Complexity and the community

 

“I hope and pray that Nagaland does not lose what we have already lost,” stated Leslie Nazareth in his introductory note for a visit to Nagaland. Leslie has been visiting the State since 1982 and is deeply influenced by the community ethics that he finds here, mostly lost where he is visiting from—Mumbai.   

Leslie and the group he is visiting with, who call themselves the One Sky Community, will move from Naga home to home to understand what it entails to be part of a community; to take back some core ethics that lie within a community that gives it body and ethic.

Indeed, as the community members highlighted, metropolitan cities have lost the communal soul that bring people together and organize around those lines. Based on corporate capitalist ethics, human beings in places like Mumbai have been pulled away from each other, confined in individual apartments, left with only external spaces of human interaction, ridden in inner turmoil and conflict. There is little sharing and caring—these attributes reserved only for the immediate family. There is boredom in love. There is consistent jealousy, competition and hatred. Loyalty is sparse. Wisdom fares worse.

Communities living in political spaces, that is, in real life, are not devoid of these strange bed fellows either. In the Naga context, communities, for instance, have settled through clans, khels, peer groups, villages, tribes, etc. that not only conjoin people at times of celebration and grief, but also group them in terms of the practice of politics. At times this brings bitterness. Cultivating the jungles for food is a community task not achieved easy—wisdom drawn from generations accelerates this. There is religion. There are gender roles, and there are roles you play as young and old. Some of these roles are liberating for the individual, as much as for the community, as some are oppressive. To sustain and progress these community structures, there is a political movement to push for recognition of these communities so their ethics and guidelines may be politically practiced and, perhaps, codified and spread. The opposition to this has led to a war.

The One Sky community is a people’s initiative to understand these complexities of living within communities, but through a firsthand people’s perspective. It is commendable in the face of deliberate subversion of such knowledge in India. As Kesonyu Yhome put it, gaps between metropolitan cities in India and the Nagas have remained, and these need to be plugged. Through initiatives such as the one taken up by the people who form One Sky, at least the people of India are now attempting to understand (beyond Hornbill Festival) why the community set-up needs to be preserved. In this case, the Naga way.