On the concept of Meitei patriotism : A perspective
- Part 3 -

Dr Mangsatabam Jitendra Singh *

We know that there are races who have never succeeded in establishing among themselves the right of property in the soil and in forming a country or state of their own while the Meiteis among others have reached this stage only after long and painful experience. The Tartars have an idea of the right of property in a case of flocks or herds, but they cannot understand it when it is a question of land.

Among the ancient Germans the earth belonged to no one; every year the tribe assigned to each one of its members a lot to cultivate and the lot was changed the following year. The German was proprietor of the harvest, but not of the land. The case is still the same among, broadly speaking, some of the Tibeto-Burman speaking groups of South-East Asia.

On the other hand, the Meiteis, from the earliest antiquity, held to the idea of private property in the soil and, thus, could establish a country or state of their own in the present North-East region of India.

It appears that, among the Meiteis, the conception of private property was developed exactly contrary to what appears to be natural order. It was not applied to the harvest first and to the soil afterwards but followed the inverse order.

Let us now pass to another object of worship – the tomb. The tomb held a very important place in the religion of the Meiteis in the olden days; for, on one hand, worship was due to the ancestors, and, on the other, the principal ceremony of this worship – the funeral repast – was to be performed on the very spot where the ancestors rested.

The family, therefore, had a common tomb, where its members, one after another, must come to sleep. There is a tradition in Manipur as to the disposal of the dead – burial or cremation – that, when a Meitei is killed in a battle or an accident and his body not found, a piece of a tree locally called pangong, which is just like the unique tree, "Dragon Blood Tree" found in Sakota Islands, because of red resin oozing out as if it is bleeding when one cuts it (tree), is used as a substitute of the dead in the funeral, if the man is not guilty of any criminal offence.

The rule, which strictly prescribed that every man should be buried in the tomb of his family, admitted of an exception in the case when the country or state itself granted a public funeral. In the present day, there is an opinion among the modern Meiteis concerning the abode of the dead after the successful imposition of cremation upon the Meitei subject.

They pictured to themselves a region where all souls from bodies live together and where rewards and punishments were distributed according to the lives men have led in this world. But the rites of burial manifestly disagree with this belief – a certain proof that, at the epoch this rite was established, men did not believe in Tartarus and the Elysian fields.

The earliest opinion of the ancient generations was that man lived in the tomb, that the soul did not leave the body, and that it remained fixed to that portion of the ground where the bones lay buried. The soul that had no tomb had no dwelling-place.

From this came the belief in ghosts. All antiquity was persuaded that, without burial, the soul was miserable, and that, by burial, it became forever happy. In those ancient days, the Meiteis believed so firmly that a man lived there that they never failed to bury with him the objects of which they supposed he had need – clothing, arms, etc.

It is a well-known fact that before the introduction of cremation in the first half of the eighteenth century, the dead were buried. An example of the burial of the dead is the use of coffin in the cremation as it is a symbol of burial so that the earth rests lightly upon the dead body; and another is the digging of a ditch in human size beneath the large pile of wood on which the dead body is placed and burned in the cremation for the burial of the ashes, called leitaiba. All this strongly suggests the burial of the dead prior to the eighteenth century.

The dead are gods, who belong to a particular family, which alone has a right to invoke them. These gods have taken possession of the soil; they lived under this mound and no one except one of the family, can think of meddling with them.

The family appropriated to itself this soil by placing its dead here; it was established for all time. the soil where the dead rested was inalienable. This shows that the idea of property in the soil was easily extended from the small mound to the field that surrounded this mound.

It may be noted that, whereas the positive religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – arose from the teaching of great religious innovators, who spoke as the organs of divine revelation and deliberately departed from the tradition of the past, the traditional religion, the sacred fire of the hearth and ancestor worship grew up under the action of unconscious forces operating silently from age to age that conferred upon every family its right to a portion of the soil.

The religion of fire and ancestor worship that exercised its empire on the minds of the Meiteis was also the one that established the right of property to the soil among them. Without this concept of territory, the land of the Meiteis called Kangleipak, now called Manipur, would not have been known or heard of in the history of Manipur.

It is clearly evident that private property was an institution that the religion of fire and the tomb had need of. This religion required that both dwelling and burial places should be separated from each other; living in common was, therefore, impossible. The same religion required that the hearth, phung-ga, should be fixed to the soil.

The tomb should neither be destroyed nor displaced. Suppress the right of property under the sacred fire would be without a fixed place. The families would become confounded, and the dead would be abandoned and without worship. By the stationary hearth and the permanent burial place, the family took possession of the soil; the earth was in some sort imbued and penetrated by the religion of the hearth and of ancestors.

Without discussion, without labour, with a shadow of hesitation, the Meiteis arrived, at a single step, and merely by virtue of their belief, at the conception of the right of property, this right from which the Meitei civilization springs.

From all these beliefs and from all these usages, it clearly follows that the religion of fire of the hearth and of ancestors taught the Meitei to appropriate the soil and assured them their right to the soil.

The right of property having been established from the accomplishment of hereditary worship; it was not possible that this right should fail after the short life of an individual. The man dies, the worship remains; the fire must not be extinguished, nor the tomb abandoned. So long as the traditional religion continued, the right of property had to continue with it. This rule disappeared in the democratic age of the country.

The appropriation of land for public utility was uncommon among the Meiteis of the olden days. Confiscation was resorted to only in case of condemnation to exile – that is to say, when a man could no longer exercise any right over the soil.

Nor was taking of property for debt known in the early history of Manipur. The body of the debtor may be held and his son/daughter may be sold for the debt, not his land, for the land is inseparable from the family. Then the debtor, having become almost a slave, still retains something for himself; his land is not taken from him.

It is therefore a rule without exception that a property could be acquired without the family worship or the worship without the property.


(To be continued....)