RESTRUCTURING ‘MEMORIAL CULTURE’: RECALLING THE BATTLE OF IMPHAL

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to illustrate how historians can use certain kinds of source material to illuminate the memory politics at work in a given time and space. Special emphasis and evidences will be given to the Imphal Peace Museum- which has its intertwined narratives of history and memory of the Maibam Lotpa Ching, Red Hills. This paper will envision a multifaceted edifice of historical revisionism that would challenge conventional accounts of the Japanese War in Manipur. The Japanese War is the episode in Manipur’s history when the state and its people were directly involved in the Second World War. The actual combat took place in the hills and valley of Manipur from March to July 1944. Memory, like art, is contextual. All historians are interested in contexts. But the historian of memory is specifically interested in the processes by which these different contexts interact or fuse. This paper will try to unravel how memory is selective, even reductionist, and committed to a particular meaning or purpose to the exclusion of others. Commemorative practices are not only multiple and dialogic, but they are bound up with relations of power. Significant contribution to academic research can be entailed through these social acts of commemoration which in a way will enable us to craft an alternative historical knowledge.