My Memories of Imphal From 1941 : Chapter 9 :: Download

Dr Mohendra Irengbam *

Author in Shillong 1954

Part 9
Health Care
Pukhri Ishing

I remember how I was swamped with excitement about Shillong after reading Dr Lamabam Kamal’s novel Madhabi during my school days. The book is the first Manipuri novel of any genre. It is a fictitious prose narrative about the unrequited love between Madhabi and Dhirendra, as well as an intense love and adoration between Urirei and Birendra, a friend of Dhirendra. It is a cultural centrepiece of Meitei society.

Dr Kamal has an amazing faculty of bringing to life, two love stories in one novel, set in the not so distant past and based on the life and dust of Canchipur. His imagination of many geographical and historical facts of Canchipur to form an authentic background of the stories, makes the book read like a historical novel. In fact, I thought it was a real story when I was a little boy, as I often saw Urirei (fragrant caper vine) and Madhabi (Climbing shrub with fragrant white-yellowish flowers) plants growing wild in our back garden.

The book contains some of the most riveting prose in Manipuri language. With his lean, muscular and pellucid prose, Kamal has the art to make things shockingly vivid. It is a literature of tragicomedy that blends with a truly unhinged bit of satire. The prose is beautiful, because it connects us all as human beings, despite our broad range of experience and beliefs.

In Madhabi, Kamal (1899–1935) describes the beautiful landscape scenery of Shillong as Biren and his friend Dhiren explored it, while holidaying there on their way back home from Calcutta after they got their MA degree.

Dr Kamal was very acquainted with Shillong. He went to Shillong to study at Government High School in Class X to sit his Prabeshika (Matriculation) exam under Calcutta University in 1922. Johnstone ME School had taught only up to class IX. It was only in 1924 that Calcutta University granted Manipuri as a vernacular subject for the Matriculation exam.

Up to date, there has never been a Manipuri novel like Madhabi. In this book, Kamal uses a liturgy of literary language in its lexicon. He was also a talented poet. He wrote an anthology of 18 poems, grouped under the title of Leipareng (Garland of flowers) in 1929, while he was posted as a physician at Tamenglong.

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