Invention, import and recovery of ideology
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: May 08 2015 -
Ideology as primarily understood in Sociological discourse is directly related to sets of cultural beliefs, values and attitudes that serve a society to reinforce existent structure or a changed set of adopted beliefs that can exert pressure on the same structure.
Thus, every culture has an ideology that can invent, import and recover values to either unify or fracture the overall structure of the society.
There have been virtually no specific and rigorous scholarships on the contours of how societies in the Northeast region of India developed their own set of ideologies with specific reference to socio-historical context.
Despite the virtual absence of the exercise, it has been quite interesting to observe the impact of value system and diverse paths opted by communities since time immemorial.
When we juxtapose the history of ideology against the overall political developments in the Northeast, interesting observations have been made.
However, no effort has been made to understand the dynamics in the invention, import and recovery of ideologies.
Perhaps, it is due to the predominant approach adopted in the study of official history written in the royal courts or the observations as recorded by colonial powers.
Vast section of the societies in India’s Northeast with rich oral traditions have been put beyond the analytical purview of high official history except for casual references made in records and official chronicles.
Even the officially recorded histories have little mention of the ruptures that developed over the span of few centuries.
Mention may be made of the period witnessed in Manipur since the advent of Hinduism with the arrivals of Brahmins in 15th Century till the defeat of Manipur in the last war of independence in 1891.
Over the last few decades, contemporary scholars have missed probing deeper into how a society composed of numerous communities have traversed through shifts and turns in value system as a result of their encounters with either the Vedic civilizational order or for that matters the Eurocentric values of Christianity.
This is why there is a need, not only to review our won understanding of the “next other” but also of the “self” from certain prism which throws adequate light on the invention, import and recovery of ideology.
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