Historical Development of Kakching's Unity & Self-Reliance

Kakching people are famous in Manipur for their "unity". However, as far as I know, this "unity" is not so straightforward. I will trace the genealogy of this shared feeling among the people of Kakching briefly here.

The place what is called Manipur now was not a place of single, uniform people but was divided into several infighting principalities. The principalities came to be known as salais/clans at a later point in history after the subjugation of the rest of the principalities (the conquered principalities) and their people under the conqueror, the Ninthoujas (or Meiteis) under Pakhangba's leadership, and it was the puyas, I suspect, written after the subjugation, that did popularize these principalities as salais/clans for political reasons, i.e. to consolidate the subjugation as unification with Ningthouja/Meitei superiority. Many puyas (they are more mythical than historical, and hence I don't want to rely solely on their more often than not irrational claims), I suspect to render the unification (under the Ningthouja/Meitei dominance) a hue of divine will, claim the descent of these salais/clans from one single lai, god (Laishram, 2009, p.36¹).

However, not all puyas deal with the spiritual (only a few do that)--of the 586 puyas listed in A Catalogue of Manipuri Manuscripts (Singh, 1984; see also Laishram, 2009, p.12²) only 72 are on religious philosophy. Religion and philosophy, though related, are different things, and it cannot be reasonably said that all the 72 puyas deal with the spiritual. Forty-eight of the puyas are on administration, which is political, and 42 on yek-salais/clans. It won't be too far to draw a line of connection between the obviously political writings with those on yek-salais, considering their conscious unificatory undertones. My contention in this is that these principalities, before their subjugation by the Ningthoujas as the Meiteis thereby all of the distinct groups in this united people being relegated to salais/clans of the united Meitei community, were not related by blood at any near past as the puyas maintain (but in that sense, it all depends on where you cut the link to see or not to see any people on the earth's surface as related to any other people). As we all know they all fought against each other. No two people from the principalities did meet without fighting lick cocks. The number and the geographical boundaries of these principalities fluctuated across time--sometimes it was nine, sometimes eight, sometimes seven, sometimes 11, and then seven, as we have it now.

The Meiteis/Ningthoujas (the Imphal people of the time) fought with the Heirem Khunjans and the Khumans, of which Kakching was part. Though the Heirem Khunjans were fiercer, the Meiteis were stronger because they had more soldiers and their settlement positioned them more strategically, and thus the latter finally subjugated the former. However, the animosity the Heirem Khunjans and the Khumans had towards the superior Meiteis transformed in course of time into a complex. The people of Kakching had a shared hatred for the Meiteis, and the Meitei kings, and it was expressed in some way or the other when Meitei kings visited Kakching, though they could not revolt openly against the superiority complex of the kings and their retinues and the Imphal people. This was a natural psychological turn of the mind of the "colonized" people when they had to pay regular tribute to the king of the conqueror. Conditioned to this psychological situation over centuries and more than one thousand years, the people of Kakching developed some defense mechanism in their psyche, and an attending tendency of self-alienation.

The shared animosity among the Kakching people toward the Imphal people drove them together and unified them--this is the unity we are seeing; and the feeling of alienation drove them aloof from Imphal and the Imphal-centric Manipuri world, thereby developing their own reactive world based on self-reliance, which differentiates Kakching from other non-Imphal places. Self-reliance (= not-asking-the-Meitei-King-for-anything and not-depending-on-Imphal) also strengthened the Kakching unity. This powered them even to dig the 15 km (?) long main canal from Ithei Maru to the end of Kakching, and the very many capillary canals criss-crossing the town.

While this self-reliance proved an essential driving force in Kakching's distant past, it, practiced to almost an extreme extent in the community's recent past, since the establishment of democracy in the state (let's call it 1947), has proved quite detrimental (if not foolhardy) to its own progress by not being able to discard the mentality of alienation or aloofness from the state government which is seen quite as of Imphal (though not without reason), thereby not demanding much (of what's due) from the state government as most other communities in the state do. When the communitarian unity we had once started to disintegrate quite long ago (with the animosity toward Imphal having become less and less intense inversely proportionately) due to increasing interactions (in tandem with political changes in the country and the state over the last 60 years) with Imphal of all kinds driven by their daily necessities, the self-reliance mentality has withdrawn into individual psyches rather than the community psyche. The result is, the people of Kakching have the residues of self-reliance in their own families, but the self-"reliances" of the Kakching families do not meet or unite. They do neither rise together to demand something from the government, something which is due for them, nor come out, as they did in the past, to do something good for the community together.

That is why the rich and the middle class families either buy water from private tankers or drive on their own to the Kakching Water Supply Scheme reservoir to fetch water by themselves, leaving the rest of the community by themselves, to their own poor devices.

While this historical factors must also have their driving force, the new economic realities must also be playing a role in the community's individual psyches now. I guess some find it quite an outing to fetch water from the picnic-site-like water supply scheme at the foot of the now-fashionable Uyok Ching (which is not illegal and condemnable), while some find it better to push their water on bicycles long distances than being parched and dry at home.

While the nature of Kakching's unity and self-reliance has majorly be reactive, their industriousness has been quite inherent, not conditional