The Idea of Ideology
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: November 13 2015 -

In the last few decades, scholars engaged with studies on the Northeast region of India, particularly Manipur seem to have bypassed investigating deeper into the production of knowledge system and ideology.

Here, the notion of ideology refers to what has been understood in Sociological discourse.

Ideology as a set of cultural beliefs, values and attitudes has over the years served as a tool to reinforce existent structure rather than offer space to exert pressure on the same structure for change.

Societies in the Northeast region have also traversed through shifts and turns in value system as a result of their encounters with the external world.

However, the shifts and turns seem to have overwhelmed the capacity to even review the understanding of the “next other” but also of the “self.”

Though, every culture has an ideology that can invent, import and recover values to either unify or fracture the overall structure of the society, there has 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.

It has been quite interesting to observe the impact of value system and diverse paths opted by communities since time immemorial.

Now, there is a necessity to juxtapose the history of ideology against the overall political developments in the Northeast region.

The predominant approach adopted in the study of official history has only led to singular understanding of the region.

Colonial history, ethnography and anthropological readings of the communities have not been able to produce a nuanced understanding as far as the study of ideology is concerned.

Moreover, a 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.

It is here that one sees a need to truly understand the idea of ideology.