"Chingna koina panshaba, chingmeena koina panngaakpa…Manipur sana
leibaakni" (Surrounded by hills, defended by hill men…is our great land,
Manipur). This is how our forefathers used to describe this beautiful
land. My grandfather used to tell me on many occasions that different
ethnics in our hills were different forms of our brethrens. Amongst
them, Kabuis and Tangkhuls were the closest ones.
I heard about the bravery and peculiar hairdo of our Tangkhul brethrens, and the watchfulness of the
Tangkhul hui (Tangkhul breed of dog) from him. Needless to mention, the
relation between Kabuis and the valley was of royal level. Many of them
reliably served the Meitei Kings even more than their Meitei
counterparts.
We can’t imagine a Meitei Lai Haraoba (festival of Meitei Deities)
without
Naga dance. Khamba, the hero of Meitei romantic folk story,
Khamba-Thoibi,
and role model of many Meitei lovers of olden times, and his sister,
Khamnu were brought up in our glorious hills by Khaangaraakpa, a close
friend of Khamba’s father and a hill village chief.
If we try to
remember,
Pamheiba (Garib Niwaz), the conceiver of Vaishnavism in the valley grew
up
in our lofty hills. The list is inexhaustible if we try to unfold the
centuries old brotherly relationship between the hill and valley.
But why do I compel to remind all these things? Don’t we know it? Are we talking
about people of far seashore or of African jungles or Sahara desert?
No, we are talking about our own people who have been living nearest to us - but still seem to be always far?
We belong to same Mongoloid group, we eat the same food, we have same
taboos and have similar origins; we look similar in the eyes of the
world,
but we always feel that we are different. We have dyed ourself with
borrowed traditions, languages, religions, customs, rituals and
beliefs.
So, we see ourself different from our own people. Vaishnavism brought
change of lifestyles, cleanliness, and respect to elders, warmth
towards
any living being for the valley people. Christianity, in the hills,
came
as an eye-opener, realization of self-respect and good education. But
on
both the occasions, we undermined the hill-valley relationship.
"Yesterday, you were my brother, today you are of low caste – somebody
we
must not interact with, as I’m now a Vaishnavite Hindu while you remain
the same uncivilized hill tribe." This was contrasted by, "we cannot
be
of one family anymore, as you have been treating us like an uncivilized
tribe for long, and now we have learned to live of our own." Like a
ship
that shoves away with the changing wind from the shoreline, we began to
tear apart from each other with each passing day. And we never ever had
realized this.
Today, we are educated and civilized, we are now aware of our rights;
we
can define what are sovereignty, liberation, homeland and the ‘state’.
1500 years ago, we might be probably used to share a single fruit
sitting
on the same branch of a tree, looking the gifted beauty of our land.
We
never thought that he was a Christian or a Hindu and a hill man or a
valley man. But today, we talk on the lines of "our people" and "their
people", because we are aware of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘city state’ and
Mao’s
social progresses and equality.
This Christmas, Santa Claus arrives in our hills with an extraordinary
gift, a hope of peace, a gift that has always been longing for by the
people of this region – this is really astonishing, and has never been
happened before in the past 50 years.
This is the time we tend to
forget
all our hard days inebriating with the cocktail of icy wind and
Christmas
jingles. This is the time, on the other hand, we feel the viciousness
of
the chilly breeze through our ear, and our breath becomes smoky as
visible
vapour.
Yes, it is also the time when our innocent eyes spend a hard
time
in distinguishing valley man and hill man, as both of them are clad
with
the same attire of Naga shawl to defend from the bone-chilling cold.
With each passing day, the fog becomes thicker closing all the eight
directions, but souls like me, slowly drift into a probably
unrealizable
dream with all those folk and real stories of the grandfathers, and
wish
if time winds back to those wonderful days again!
Irungbam Prabin, a Post Graduate in Mass Communication is a freelance journalist based in Delhi, contributes regularly to e-pao.net.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
This article was webcasted on Dec 22nd 2004.
|