Traditional political life of the Meiteis and the Mizos is deeply rooted to their customary laws in their respective societies. The socio political institutions are closely entrenched with other institutions.
Their system of political institution is based on Kinship relations and is termed as a mere “Social Organisation” distinguished from “Political Organisation” of civilized community (Lewis Henry Morgan : Ancient Society, London, 1877, pp 65-67).
Similar views were expressed by Durkheim (Emile Durkheim : Elementary Forms of religious Life, London, 1915) and Malinawski (Boris Malinawski : Freedom and Civilization, London : 1947; pp 263-266), whose authority on the primitive people is undisputed.
They contended that primitive State was not tyrannical, as is supposed to be, to its subjects because they were always a body of people related by bonds of kinship and relationship, by clanship and age grades and that they spoke of themselves as a group where practically everybody was related, in reality or fictitiously, to everybody else. Customary Laws governed and regulated these relationships and ties of fraternity which emerged thereof.
Schapera (Issac Schapera : Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, London ; 1963; pp 14-15) contended that political system among primitive societies was based on kinship relation and that each tribe claimed exclusive rights to the land it occupied.
( The tribal areas are often governed for all practical purposes by the customary laws. Normally a Customary Law or the other had jurisdiction over the village administration, village officials and ever the village boundary. The authorities therefore exercised their customary laws over the villagers or their kinship based society whenever disputes arose or in due course of performing right rites and rituals.)
All people living therein were subjects to the chief, as head of the local Government, and only by moving away or migration could they escape his control. Outsiders might not settle in his territory without chiefs’ permission, who rehabilitated them wherever he wished.
(For details see the aspects of Yek and Salai formation in Meitei society especially with reference to the Muslim Pangals and the Brahmanas.)
Thereafter, they, the settled outsiders, became his subjects. In case they disobeyed him they were expelled. He not only regulated the distribution and use of the land but also decided the fate of his subjects on the basis of customary laws.
MacIver (R.R. MacIver : The Web of Government, New York : 1965; p. 165) said with conviction that in primary sense a tribe was “community organized on the basis of kinship who usually claimed to have descended from a common ancestor” and that “tribal Government was characteristic of simple society” and “was equivalent to Primitive Government”.
As a matter of fact, the study of Mizo and Meitei societies together is academically to our mind compatible due to the fact that though both are at different stages of societal birth, growth, development and civilization they have a common origin.
Though the two societies are far apart from each other in all spheres of life, socially, politically and economically, the cultural legacies of the Meitei society can be studied deep into the historical period through their written documentary evidences, other materials available in oral traditions.
Such evidences are recorded/seen down into the antiquated period of pre-historical civilizational periods with the help of archeological excavations that have been carried out and some antique evidences, which can be claimed as far back as about more than two thousand years of Meitei civilization stretching into the ages of ‘before Christ’ periods.
The Meitei society has long since gone through the processes of ‘de-tribalisation’ as can be observed in the evolution of chiefdoms that gradually resulted in the formation of the ‘Meitei State’ with the merger of the ‘Seven-Salais’ into the Ningthouja clan which assumed the dominant Royal authority at Kangla.
It needs to be highlighted here that Bhattacharjee (J.B. Bhattacharjee : Social and Polity Formations in Pre-colonial North-East India: 1991, p.1, Vikas Publishing House Pub. Ltd, 576 Masjid Road, New Delhi–14) observed that in the early egalitarian societies inequality stratification started with the emergence of private property and interest groups whose political organizations were founded on territory and property, that State as a higher form of political organisation came into existence when economic relations were further sophisticated by privatization of property and extraction of surplus by the dominant groups in the society and that growth of such a situation strengthened authority of the rulers to assume the theory, ‘divine right’, which was more susceptible to contributing the ‘Brahmanical myths’ that propagated ‘divine origin of the King’(Ibid.).
He was also convinced to attribute that social and polity formation processes in the North East India were more spontaneously influenced by its geo-political situation that readily absorbed pan-Indian traditions where a fine blending of Indo-Aryan and the Indo-Mongoloid traditions co-existed among tribal communities.
Bhattacharjee (J.B. Bhattacharjee : Op. Cit.) was also emphatic to say that emergence of States from indigenous and immigrant tribal social bases in the medieval history of the North-East region was significantly common as could be evidenced in the cases of Koch, Kachari, Meitei, Jaintia and Tripuri who were settlers since early times in the region.(Ibid).
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* Dr. (Mrs.) Priyadarshni M Gangte wrote this article for The Sangai Express .
This article was webcasted on January 23 , 2008 .
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