By Yona M Nonglang
‘The wall on which the prophets wrote/Is cracking at the seams/Upon the instruments of death/The sunlight brightly gleams/When every man is torn apart/With nightmares and with dreams/Will no one lay the laurel wreath/When silence drowns the screams.’
“Confusion will be my epitaph/As I crawl a cracked and broken path/If we make it we can all sit back and laugh/But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying . . .’
“Between the iron gates of fate/The seeds of time were sown/And watered by the deeds of those/Who know and who are known/Knowledge is a deadly friend/If no one sets the rules/Is our collective fate, therefore, in the hands of fools?’ (italicised in Bold paraphrased for the sake of context).
These poignant lines from the rock band King Crimson’s song “Epitaph,” were what came to mind while listening to a discussion on Doordashan Shillong (https://youtu.be/VkBubvcgGPg?si=Iy_84x_wgGfpFnRZ) where four gentlemen tried to unpack the implications of the recent PIL by the Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (SRT) that challenges the long held Khasi maxim of Tipkur, Tipkha.
Surprisingly, or not, the SRT sent no participant to the discussion—their missed opportunity to enlighten the public on their PIL move, since that was the media platform with the broadcast capacity to the entire Khasi Hills. So, the discussion ended up one-sided since all three participants were firmly against the PIL, with why “unsettle the settled” their agreed understanding.
Indeed, why, the SRT’s move to unsettle our tipkur-tipkha tradition at this point in time? Is it because this is the most opportune time for them, with VPP at the helm in the KHADC? The party known for our respected Christian fundamentalist, Member of Parliament who is rumoured (apologies if it’s just a rumour) to have personally discarded his matrilineal roots? The same party with a blowhard supremo who has not only been mocking our matrilineal tradition at public forums, but who has also been displaying his fallacious sanctimonious habit of proof-text, in public, to further inflame the religious sentiments of his Christian fundamentalist base?
While we’re supposed to respect others’ personal religious faith, we have to raise this issue because of the messianic evangelical nature of these leaders’ religious fanaticism that will not make them rest until they have reshaped the rest of us after their own image. So did SRT reject Doordarshan’s invitation to participate in that post-PIL discussion because it no longer feels the need to explain itself to the community because it finally has power on its side?
About a year ago, however, the SRT did send their representative to a 4Front media discussion on more or less the same topic (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M0TNEuW1bB4). And that representative’s gutter arguments for the change he and SRT wanted to bring about were so scandalously lumpish, it was difficult to swallow the idea that this was actually the face of the group that wants to “reform” our community by daring to question the profound wisdom of our esoteric founding forebears who implemented our Tipkur, Tipkha policy in the first place.
In fact, “inner displacement” was the only diagnosis one could come up with after careful listening to the lowbrow arguments for change from a gentleman who came across as spiritually, mentally and emotionally displaced by both patriarchal Christian fundamentalist fanaticism and chauvinistic Khasi nationalistic fervour—with an uninformed reading of the Christian Bible and the aforementioned equally inwardly displaced VPP supremo as his reference sources for his arguments for change!
The way this same gentleman also mocked our rich tradition of orality as mere ignorant gibberish was shockingly appalling. Had he bothered to do his research on the beautiful brain science behind oral storytelling, I doubt he would have verbalised such patronising and ignorant gibber himself. To paraphrase the Socratic dictum δνεξέταστος βίος ο βιωτς νθρώπ (ho de anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropoi) in Plato’s Apology, the unexamined lives among us, left to their machinations, are dangerous to our very survival as a people, aren’t they?
As if patriarchal societies have no broken families, spousal and child abuses, and addiction issues. As if they have reached the point where they no longer suffer economic, social and political polarities, violent unrest, and so forth. The statistics, if we bother to find out, are there to tell the real story, aren’t they?
But, what if, – a big what if at that – SRT’s foolishly defiant move to undo our Tipkur, Tipkha succeeds? What will we be left with if we consign our cherished legacy into the ashes of history through some short-sighted act of legislation, passed by ill-advised, purblind, chauvinistic, power-drunk legislators, who lack the capacity to understand that their sacred duty as policymakers is to constitutionally uphold, not violate, the sacrosanctity of our inherited customs and traditions established by our clear-eyed and farsighted founding generation of policymakers who came up with the profound moral maxim of Tipbriew, Tipblei; Tipkur, Tipkha; Kamai ia ka Hok; the very sacred ground where our community’s substructure and superstructure stand?
That if we ever dare to profane that hallowed ground through some reckless and obtuse policy change, both our substructure and superstructure will come crashing down? Who will we be and where will we go after that? We’ve heard of disappearing and wandering communities that have lost their ground, haven’t we? Will that be our self-inflicted destiny too?
Therefore, isn’t it time this generation asks itself how our community’s Tipkur, Tipkha, this Mei-Meikha-centered-centrality, this non-patriarchal lineage legacy, evolved in the first place? Isn’t it because of our esoteric forebears’ reconditeness, that gave them their policymaking clarity? Their vision for an empathetic, nurturing and non-chauvinist social framework? And their moral intelligence that understood the importance of that feminine-centred centrality?
Shouldn’t we also be more appreciative of our founding forebears’ progressive mindset? That they created legislations that elevated our women’s status socially and economically? Especially the youngest and most vulnerable amongst us? And what better exercise in collective character development than at the same time shouldering those same youngest and most vulnerable members of the community with their fair share of responsibility, to both immediate and broader family, even as they’re the chosen custodians of both clan lineage and family heritage?
And, shouldn’t we also thank our ancient knowledge system, inspired, perhaps, not just by our enlightened forebears’ lived experience, but also their keen observation of their domain too, that might have led to their philosophical and scientific understanding of that amazing biological fact: seed can’t sprout without life-giving Mother Earth and Mother?
Indeed, their profound understanding that there can be no life without one or the other? And we would, therefore, collectively, be better off, if we elevated both, because it would have been foolhardy and sacrilegious to sideline them? That a militant, chauvinistic impulse to “subdue” them would kill their marvellous life-giving rhythm and energy that have been sustaining us and our beloved Hills for millennia?
That, as long as we hold on to what our enlightened and far-sighted forebears put in place, we will always be here, small in number though we are, but sure of our identity as a people, here in our own world, out there in the larger world too, just like other fellow matrilineal kins everywhere, whose primordial primogenitors were not “Adam” and “Eve?” That, in spite of genocides, culturicides, and ecocides, at the hands of European white supremacists and their present day local ideological offsprings, we indigenous people are still here, aren’t we, still resisting pressures to abandon our customs and traditions by defiantly staying true to who we are?
So why hold in contempt our beautiful legacy of female-centred centrality? Why the willing self-sacrifice at the altar of chauvinistic patriarchal supremacism? Wouldn’t that be our worst ultimate form of self-betrayal? But that’s the legacy colonial white supremacist “education” and “religion” have been leaving in their wake, isn’t it? “Natives” who are no longer sure about themselves. But, very sure about being someone else.
Just look at what we have become. A people at sea, adrift in this senseless vortex of political, economic, ecological, moral, cultural and identity disorientedness. While we regurgitate paternalistic, divisive, and dangerous, ideas, of our erstwhile colonial masters. Because we’ve been straying, and estranging, from our own Sohpetbneng and our own primordial primogenitors narratives?
Indeed, isn’t estrangement, from our own Sohpetbneng, the reason for our present state of disorientedness, self-doubt and self-betrayal as a people? Our Sohpetbneng, that, until almost two hundred years ago, was our sole collective spiritual anchor that connected us all to that sacred higher purpose of existence—of reverence for the Creator, of care for Mother Earth, and for one another, together as a community, to ensure a harmonious world for generations to come?
But to a majority of us, our very own Sohpetbneng narrative is now just another embarrassing and irrelevant old story we’ve cast aside, isn’t it? Hence the daredevil attempt to unsettle the very sanctified ground of our shared existence as a community, whose founding forebears’ wisdom is timeless?