger of Manipur with the Indian Union at the dawn of Indian independence, while the king wished to maintain the sovereign status of the state.Footnote 15 In a dramatic turn of events, however the king signed the merger agreement with the Indian Union on 19 September 1949.Footnote 16 Manipur was annexed in due course, under extremely controversial conditions.Footnote 17 In the 1940s when the anti-British nationalist movement was at its height in India, religious revival arose among the Meitei population in Cachar led by Naoriya Phullo. It was aimed at completely eliminating Hinduism from the Manipur Valley and re-establishing the pre-Hindu religion as the sole faith. This movement initially met with great resistance from the king and his advisors in Manipur but nevertheless gained immense popularity. Today, apart from a large number of formal converts, the philosophy and many components of the movement's agenda, such as the revival of the Manipuri script (mayek), have been embraced by the greater Manipuri society. Several scholarly works have provided extensive commentaries on the larger implications of this phenomenon. In introducing their study on the Meitei Lai-haraoba festival,Footnote 18 Parratt and Parratt have commented on how the indigenous aspects of Meitei religious life are enjoying renewed importance. On a similar note, Vijaylakshmi BraraFootnote 19 argues for a cultural concept of a state that follows the indigenous ritual beliefs surrounding the monarchical tradition of Manipur. Even today, the common people's faith in the independent monarchical state challenges the modern political order imposed on them. The contemporary anti-Indian political insurgency in Manipur draws its ideology from the indigenous revival movement Footnote 20 but their goals remain separate.
In another area of Manipur, the Naga people who live in the hills and were converted to Christianity about a century ago are also experiencing a rediscovery of their roots and are involved in a revitalisation movement of their own. With recent political tension between the Nagas and Meiteis, there has been marked hostility from the Nagas towards aspects of the Meitei indigenous revival movement, such as the use of the Meitei mayek (Manipuri script).Footnote 21 With the rise of media, travel and more direct contact with mainstream India, many issues of marginalisation have come to the forefront.
Marginalisation in Everyday Life: Genealogy and Race in South Asia
In contemporary South Asian cultural studies, race is not yet a popular topic, but for political studies in northeast India, it has become a central issue that must be taken into consideration. In this section, I shall trace the development of race theory in the Western and the Indian spheres, contextualising its relevance in north-eastern India.
The word ‘race’ has a malevolent history in the West, and even its utterance in public brings forth histories that the Western World would rather forget. As Dominick LaCapra writes, “The very act of writing or speaking about race is fraught with difficulty even when one attempts to go about it in a critical and self-critical manner”.Footnote 22 In Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850, Hannah Augustein notes that race theory was, among many other things, a political justification for slavery.Footnote 23 The fundamental impetus behind studying race has never been an innocuous quest for knowledge but always loaded with an agenda of exploitation. Race theory played a key role in colonial times, as European powers used it to justify colonial rule. In India, many generations of colonial scholars and administrators produced extensive commentaries on race,Footnote 24 the most noteworthy being the imagined interrelationship between race and caste.
Race theory as developed in the Indian subcontinent had its own uniqueness in contrast to that in the West, though it was neither simple nor monolithic. In her erudite discussion of the study of race in colonial India, Susan Bayly concludes saying: “The language and assumptions of racial theorists is [sic] abhorrent to us today.”Footnote 25 For Bayly's “us”, the postcolonial scholars of modern South Asia, race theory as postulated by European scholars during colonial times is abhorrent but nonetheless influential, as its shaped societal attitudes and administrative policies. Just as postcolonial scholars like Bayly have been vocal against European colonialism, the early 1990s saw the beginning of a “post-postcolonial” era among Indian academics as the word “race” reappeared in the academic literature in a new context. In this case it was not caste but the interrelationship between race and nationhood that came into question in the soon-to-be 50-year-old Indian nation. Scholars from north-eastern India brought back the words “race” and “racism” from the colonial past to accuse modern mainstream Indians of discriminating against peoples from north-eastern India on the basis of their “different” appearance. Examples of such scholarship now abound in north-east India. For example, in describing the genesis of the Meitei political insurgency, Naorem Sanajaoba, a distinguished Manipuri legal scholar writes: “The political, economic and cultural dominance over the MeeteisFootnote 26 [Manipuris] had been legitimised by the law of the land, the apartheid morality of the racist regime and deeply rooted ethnocentrism. . .”. Footnote 27
This political stance has become increasingly popular in discourses on north-east India. Noted political theorist Sanjib Baruah writes that race is a “visual regime” of labelling, where there are social constructions associated with those labels. Individuals living in north-east India internalise those labels as well as the abiding social constructions.Footnote 28 In looking at the social history of the Meiteis, one finds division on the basis of racial features has been a part of north-eastern Indian society for a long time. After independence in 1947, its political climate began to change. One of the first social movements in the region in the early 1950s was known as the “Pan Mongoloid Movement”.Footnote 29 This movement brought together different groups of people who possess “Mongoloid” physical features and was the first political effort based on racial grounds in north-east India. This movement did not gain momentum, however, because of the many internal differences within the population. To discuss the different issues associated with ethnicity in Manipur, I have divided the following section into four subsections: within state boundaries, realities outside the state, in cyberspace and the reconstruction of history in the light of ethnicity.
Within state boundaries
After merger with India in 1949, Manipur was subject to the policies of the Indian government. These did not work in favour of those in Manipur. Today, Meitei people consider themselves marginalised and “ruled” by the South Asian administrators from the Indian national government, and they feel their economic development is at “the mercy of the Indian bourgeoisie”. The current economic and political condition of Manipur significantly contributes to its marginalised existence. The complete absence of a private sector or especially of foreign investors (the entire north-eastern region is closed to foreign nationals)Footnote 30 sharply contrasts with other parts of India. A stagnant economy and severe unemployment are core social problems. In the face of such economic hardship, resentment against the Indian government arose, and a strong political insurgency grew in the region soon after the merger with India in 1949. As violence erupted, the government of India started taking action against the insurgents. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (afpsa) was passed in 1958 by the Indian parliament and, as allowed by the act, a large contingent of the Indian military has been stationed in Imphal since that time. The military has the right to arrest any individual for interrogation or to shoot to kill in the name of controlling the insurgency. Sexual assaults on female suspects and deaths in custody are an everyday occurrence. The legal implications of afpsa and the circumstances that led to its recent modification are beyond the scope of this essay.Footnote 31 Ironically, however, the afpsa has engendered a new form of nationalist consciousness based on ethnicity throughout north-east India including Manipur. Even today, anyone looking more normatively “Indian” is treated with respect by the military officials, while any Manipuri can be stopped at anytime and asked for identification. This entire scenario is one of the factors contributing to the discordant relationship between the locals and non-local Indians.
Realities outside the state
Manipuris rarely feel comfortable living in other parts of India, where their appearance typically arouses curiosity and animosity among the larger population. Gangumei KabuiFootnote 32 has written that Manipuri students who join the insurgency in contemporary Manipur are often motivated by the social discrimination they have experienced in India.
During the course of my fieldwork, a young Manipuri student told me of his first visit to Bombay. He recalled that he and his Manipuri companions were constantly asked where they were from and that people were always staring at them. After a few days, they started answering that they were from Thailand because it was more convenient. If they answered Manipur, people would ask them where that was, raising even more suspicion.
In cyberspace
The exchange of ideas and experiences regarding ethnicity in both email discussion groups and electronic chat rooms has become increasingly more common in Manipur. I tracked some autobiographical accounts on “Manipur-diaspora” regarding race and ethnicity. An example is telling:
The one that I still remember clearly was my being called “Chapta” (flat nose—for those fortunate ones that never heard the term) by my Hindi teacher. The word “chinki” even is peddled around with not even a little thought of whether the term could offend someone (Manipur Diaspora, @yahoo-groups.com, email No.367).
This account demonstrates the bitterness that accumulates in young minds when they interact with the mainstream Indian population and are exposed to racist insults. Several postings from the Manipur Diaspora email discussion group give details of hate crimes perpetuated against north-east Indians with Asian features in the Indian capital of Delhi. One of them ends as follows:
Is the conduct of the police justifiable or a threat to National Integration that just because of our Chinese feature[s] why should we be deprived of justice in all walks of life? We appeal to all True Indian Nationalists to extend their helping hands to fight against the racial discrimination (Manipu Diaspora@yahoo-groups.com, email No.500).
In response to this email another member of the Diaspora shared his experience of talking to a Manipuri member of the Indian women's national hockey team. She related her story of being repeatedly mistaken for Chinese or Korean at international events (Manipur Diaspora@yahoo-groups.com, E-Mail No.501).
Reconstruction of history in the light of ethnicity
Memories from the common people of north-eastern India vis-à–vis race form the untold history of the region. Along similar lines, Yasmin Saikia has described the nationalist sentiments of the Tai-Ahom people and argues that nationalist Indian history has never included the memories of the people living in Assam.Footnote 33 The ethnographic scenario described in the previous sections brings us to an important topic: the meta-meanings of the word “race” through different histories. As Ballhatchet reminds us, terminology used in one part of the world in a specific historical era cannot always be transposed to another without the danger of losing the complexity of meanings. The word “race” has historically collected many meanings in many parts of the world over time. Can it be transposed so easily to northeast India?
Partha Chatterjee has conceptualised “political societies” to discuss the sections of civil societies that remain at the margins. At its inception the Indian nation identified its marginal groups in the light of information available to the leadership. When the Indian constitution was being formulated by the constituent assembly, B. R. Ambedkar, an influential assembly member from an untouchable caste, made sure that the rights of those castes were protected by the constitution. The idea of race and ethnicity, however, never appeared in what was then the minority discourse.
Given this, I would argue the birth of the Indian nation occurred with a monoracial imagination. People with “yellow skin” and South East Asian features were not a part of the nation's vision. India's formerly colonised elite in a way became the new colonial power in post-independence India, discriminating against South East-Asian-looking minorities in the same way that they had once been discriminated against by the British. And, ethnicity one of the predominant factors differentiating people from north-east India, never found a place in the Indian political/developmental discourse.
Chatterjee's “political society” thus finds a new incarnation in the Manipuri case. In contrast to urban marginal groupsFootnote 34 or to West Bengal rural politiciansFootnote 35 , I identify Manipuri society living in the state under afpsa to be a “racial society” or a racialised entity without any constitutional rights under the Indian nation state. While there is hierarchy of class, education and tribal affiliation within the population of the state, within its geographical boundaries, any ethnic South East Asian receives the same discriminatory treatment. While academics and activists have on several occasions pointed to the importance of race as a social factor,Footnote 36 systematic political lobbying on the race issue has yet to happen. But racial activism expresses itself in Manipur in the area of genealogical folklore.
Folklore and the Quagmire of Realities
Folklore and cultural expressions have been used in building nationalistic ideologies in almost every modern nation.Footnote 37 In the case of Manipur, the story of Chitrangada explains the invented genealogy of the Manipuri royal family. It became very popular during the time of conversion to Hinduism because it gave a political and cultural identity to people that was preferred at that time. It relates that the third Pandava Prince Arjuna travelled to Manipur and married the Manipuri Princess Chitrangada. Their son Babrubahana became the king of Manipur. The royal family of Manipur was thus given an Indic ancestry.Footnote 38
After the revival movement spread to Manipur, this was one of the first stories that revivalist communities came to question. The founder of the Sanamahi movement, Naoriya Phullo, was the first person of his generation to challenge this story, as detailed in his book Eigi Wareng [My story].
Meetei Ningthouron: Babrubahana pushillakpagi namthak.. . .Babrubahana puthoraktuna Meetei ningthoushinga taishinnarakpashida lairikshingshi yamna wanre.. . .Mashida eikhoigi angakpani.
[The story of Meetei kings: the story of insertion of Babrubahana.. . .We are amazed/shocked to see how Babrubahana was inserted into the line of Meetei kings and so many books were written on that basis. . .]Footnote 39
Ng. Kangia, a philosophy professor and a priest of the revived Meitei religion, has argued in his book Adungeigi Kangleipak Manipur Natte [This kangleipak is not Manipur] that the present-day Manipur is not same Manipur described in the Mahabharata. He points out that in the Mahabharata, Manipur is described as close to the ocean.
Mahendra parbatang drishtwa tapasheirupashobhitam Samudratiren shanei manipurang jagamaha.Footnote 40
[After seeing the mountain named Mahendra he proceeded toward the Manipur by the bank of the ocean.]
As Kangia concludes:
Mahabharatki Manipur adushu mahakki mataroishing asigi marakta adum leijabani. Sanskrita maming khara phongdokpasin babrubahangi Manipur adugi mataroising leitaba kangleipakta laku haibasu yaroi.
[The Manipur of the Mahabharata and its stories are not found here [in Manipur]. By imposing a few Sanskrit names, like Manipur of Babrubahana, one cannot (and should not] publicise our Kangleipak [the old name of Manipur] as the land of the Mahabharata.]
Ng. Kangia's book immediately stirred controversy. The noted Bengali historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, however, supported the view. Footnote 41,Footnote 42 The controversy was not restricted to academics, and the religious revival movement carried it much further. In 1979 and 1980, when the movement for the inclusion of the Meitei language in the Indian constitution was at its peak, Ibemu Devi observed a celebration of Puya Meithaba.Footnote 43 She quotes from the pamphlet of the celebration committee:
Our movement for the preservation of cultural identity will be gaining ground with the tireless and selfless effort of Chingburoi-Tamburoicha [the people of hill and plain]. We have started our movement with a great momentum from the year 1979.. . . As a part of our duty we set fire on books, [sic] translated by committed scholars such as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana etc. that created the false conception that the Meiteis were the descendents from Arjuna, one of the Pandavas, and so called Manipur was erupted by a Hindu God “Mahadeva.” [sic] This marked the end of the “dark age” and dawn of the “glorious period” in the history of the country.Footnote 44
The new nationalist consciousness led the Meitei community to rebel against the stories of Arjuna and Chitrangada. Books containing those stories were burned in public as an expression of rebellion.Footnote 45 In May 1998, in the course of my own fieldwork, I witnessed a major debate surrounding this controversial folklore. An older Hindu storyteller had published a book in which he argued that the present Manipur is the same as that mentioned in the Mahabharata. A major revivalist organisation called a public meeting, collected copies of the book, set them on fire and fined the storyteller Rs. 2000 for writing such a misleading history. Although I was not present at the meeting, I heard several accounts of it later from members of the revivalist group as well as their opponents. It was rumoured that the storyteller had been beaten up. Many of the elite academics laughed at the incident, but some also observed that the revivalists had taken advantage of the fact that the storyteller did not have any education and had harassed him. The event is certainly indicative of the influence that this particular story wields in the day-to-day life of Manipur.
Ng. Kangia's Adungeigi Kangleipak Manipur Natte does not stand alone. Several history books, especially textbooks written in the community, either support or oppose the story. Taking a stand with regard to it also has social consequences for those living in Manipur. For example, a noted Manipuri historian told me in a personal interview that after his book supporting the revivalist view was published, he had been invited to a function and offered felicitations by several revivalist organisations. He did not want to be involved with them, however, and hence did not attend.
The Politics of Scholarly Production: “Folklore” or “History
The Meitei community has had a long tradition of writing religious manuscripts (puyas). Different histories of migration are documented in these, and there are debates about how old the puyas actually are, with some scholars claiming that they date back to the twelfth centuryFootnote 46 . The long history of kingship in Manipur is also a history of the royal patronage of scholars.Footnote 47 The pandit loishang, or scholar's residence, that adjoins the palace today attests to this connection. For generations, many scholars have been in residence in the loishang and have pursued research on a variety of topics including religion, ethics, botany, medicine and clan genealogies.Footnote 48 If one looks at the history of Manipuri literature, it becomes obvious that religious conversion to Hinduism also marked a key point of change in the style of scholarly pursuits. Sanskrit and Bengali became the languages of erudition, and the royal patronage of scholarship emphasised the translation of sacred Hindu texts into Meitei. Manipuri scholars also wrote numerous texts in Bengali and Sanskrit. The most noteworthy of these early twentieth-century Meitei scholars was Panditraj Atombapu Sharma, whose vast scholarship on Sanskrit literature remains legendary in Manipur, even though his attempts at establishing the Indic origins of the Meitei society are deemed controversial.Footnote 49
Varying but detailed accounts regarding how the manuscripts were burned at the time of the Hindu conversion can be elicited from local scholars in the community.Footnote 50 One legend has it that the puyas were too sacred to be burned and actually flew away from the fire, while others note there were a number of scholars who had many copies of the same text, so even though some copies of the puyas were burned, others remained. Yet another interpretation of the legend is that the puyas were taken outside the Valley to save them from the king's wrath. I have also heard that the puyas were written in water-resistant ink on similarly protected paper and were hidden underwater. No matter what happened, the puyas in Meitei script are all found in Manipur today.Footnote 51 They are stored in private collections with local scholars and also in the state archives in Imphal.
The royal administration of Manipur was divided into eight departments or loishangs, the foremost being the pandit loishang, or house of scholars. The palace of Manipur still houses the adjoining royal Govindji temple. This temple along with the several royal departments includes the royal pandit loishang. Today there are three scholars in residence there. In the mid-twentieth century, however, there was a feud within the royal establishment. When the kingFootnote 52 of Manipur, Maharaja Okendrajit, converted to the revived pre-Hindu religion, Sanamahism, the royal temple separated from the palace and established a managing trust of its own. The royal departments, including the pandit loishang, or department of scholars, came under the jurisdiction of the temple board. The head of the pandit loishang at that time was the renowned scholar M. Chandra Singh. Parallel with this, the king established a separate maichou loishang that was led by a revivalist scholar, Nodiachand Amaiba. This dual system continues to the present. As the pandit loishang and the maichou loishang represent two schools of thought, their divergent religious views have given rise to acute differences in the interpretation of puyas.
As should be abundantly clear from the above account, scholarship under royal patronage has never existed independently of politics. The pursuits of the royal scholars have always centred on the king's sponsorship. Thus in many ways the king's patronage has influenced the production of books written by scholars at the court.Footnote 53 At this point, we should consider how the politics of present-day Manipur influence contemporary interpretation of these writings and mythologies.
Ranajit Guha’sFootnote 54 commentary on religious epics in India being classified as purana itihasa – purana and itihasa meaning epic and history, respectively – by a more conservative Indian contingent provides a valuable perspective. He points out that not all the segments of Indian society agreed to this claim – in fact a large portion of the intelligentsia took the opposite stance, i.e., collapsing the “happenings, deeds, events” into a “common source”, i.e. the state. With the colonial state emerging as the modernising agent, South Asian intellectuals found writing South Asian history an important tool in finding a place on the map of world history for the subcontinent. Guha however, points out the differences between the two forms as he pithily claims, “viewed from one side it is a shift from fantasy to reason. . .viewed from another side it is a shift from one form of story telling to another”. Footnote 55
If mythology represented the narrative of the monarchical Manipuri state, “modern history” represents the narrative of the modern nation state. Which brings us to the next question: what is the “state” in north-east India today? The transition from monarchy to democracy was a very questionable one and hence the old narratives of the past that contributed to the agenda of the monarchical state have been declared defunct. The population is now looking for new meanings and realities to internalise the concept of modern statehood. As discussed earlier, the emergence of the modern state apparatus has brought forth consciousness of racial differences within India. Economic deprivation and political instability has led to an acute crisis in the everyday life of the people. Under these circumstances, the marginalised Meitei population regards its past in a light that suits everyday realities.Footnote 56 The people of Manipur nonetheless want to claim a “modern history”. Having a place in the discourse of modernity is an important criterion for making themselves visible within the Indian nation state. Ashis NandyFootnote 57 argues that history is a sign of being “modern”. Older civilisations in their quest for being accepted as “modern” societies in the contemporary globalised world often resort to finding their own histories. “Though millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects”Footnote 58 .
The multiple dimensions of historiography in Manipur are beyond the scope of this article. Even if we were to agree that the people of Manipur are moving towards the “empire of history”, what significance does the Chitrangada story have in this process? “Becoming loyal subjects” of the “empire of history” also involves the complex and sometimes painful process of choosing the right history. It is this search for a past to suit current realities that brings us to the next section.
The Quest for an Alternative Allegiance
Sanjib Baruah's India Against Itself (1999) delineates the case of Assam, another state in north-eastern India, where an armed anti-Indian insurgency has been an important part of the local politics. He points out that the political insurgency goes hand in hand with rethinking the past and questioning allegiance to the Indian nation state. Manipur is clearly going through a similarly ironic transition in rethinking its past. Contemporary academia in Manipur remains engaged in attempts to reconstruct the genealogical roots of Meitei society.
The writings of British academics R.B. Pemberton and T.C. Hodson, and also of some contemporary scholars of Manipur, are illuminating in this context. PembertonFootnote 59 rejected the popular theory of a Hindu origin of the Meiteis and concluded that they emigrated from the north-western border of China. HodsonFootnote 60 in his pioneering ethnography of Manipur disagreed with Pemberton and postulated that the present Meitei population was descended from the surrounding hill tribes, although he agreed with Pemberton in rejecting the western Hindu origin. Curiously enough, local scholars of Manipur at the time did not take these accounts into consideration. Among recently published works, Hareswor Goshwami's History of the People of Manipur gives a detailed account of the Tai migration in the Manipur Valley. He describes the different groups of Tai people who left their ancestral lands because of political conflicts and entered the land Tribes by Meitei author K. C. Tensuba explicitly claims a connection with the population of “Mee” (the land of the Tibeto-Burmans) around 2200 BP.Footnote 61 The Genesis of Indian of modern Thailand as the book's subtitle is An Approach to the History of Meiteis and Thais.Footnote 62 In the book, an actual comparison of Meiteis and Thais occurs in very few places. The third chapter, “The origin of Mongolian people”, includes a comparative account of the history of the Chinese, Thais, and Meiteis. The nationalistic bent of the writing becomes apparent when the author claims the Meiteis invented the art of silk weaving before the Chinese but fails to provide any evidence in support of his thesis.
In the section on the Tang and Shang dynasties in his third chapter, Tensuba argues that the Shang dynasty (which he claims was the ancestor of the ShansFootnote 63 ) had evolved from the Tang dynasty in China. He gives an account of the different Chinese dynasties and attempts to establish that some of them migrated to Thailand, Kachin and Manipur. He has also set up a comparative table of the Meitei, Shan, Brahmi, Bengali and Burmese scripts. He argues that Thai and Meitei have a common origin as they both were descended from the Shang/Shan.
In Manipuri mythology, the coming of the hero Poireiton is a seminal event, as among other things he is credited with introducing fire. The fire that Poireiton purportedly brought to the Meitei community is still kept burning in the village of Andro. There are several theories about the identity of Poireiton: M. Kirti Singh quotes Atombapu Sharma to posit the view that he was a Aryan priest,Footnote 64 while Tensuba states that he came from China or Burma. In a review of Tensuba's book that appears at www.amazon.com, reviewer Lalit Pukhrambam points out that Tensuba's thesis is not well supported by historical evidence, but at the same time he asserts that Meiteiology is a field that still needs to be established and this work is a step in that direction. The reviewer's emphasis on placing Meiteiology on the academic map is noteworthy.
In October 1998 the History Department at Manipur University organised a national seminar on the “Ahom-Shan-Manipuri Diaspora in the Thirteenth Century”. A number of historians presented papers on the arrival of Prince Siu-Ka-Pha in north-eastern India. In her paper on the “Tai-Ahom diaspora in the thirteenth century”, I. S. Mumtaza argued that Siu-Ka-Pha, a Mong prince from the Pong kingdom had immigrated to Assam. Among the papers presented perhaps the most noteworthy was “A note on Soraren [god of heaven] Macha [son] Khunkumba [descending for settlement] –an ancient Manipuri manuscript relating to the Shans”. In the paper the author relates the story of how Samulang-pa, the younger brother of Prince Siu-Ka-Pha, came to Manipur and took over the kingdom, introducing many cultural practices as described in the manuscript.
In reviewing the seminar papers, I was first struck by the subtitle of the seminar itself, “In Commemoration of the 770th Anniversary of Chao-Lung Siu-Ka-Pha”. This anniversary is regarded as a major landmark in the history of Assam and Manipur, and the academics at Manipur University considered the event important enough to sponsor a national seminar to commemorate the coming of the prince from a South East Asian country. What is of further interest here is the unique relationship that modern historians draw between the Shans or Pongs and modern Thai or Chinese communities. The boundaries of the kingdom of Pong or Shan varied through time, but in the seminar papers that I read the Meitei and Assamese scholars seem to have been silent about where they should be drawn. In my reading of these papers, I observed scholars avoid discussion about Burma. However, when it came to Thailand, and sometimes China, no one ay the seminar hesitated to draw their roots from these countries. The scholars also agreed that the origin of Tai communities is China. Presumably, the centuries of war and a history of enmity with Burma made scholars avoid considering it as their possible point of origin. Thailand in contrast matched their romantic imagination of an ideal country for the Manipuri people. The phenotypical similarities, the lack of a colonial presence in its history, its current prosperity, coupled with unfamiliarity with Thailand itself, all nurtured the imaginations of the scholars and led them to locate their “ideal” roots there. Manipur's renowned philosopher and cultural commentator M. Kirti Singh's book Recent Researches in Oriental and Indological Studies has a chapter on the cultural ties between Thailand and Manipur. The chapter conclusion emphasises the cordial relationship between the Meiteis and Thai people, mentioning intermarriages and pointing out the possibility that there were Pong leaders (inhabitants of northern Burma, Thailand and Yunnan province in China) in Manipur before the reign of the first mythical ruler Nongdalairen Pakahngba, dated to the first century ad.Footnote 65
The attempt to reconstruct ties between Manipur and South East Asia is noteworthy here, as well as the emphasis on marital relationships. The search for genealogical ties with the present Thai community is especially significant and exemplifies the Meitei quest to establish its place within the Thai Diaspora. Hyung Pai Footnote 66 explores a similar story when writing about the construction of Korea as a nation. Several Japanese scholars had argued that Japanese and Koreans have a common racial origin, and Pai has demonstrated how archaeological and anthropological research has been guided by this assumption. In looking at the historical identity of Tai-Ahoms, Yasmin SaikiaFootnote 67 writes that she encountered people at her field site wanting to establish Chinese ancestry. I observe a similar trend among Manipuri academics who now direct their research towards finding a South East Asian connection with Manipur.
Saikia's recent observations about the academic discourse on South East AsiaFootnote 68 conversely reveals that South East Asian scholars are developing an interest in north-east India. Thai intellectuals have travelled to Tai-Ahom communities to meet and convince the people that they were indeed a part of “Greater Thailand”. Following the same trend, Thai scholars have now started coming to Manipur as well.Footnote 69
Many of my questions concerning the desire of Meitei scholars to belong to Thailand were answered when I read Yasmin Saikia's earlier Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India where she vividly describes the interactions that Thai scholars have had with the Tai-Ahoms in Assam, starting in the 1980s. In their quest for an “authentic” Tai past, Thai scholars travelled to Assam repeatedly, purchased old manuscripts from Tai-Ahom villagers and had them translated into Thai. Saikia observes that as more researchers have travelled to the villages, members of the Tai-Ahom community have become increasingly conscious of their value as research bases. The importance of the Ahoms to these scholars from Thailand has influenced the Ahom cultural revival movement and political insurgency.
Similarly, with the hostile political climate in Manipur and its increasingly negative relationship with the Indian government, Meitei scholars are once again seeking an alternative genealogy, this time in South East Asia. Just as the coming of Arjuna during the times of Mahabharata promoted a kinship between the Meitei community and the north Indian population, now the unspoken agenda of academia seems to emphasise the coming of Prince Siu-Ka-Pha, signifying closer ties with South East Asia. The Thai diaspora is thus the coveted space wherein the modern Meitei imagination finds its ideal sources.Footnote 70 What is this politics of culture and spaceFootnote 71 that makes a community living in India imagine that their roots lie in another land? And how do they justify their claim? Manipuri historian Gangumen Kabui regrets that myths were given prominence in the history of Manipur, but at the same time takes pride in the fact that the Meitei community have a deep sense of history.Footnote 72 In reading papers from the conference, I find the same tendency on the part of Meitei scholars presently seeking to establish a “history”. This “history” derived from the mythology of the puyas is an attempt to construct an alternative past that suits present attitudes and feelings. The myths produced by Panditraj Atombapu Sharma were not previously called “history”. Now, however, contemporary academics have transformed precisely those myths into “history.” Ranajit Guha has conceptualised the nation state as a spiritual idea that is externalised in human will and freedom. He states that all historical changes are dependent upon the state and that the specific objective of “world history” is attaining the said freedom of the state.Footnote 73 If we examine Guha's postulation with regard to Manipur, we can recognise that change in the structure and philosophy of the state of Manipur from a monarchical to a colonial, followed by a national, and subsequently to a military-authoritarian one has given rise to innumerable strands of historical thinking. The exclusion of Southeast Asian-looking people from the national imagination has created a large gap in the meaning and significance of a nation state for Manipuri people. The status of the Chitrangada story in contemporary Manipur signifies this exclusion.
During colonial rule Indian nationalists were compelled to produce a school of historiography that highlighted the glory of Indian civilisation. The Indian nation state and its apparatus are now inadvertently prompting several communities in north eastern India to repeat the same cycle. In a move recalling early Indian nationalists, modern Meiteis, including those in the diaspora, are looking at the puyas, a lengthy written tradition to attest to the antiquity of their own civilisation.
Conclusion
Racial marginalisation experienced as a fact of everyday life in Manipur has led to a diminishing focus on the story of Arjuna and Chitrangada, which had been given considerable prominence by the Hindu pandits of previous generations. The story of Prince Siu-ka-pha is the source for the new genealogical folklore of modern Manipuri historians. Behind the shift is the complex notion of identity formation by the Meitei community with respect to the Indian nation state – and the prime mover is the notion of race. The everyday consequences of the racial differences between the north-east Indian people and the larger Indian population propel the quest for an alternative genealogy. Within the context of Meitei genealogical nationalism, the word “genealogy” does not indicate the kinship structure of individual families, as in traditional anthropology, nor does it refer to the extensive interpersonal relationships within a given family and their interplay. Genealogy in this case references the ties of the Meitei population to two different regional populations in Asia that have been established through two sets of folklore: the story of Arjuna linking the Meiteis with greater India, and the story of Prince Siu-ka-pha linking them with Thailand and South East Asia. Two generations of Meitei academics are involved in forming these linkages. Michael Herzfeld's (1982) discussionFootnote 74 of folklore and the creation of nationalistic history is relevant to the Manipuri case, but the story of the Meiteis traces nationalistic conversations on genealogy through time and generations.
In my reading of the debates surrounding Meitei genealogy, the racial body comes to the forefront of the nationalistic enterprise of reconstructing the genealogical roots of the community. The Manipuri students who study in India or the occasional Manipuri traveller to India who incurs hostility immediately turns towards the history of his or her ancestors and questions any relationship with the Indian population. The idea of sharing a common ancestry with a people prejudiced against one on racial grounds becomes unacceptable. It is when the racial consciousness of the Meitei community comes into prominence in modern thought that the alternative genealogical roots of the community seem most plausible. Race thus becomes the signifier of the alternative history as sought by the Meitei community and genealogical folklore becomes the ploy.
The last scene of the dance drama at Imphal showed Arjun and Chitrangada dancing after their wedding. The curtain dropped and lights came on in the auditorium as the performance ended. The buzz of the conversations from the audience slowly faded away in the dark night as people made their way through the lonely streets of Imphal. All businesses were closed, and not a soul was to be found anywhere; military trucks drove back and forth. As civil rights are suspended in the state, the people silently reject the Chitrangada story. Its place is being taken by other stories that give them legitimacy as “foreigners” in their own land.
