Manipur News

A second Sanskritization has become almost a pattern in Manipur today. Names from history such as that of the great king Bheigyachandra is today spelt as Bhagyachandra, although the on the Manipuri tongue the sound of the name corresponds very much with the first spelling. This is just one prominent example, but it is happening everywhere. Robindro has become Ravindra. Likewise the Kullo, Nilo, Bidhu, Bimol, Komol… have begun to metamorphosed or else have already changed unrecognizably. It is true this is about fine-tuning to the Sanskrit origins of these names, but in the process what is lost is the distinctive identity of those who use them. In a single stroke, the phenomenon is wiping off a feature of history and memories of the place. In an abstract sense, this is a silent violence of a different sort too. In much of South East Asia where too the great Indic culture spread in profound ways, influencing lifestyles, the arts and architecture, nomenclatures of places and persons too are a marriage of the essence of Sanskrit names and unique ways local tongues pronounce them. In Cambodia, Ramayan is known as Reamker and nobody would dare say that is the wrong way of doing it although some Indic bigots do so sometimes, earning the displeasure and sometimes hostility of the locals. Hinduism and Buddhism, though originally foreign religions to these countries have also been thus transformed to give them local ethos, and they have stayed that way. For instance, to make a SE Asian believe vegetarianism is an important feature of these religions and that they should also give up meat would be like trying to force an unwilling horse to drink, as it were. This would include any move to prohibit beef eating as well.

Manipur’s brand of Hinduism was also to a great extent such a marriage of cultures, and it is great and unique precisely because of this. Conversion to Hinduism of the Meiteis was not too much of a trauma precisely because they did not have to abandon much of their old ways and beliefs. They have had to give up much of meat eating, but they still retained a great deal of their pre-Hindu culture, including the worship of their old deities of the forest, sky, rivers, lakes and hills. It helped that Hinduism is flexible and accommodating enough to allow this. What is also pertinent is, it is because such a marriage of culture was allowed that the great devotional classical dance Ras Lila could become a reality, so too Sankirtan and Pung Chollom etc. Why then must this culture be made to go through the extremely apologetic exercise of divorcing its two major components? Let the names of people and places be if they are truly the original non-Sanskritized ethnic ones. But when they are the Sanskritized names, twisted by the peculiarity of local tongues, let them remain transformed, for these are what are real and not the re-tuned versions. Let Maharaja Bheigyachandra be Maharaj Bheigyachandra and not Rajashree Bhagyachandra. The former is natural and closer to the genius of the place, the latter artificial and in more ways than one, sycophantic. It betrays a lack of confidence in the independent Hindu Meitei self. To insist on this re-Sanskritization would amount to a degree of alienation, and thereby introduction of a new distance between this great king (indeed the history of the place as well) and the common man.

This lack of a collective self confidence is also visible in the ways pronunciations of local names have been anglicised.  While speaking in Manipuri, the natural way of pronouncing the name of the capital city is as its spelling suggests – “Imphal” where the “ph” in the Im-ph-al, is a heavier sound of consonant “p” and not the lighter sound of consonant “f”. However in conversing in English, the Im-ph-al becomes Im-f-al. This is regardless of the fact that to the local ethnic tongue, Im-ph-al comes much easier and natural.  This is however not a case for changing names of individuals and places, but only a suggestion that the corruption of the sounds of new cultures by the older local cultures should be allowed to stay, as they are also landmarks of history and memories of hundreds of years. There can also be no argument history and memories are the spine of anybody’s identity. As they say, if you have a heart transplant, you will still remain as the same you. But if you were to have a memory replacement or suffer from a memory loss, you will no longer be you.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2012/01/significance-of-names/