The Learning Curve

‘Having thrown away our tribal values, what we are clinging to today are simply remnants of a lost culture’

By Patricia Mukhim

Last week in these columns, I looked at the neighboring state of Mizoram in an effort to understand its society better. After all, a state without a people is a vacuum. The article elicited a phenomenal number of responses from the Mizo Diaspora spread across the universe and from Mizos residing in Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, you name it. There were, of course, responses also from Mizoram and from Shillong where I live. Mizos living outside this region were positive and felt that internal churning is healthy for every society.

Reactions from Mizos closer home, including some research scholars from NEHU, bordered on the hostile. They said Mizos should be left to themselves because they are the only pristine group today, since all other tribes have been assaulted by cross-cultural fusion that was not exactly healthy. They were supportive of the Inner Line Permit, which they felt was a gate-keeping mechanism to keep out non-tribes from proliferating in Mizoram. They pointed to the non-tribal traders in Shillong, Dimapur, Itanagar and the like and said Mizos would not like to follow that beaten track. Well, to each his own.

Self-introspection, leave alone self-criticism, is not a virtue of any of the tribes. There is an inherent need to showcase the best to the world even if inside we are crumbling to pieces. Understandably, this is a tribal trait that emerges from two things. One is the deep sense of insecurity that if the world knows what is not so good about us, we would lose our social pride.

Secondly, our tribal worldview is juxtaposed to that of mainstream Indian worldview. This is a very problematic position. Every tribal inwardly acknowledges that the non-tribals are way ahead of us intellectually, having been recipients of wisdom from a 5,000-year-old civilization. I have my doubts about this rationale. What causes insecurity is that if others know too much about our weaknesses, they might capitalize on those weaknesses.

Tribal values

Social inbreeding such as that practiced by Parsis has its own constraints. Nature has other ways of maintaining a healthy equilibrium. But for now most tribes still believe they have a right to privacy and “others” have no right to pry into that private domain.

Interestingly, we look upon our social pride as something quite exclusive and distinct from other forms of behavior. Tribes are quite sharp in their criticism of politicians.

States like Mizoram and Nagaland are usually referred to as Christian states. On the political front, however, politicians from these states and also from other tribal states portray a homogenous culture of venality and we are ruthless in countering these misdemeanours and criticising acts of corruption.

But in using two separate yardsticks to judge social and political behaviour, we forget that the same human beings, who are in politics, are also part and parcel of society. And that if political behaviour is getting more and more venal, then society itself must have produced that venality. After all, politicians don’t drop down from outer space.

What every tribal group forgets perhaps is that prior to the arrival of Christianity to these hills, there were deeply embedded tribal values that were our moral compasses. These indigenous gems of wisdom tell us with no ambiguity that it is wrong to steal; that we should always return what does not belong to us; that we have to conserve nature and use resources judiciously and sustainably. We were told then as we are now that it is wrong to kill or harm another and that sharing resources will take us much further than hoarding everything for ourselves.

Winds of change

Our wise ancestors told us to take only what we need and that need was so well defined that it never transgressed into greed. Above all, our ancestors told us categorically that we should not pine for what we have not earned. They exhorted us to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow.

The valuable codes of conduct were transmitted from one generation to the next by parents and grandparents as they sat round the hearth in the evenings, lulling their children and grandchildren to sleep. Things have certainly changed a lot since then. We have graduated from the hearth to the dining table. With that we have also lost the best nuggets of our cultural values. Today, conversations are reduced to monosyllables. Even younger children are multi-tasking and how! They watch television while eating and therefore have no time to talk.

Our younger generation, no matter which tribe it belongs to, no longer values its heritage. The young know so little of their social and cultural moorings. They have just one behavioural code — what you see is what you have. An all-pervasive culture of instant gratification is what is starkly visible. Parents can afford to give their children everything except time. Time has a different connotation to a tribal, which is not linked to the clock or to her watch.

Time is life itself because life is counted by the time we have on this earth. But could it be because of our inner contradictions that we are afraid to give time to our children? And if we do give time, it is only to take them to the shopping mall or for very material pursuits. It appears that life itself has lost its quality and meaning.

Reality check

There is nothing to distinguish a tribal child from “others” if one assesses them on the basic indicators of “needs and wants”. This is where the claim to being tribal and unique rings hollow. Having thrown away our tribal values, what we are clinging to today are simply remnants of a lost culture.

The word “tribal” is purely a political instrument. Ironically, the all-pervasive role of the church both in Mizoram and Nagaland has failed to correct our deviant behaviour.

The other day, a non-Naga working in that state wondered why every government function is prefaced by a prayer. Yet there is such a wide, almost unbridgeable chasm between the prayers and the actions of those who lead the state and its bureaucracy. Often it is a mockery of Christianity, which to all intents and purposes preaches one basic tenet — love for fellow human beings. Those who live by the teachings of Christ would know it is wrong to divert money from the health department into their private coffers even while so many women and children die from lack of health facilities.

But isn’t this happening in all the Christian states?

These discordant notes need reflection and corrective action. If we claim a pristine tribal culture but fail to practise those tribal values because we believe they have lost currency after we embraced Christianity, then we need to do a serious reality check.

It is also time to grapple with the eternal truth that no society is pure and that we all evolve and imbibe new cultures.

Change, as someone said is the only permanent thing. And sociologists tell us that if we do not manage change, then change will manage us. Our problem as tribes is that we refuse to accept that we have changed, sometimes volitionally and at other times because we have been pushed to change.

The learning curve is the average rate of knowledge gained over time. Every society has its learning curve. While some graphs depict steeper curves, others are more flat. I often wonder what sort of learning curve we have as tribes and whether that actually affects our worldview and therefore our interface with the world.

(The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com)