Indi-moderniti

Our cousins consider themselves modern. They wear clothes designed by expensive tailors, walk on Italian shoes, drink single malt at a “high end” restaurant before having dinner at another, talk only through the Apple, and even live in the Big Apple. When in India, they talk of the beggar as the lazy bugger they never want to be. It is, after all, their fault they are poor. They talk of the great Indian democracy and their love for Obama—they have never voted, or gone without food, water, shelter and diamonds. They detest racism directed to them. They say how lazy black people are “in general.” They are repressed and consistently feel so.

Subjects like these are perfect for the capitalist market, designed around western systems—arrogant and stratified. Our fellow Asians have contributed much to the strengthening of western modernity and the subsequent weakening of our own.

Ashis Nandy has postulated a model of thought. For centuries now, Asia has had to face the slow chopping of its myriad cultures and dignity because the west would not have it. The modern west has looked at us, studied our “exotic” ways, and we have to now work in the way they have said we are. We are not allowed our systems of thought and politics. We can fight with our neighbours but not negotiate peace without a western framework and intervention. We can keep what is acceptable by the west about us (dances and songs, albeit stripped of context) but discard what is not (animism).

So, the Nagas are interesting as long as in the process of this modernization. If we are cosmopolitan in the sense of our cousins noted above, even if for mere survival, it is all good—good roads, cars to drive on them, fancy restaurants, circulated money, shoes, a good bureaucracy. Talk about indigenous forms of cultural dialogue and political form, (pursued through violently nationalist means thanks to the little space given to our cultures) and we are given the boot, or convinced to think that we are wrong to want it.

This is modernity as we accept it. But we need not. Western modernity has always been challenged in the indigenous climes of Asia, Africa or South America. A large number of cultures in these pockets continue to defy western modernity by being truly modern themselves—by talking to each other as equal partners taking western lines (like boundaries) out of the equation. We need not gulp down global concepts irrelevant to our context. The Zo people are breaking out of naked descriptions of themselves as intellectually blind tribals and talking to each other to design modern systems. The Naga people have been attempting to do so for years now—different processes have kept the community from obliterating itself yet allowed space for self reflection and continued resistance.  

This form of modernity could bring to the world solutions that it has been unable to find in its grand scheme of things. It will perhaps even release the west from its own repressed notion of it.