Editorial on 10th Arambam Somorendra Memorial Lecture

Imphal, June 4, 2015

From the Arambam Somorendra Trust

The Arambam Somorendra Trust is happy to introduce our deeply respected friend, Pu Lalthlamuong Keivom, the first Indian Foreign Service Officer from Manipur and a true son of the soil who shall deliver the 10th the Arambam Somorendra Memorial Lecture.

The Arambam Somorendra Trust on its regular mission to commemorate the death Anniversary of the late leader, had made humble efforts to disseminate through such lectures new vistas of information, share perspectives and engender debate amongst well-meaning citizens and neighbours about critical issues affecting contemporary Northeast India.

Pu Keivom’s choice of the 10th the Memorial Lecture entitled, “Ethnic Churning: CHIKUMI Style” is a subject not much known amongst the general intelligentsia environment in the river valley plains of Manipur for reasons perhaps best known to its inhabitants. Probably the heavy discourse on the issues of the Naga ethno-national movements had overshadowed any other historical awakenings, silent but effectively undergoing long laborious processes of rediscovery of ethnic selfhoods amongst other indigenous populations.

Like us they also had been experiencing critical ancient as well as contemporary human displacements resulting from forces of history, more particularly from imperial as well as colonial manipulations of spaces, peoples and history throughout the Indo-Burma region. The Arambam Somorendra Trust hopes the intervention of Pu Lalthlamuong Keivom along with young scholar representatives of different ethnic denominations would help reassure our audience on the realities of the diversity of identity locations and the adaptation to freshly challenging dimensions of modernity and its corresponding stresses, tensions and anxieties.

The state of Manipur happens to experience now a historical amalgam of rising ethnicities amidst the unredeemed environment of volatile social and economic disparities, ethnic divides as well as state and non-state violence under various forms of conflict and militarization.

With his inimitable and free flowing personal style, Pu Keivom traverses some 20-odd years of his international diplomatic career where his deeply humanitarian nature and primordial attachment to the place of his birth, the Sanaleipak or the Golden Country, had impelled his duties and services towards finding associations and connections, retaining vignettes of memories of interactions which would help expand the quest of the younger generation towards enriching the history of their ancestral land.

He then undertakes to grapple the epic dimensions of the history of the Zo people comprising of the Chin, Kuki and the Mizos where he, taking inspirations from his own discipline of history nourished by his alma mater the Dhanamanjuri College and later his stints at the Guwahati University along with personal readings of necessary socio-anthropological literature, he encapsulates in a brief narrative the entire spectrum of the demographic and diasporic placements of communities and tribes within the vast ecumene of econo-cultural types of rugged hill terrains and vast forest lands.

How colonial political and administrative manipulations of space and territories resulted to the geographic and environmental stratification which also effected clado-genetic segmentations and internal structural cleavages in the socio-anthropological revelations of clans and sibs within the ethnic structures themselves. What Pu Keivom helps to enquire into is the realities of imperial and colonial administrative restructuring Northeast Indian autochthonous societies and its historical impact on the domestic lives of ethnogens and their emotional, sentimental flowering of their identity formation.

Or whether this imagined recapturing of the primordial unities in spite of differences would impact on their own post-colonial histories. A dispassionate reinvestigation into the realities of ancient migrations, the search for human livelihood in various ecological niches, social and political formation of tribes and communities that shaped who we are and how we came to be what we are now and what next for our identities and their relations seemed to have underlined his frank, personal and truth seeking narrative.

Pu Keivom’s anxious worries are definitely the state of transformation in our indigenous communities and the highlander and the lowlander divide, which now seem to plague the existential realities of our multiethnic and multi-cultural polity. Without entering into hair-splitting arguments, he expresses the contemporary predicament of a spiritually dissonant reality of inter-community divisions which now shatters the idyllic image of the Golden Country of erstwhile Manipur he fondly cherished as the sacred place of his birth.

His honest lament at the loss of that land, the belongingness with which he cherished every moment of his chequered career, his sojourns and his interactions with various sections of humanity, the air he breathed, the food he ate, the sensuous atmosphere he interiorized into his nerves and veins that created a sense of place he nourished since his childhood have now been completely altered into a regressive state of a great fall of civilization. He now senses this in his own being.

His anger at experiencing this reality, his diatribe about all these mutually self-destructive exercises are morally legitimate yet painful, that he shares with all his sincerity and frankness of his character and temperament. Pragmatic in his philosophy and spiritually inspired by the compassion he developed as a lover of human dignity he bares his heart on this very special occasion.

Pu Keivom is perhaps right about his perceptions about the deep transformation that have occurred amidst indigenous neighbourhoods. Though many of our generations do feel yet hesitant to talk about this, Pu Keivom had sincerely expected us to ponder deeply and help to recover in our contemporary imagination the idea of the birth place and its role in our lives.

For many men of wisdom had spoken about the issue that geography is destiny, that we can choose friends but not our neighbours. Pu Keivom had thrown the ball into our court for us to delve deeper in the very critical dichotomies of identity and modernity and seek solutions that he offers to the crisis of the roots that affect our collective destiny.

Happy deliberations!