SPACES OF ETHNICITY, CIVIL SOCIETY AND TERRITORIALITY OF NAGA TRIBES IN MANIPUR

The study argues two major points: one, ethnicity is not just a feeling of commonality and belongingness of a group of people, but also the construction and contestation of meanings of the geographical and cultural connectivity between the ethnic groups; and secondly, these politics occur dominantly among the civil society organisations of the ethnic groups. The Nagas and valley society of Manipur have been at the centre of territorial contestation for quite a long time. There have been movements in the hills of the state that demand separate territorial identity for the Nagas. However, this antagonizes other argument that reads the hills and valley as one. That the Naga tribes have formed parts of an organic society and polity called 'Manipur' has been strongly defended by non-Naga civil society organisations. That the Nagas in Manipur have a specific spatial trajectory, in terms of their cultural and geographical affinities with the valley society, is also mentioned in the colonial texts. Against both the idea and practices of an organic society, and colonial definition of Nagas of Manipur, the civil organisations of the Nagas claim control over a territory using oral accounts, myths, religion and poetic narration of an imagined homeland.