Aheli Moitra
All great cities have their boons and banes. So does Dimapur.
In its making, Dimapur may have borrowed much from the neighbouring Sibsagar, a town where the Ahom Kings had accommodated a cosmopolitan population of varied ethnic representatives from the region.
Dimapur developed since the 19th century with a peculiar sense of urbanism. Without fixed lines of indigeneity, Dimapur continued to welcome all shades of “outsiders” without prejudice of community, class, caste, creed or criminal background.
It has its pouches of facelessness. It has its secluded pockets and villages (colonies) of ethnicities with their own set of customary or religious laws, while others mingle, held together by the modern State (legality) as well as by Trade (capital). Naga journalist Y Merina Chishi had once aptly termed Dimapur as “a city of villages.”
It is here that the Naga people amalgamate, without becoming marginal objects, with the idea and people of India. It is here that the contemporary lingua franca of the Naga people, Nagamese, sounds right in its place—in its ease of the spoken word, it connects not just the various communities among the Nagas but also the Nagas with the non Nagas participating in Dimapur’s daily life.
As one of the most militarised cities in the sub-continent, Dimapur becomes an odd site of militarisation—its experience felt by Naga and non Naga people alike.
Dimapur is also a site for accumulation of money, power and status. Illegality here is just another word. This is where “modernity” truly drives the hammer home. Social life is not driven by moral ethics. Arbitrary lines of cosmopolitanism take the place of community ethics—clan, khel, village, community/tribe affiliations dilute as zones of loyalty. Individual choice rules. No contradiction is felt while walking into a bar to discuss a subject right after the evening prayer session. Decision making has shifted from Morungs and customary courts to these cosmopolitan spaces, rendering decisions and ways of moving forward completely arbitrary, leading to various problems of divisions, discord and disunity.
Ashis Nandy, Indian social theorist and critic, explains this arbitrary attitude. Asian Cosmopolitanism, he notes, means that people living in diverse communities learn to accept "the otherness of others," instead of striving to become global citizens who shed all prejudices and perceived differences. Segregated colonies or even churches are apt examples of this maintained “otherness” in Dimapur. Naga polity is increasingly influenced by this lived discourse of Dimapur—its crumbling institutions exemplify how.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Scottish moral and political philosopher, resolves the dilemma theoretically by offering that morals and virtues can only be comprehended through a relation to the community in which people come from. To go by MacIntyre’s words would mean giving power back to people who continue to remain loyal to their immediate communities as the Naga polity once imagined—those who are in the villages, cultivating land or weaving shawls, living in the context binding them to central Naga virtues. However, these people today consist of the most powerless, poor and downtrodden in Naga society, their voices nullified. Leszek Kolakowski, Polish philosopher and historian, underlined the role of religious commitment as participation in community to keep it together as an integrated whole. But has the church succeeded in doing this in the pan Naga context—escaping the divisive fallout of modernity?
Modernity cannot be discarded in today’s world with its new founds freedoms closely tied to the trinity of money-power-status. Thus, given the unique ways in which communality interplays with modernity in Dimapur, it is here that we may find a method. This will need some radical change in our perception and interaction with not just ourselves but, particularly, with “others.”
Ashis Nandy bats for a “cultural conversation of equals” by overthrowing the invisible eye of the West from which all such conversations have come to be conducted (X community is oppressive of its women, Y is a stingy race, Z is attracted to violence—all inferior as opposed to the superior W, that is ‘us’). A dialogue of equals, Nandy writes, brings new modes of “self-reflexivity and self-criticism.”
Dimapur, today, provides this space to explore new dimensions of dialogue between different communities of the Naga people, but, more radically, with those other communities that continue near-hidden cultural existence. Perhaps in unlocking and understanding the potential in the ‘other’, each of us can begin to engage within, thereby guiding modernity to where we can comfortably engage with it.
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