Production of Ideologies
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: October 30 2015 -
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.
Ideology in sociological parlance is understood in direct relation to sets of cultural beliefs, values and attitudes that serve a society to reinforce existent structure.
It can also be understood as a set of adopted beliefs that can exert pressure on the same structure for ushering in change.
It has been accepted that every culture has an ideology that can invent, import and recover values to either unify or fracture the structure of the society.
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 actual dynamics in the invention, import and recovery of ideologies.
Perhaps, there has been overarching dependence on the study of officially written history 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 official 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.
However, in the last few decades, some efforts have been made to probe into how a society composed of numerous communities traversed through shifts and turns in value system as a result of their encounters with either the Vedic Civilizational order or the Eurocentric values of Christianity.
There is still the need for a rigorous review of our own understanding of the immediate “others” and the construction of the same via numerous distortions and production of ideologies.
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