Friday, November 28, 2008

"Tribal" Identity and Ethnic Conflict...



"Tribal" Identity and Ethnic Conflicts in Northeast India - Page 2



Cultural Roots of the Problem of "National Identity" in the Northeast


 

1. The Betwixt and Between Identity of the People of Northeast India


 


Geographically and racially, the region we now call Northeast India is situated between the two great Traditions of the Indic Asia and the Mongoloid Asia. This geographical-cultural condition of "in-between-ness" is an important factor for the crisis of identity. It was only since the British period that the entire region came to be associated with India politically.[11] Many leaders of the present day "underground outfits" of the region may argue that the political integration of the region to India was done without the approval of the people themselves. The lack of cultural relatedness, especially of the "tribal" culture, weakens the new political association, and the racial and cultural difference, thus, came to play vital role in defining the self-identity. To answer the question "who are we?" most Northeasterners are caught between the racial-cultural definition and the politico-administrative definition of their identity. Whereas they are politically Indian, they are racially and culturally Mongoloid. The consciousness of the two differing identities is pulling the people and shakes the political loyalty. The situation is worsened by the complex nature of Indic culture with which they have been-out of political necessity-associated. The problem of acceptance on the part of Indic culture with its caste-ridden social system, and the problem of identification on the part of the Northeasterners because of the underlying cultural difference underpins the identity problem. These two underlying problems may be dealt with separately.


 

2. The "Indic" Culture and the People of the Northeast


 


When one talks about cultural plurality in India, since it shares little or no commonality in its traditional culture with the rest of India, the case of the "tribal" people in Northeast India is especially acute. To address the identity crisis in the region, one has to bear in mind the cultural plurality of the Northeast in general and the sharp difference between the people assimilated into Indic culture and the unassimilated "tribal" people in particular. Out of constant interactions, cultures influenced each other and developed commonalities. While the Indic-sanskritic culture of India is as a foreign culture for a large part of the regions, there are also areas where it has been at home for centuries. I will argue that the assimilation of people into the Indic culture became a defining factor for what is "tribal" and "not tribal" in the identity of the people of the region today.


What Ananda Bhagabati calls the distinctive "geo-ethnic character"[12] of the Northeast is helpful in clarifying the multicultural nature and the cultural differences between the people. About three quarters of the region is covered by hilly terrain and one quarter is made up of the four plain areas of Assam's Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, the Tripura plains, and the Manipur plateau. Those in the thinly-populated hill areas are the people we now call "tribals," and in the fertile plains and plateau are mainly the "non-tribal" people who comprises more than 80% of the total population. In recognising the cultural foreignness of the "tribal" people of the hill regions, we should have in mind that the sanskritization of the plain areas have been going on for centuries. F. S. Downs is right in pointing out that until the coming of the British rule in the early nineteenth century, the entire region was never linked politically with any major Indian political power,[13] the cultural link of some plain areas with the Indic culture dates back centuries. The Mahabharata[14]already mentioned Assam as Pragjyotisha, and a reference to Kamrupa-Pragjyotisha is also found in the Kalika Purana and the Yogini Tantra.[15]R. N. Mosahary believes that "the Aryan intrusion" in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam should have begun as early as "one or two centuries before Christ."[16]The sanskritisation or Aryanisation of the indigenous people of Assam, the bulk of which are of mongoloid race,[17]reached its climax in the sixteenth century[18]when Hinduism became the most dominant religion and the sanskritic Assamese replaced the native language. The Tipras, the indigenous people of Tripura, close kin of the Cachari-Bodos of Assam, are also Hindus from time immemorial.[19]In the case of the Meiteis of Manipur, although there are claims of Hindu influence as early as the seventh century, the large-scale spread of Vaisnava Hinduism of Caitanya school began only at the end of the seventeenth century.[20]Around 1705, the Rajah of Manipur officially adopted Hinduism as the state's religion. Unlike in Assam, the Meiteis retain their native Tibeto-Burman language and do not follow a number of traditional Hindu practices such as child marriage, the inhibitions of divorce and widow re-marriage, and the supremacy of Brahmin as well as caste hierarchy.[21]Thus, the level of assimilation of the people into Hindu religion and Indic culture differs from people to people or tribe to tribe. Whereas the Hindu-Assamese-who are relatively inculturated Hindus with some indigenous festivals and practices of their own-became sanskritised to the level where the people lost their native language and adopted many imported practices, the Meitei-Hindus retain many more indigenous practices and traditions within their adopted religion. The Hinduisation of the region was limited to the plain areas as the Indic culture never reach the hill regions. Until the imposition of the British rule in the nineteenth century after the treaty of Yandabo (1826), the hills were isolated and were preserved from the onslaught of sanskritisation. Their cultural foreignness to the Indic cultural system clearly marks off the hill "tribes" from the rest of Indians. Is the non-Indic-ness the mark of "tribal" identity in the Northeast?





Notes to page 2



[11] F. S. Downs, History of Christianity in India, Volume 5, Part 5, Northeast India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Bangalore: The Church History Association of India, 1992), 6.



[12] Ananda C, Bhagabati, "Emergent Tribal Identity in North-East India," in Tribal Development in India: Problems and Prospects, eds. B. Chaudhuri (Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1982), 218.



[13] Downs, 6.



[14] In scholarly estimation, this great epic poem reached its final form no later than 200 A.D. See, for instance, Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Traditions (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1971), 81.



[15] Bangovinda Parampanthi, "Aryanisation and Assimilation of Assam," in Nation-Building and Development in North East India, ed. Udayon Misra (Guwahati: Purbanchal Prakash, 1991), 106.



[16] R. N. Mosahary, "Aryanisation and Hinduisation of the Bodos," Proceedings of the North ast India History Association, Tenth Session (Shillong: NEIHA, 1989), 165.



[17] According to Sir Edward Gait, the earliest known settlers in the Brahmaputra valley are the Kacharis of mongoloid race speaking Tibeto Burman language-group. See Gait, A History of Assam, 2nd ed. (Guwahati: Lawyer's Book Stall, 1926 [reprint 1994]), 2, 236.



[18] Mosahary, 167.



[19] The myth of origin of the Tipra Rajah is fully Hindu in character. See A. mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1884 [reprinted 1995]), 269-70.



[20] Saroj Nalini Parratt, The Religion of Manipur: Beliefs, Rituals and Historical Development (Calcutta: Firma KLM Pvt. Ltd., 1980), 103, 113, 141ff.



[21] Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James hastings, s.v. "Manipuris" by T. C. Hodson.


No comments: