By Gregory Shullai
After all that has been happening recently on the streets and in the different localities of Shillong, I have every right to be despondent. For we in Shillong really live in the midst of a solar system of an unfriendly life with the constant reports that some criminal act has been committed on the streets or in the localities, giving rise to the need to be constantly aware of who is in our vicinity and where we are. We are not spared these thoughts even at night fearing that someone may turn up at the dead of night to steal our car tyres, car accessories, CCTV cables, and anything of value that may have been left outdoors. What is it that the people of Shillong are lacking that we take what is happening in the city without doing something about it in a uniform organised manner? That we are taking this petty civil mediocrity and corruption as an equilibrium knowing that there are greater motivations within us to accomplish something higher, something for the betterment of the present and the future of the people and the place hurts everyone more than just sufficiently. In this specific turmoil – the one that beckons us to stay awake at night and watch our back, our side and front simultaneously– we are compelled to raise the question who is to blame for what has become of our society? We don’t even have the time to answer this burning question. We just blame it on junkies and their need for money. In the midst of all this catastrophic mess, it would be patiently dishonourable of anyone were he to continue oblivious to it all when the locality is under the threat of some intruders, or a family member or a friend has been left unconscious on the roadside (recently a young woman was left unconscious near Woodland hospital) – that is the price we have to pay.
As much as we enjoy the circumstances of our lives in the pleasant conditions of Shillong’s natural environment it is only fair and just that we should get annoyed with ourselves for not being able to do what was and is expected of us…the job of raising children in a manner that they become better citizens than us, citizens who live by the sweat of their brow, instead of becoming liabilities to the family and threats to society. Looking back at how Shillong – essentially the younger generation – have become what they are today, there is the compulsion to question whether we would do to ourselves that which we have done with our children, and my immediate conclusion is that we wouldn’t. Try and picture the situation: we have used up all the time we had – even more than we had – earning money for the family and acquiring assets to raise our status in society that we find lame excuses to avoid the suggestion that we are to blame for what has become of our children and grandchildren and society at large. Therefore, we still have a huge debt to pay for posterity so much so that we now render our position untenable. We are placed in the desperate situation to be obliged to admit to ourselves, truly shamefacedly, that we have failed to raise children in the way that is expected of sensible and responsible parents and in the process have brought about the situation that now stares us in the face knowing that it is our responsibility to still try to bring about a restoration in the way we administer discipline as parents and as a society.
Whereas we all know what it means when we mention parents we forget what we mean when we say society, because the Khasi and the Jaintia society have, or rather had, bred in themselves a strange social faculty which the present-day man is forgetful of – “the Kur” translated to mean the clan. Once upon a time it was the duty of the mother’s clan that took the responsibility of raising and disciplining the child, but all that has changed as the community grew and now it is the duty of the parents. To ordain the future in advance; essentially that the responsibility of raising the children would become the duty and function of the parents in the way that the clan did means parents would have needed to learn to distinguish necessary outcomes or eventualities from chance ones because what was handed down to the clan elders had become intrinsic in them, and adapting to the idea that the parents would now shoulder that responsibility meant that the parents needed to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present and to decide with certainty what is the goal and what would be the outcome from the means that were and are at their disposal. Parents now need (needed) to assess and calculate their own upbringing and apply that which could be applied in raising their children which was and is asking a lot from a single family as compared to when the clan took up that responsibility. Now the father and the mother have to be able to assess their worth and build up an image of themselves and whether who they are was what they wanted their child to become. This in short is precisely the long story of how responsibility originated in the Khasi society and I dare say, only about 5-6 generations have lapsed since this transition came about. Looking back to my own ancestors I am inclined to believe that it was with my great grandmother or at the most a generation before hers when the first individual left the Jaintia Hills for Laban (which was what Shillong was known then) and the embryo of this shift in responsibility was conceived
The job of raising an individual the right way evidently supposes that the parents have been raised the right way but when the parents themselves rebelled against the institution of the clan, the expectation from this new responsibility that had devolved upon the parents must have been a tremendously trying process on a micro aspect, and meanwhile the parents remained oblivious to what would be the resultant outcome on the macro aspect. The macro aspect got further compounded by the migration of rural families to urban Shillong. Placing ourselves at the end of these tremendous processes occurring simultaneously, we can now understand how and why society is bringing about the kind of fruit in this age and time – society once played a vital role as a means to character building in an individual. An individual who feels he is liberated from customary authority, who has an autonomous identity, in short, the person who has his own right to make of himself what he wants…emancipated from the social shackles of “thou shalt and thou shalt not” is what we are confronted with now. Now it is “rights” that we emphasize on and not duties. When we contemplate the manner in which the Shillong society has mutated from one generation to the next, these issues become a formidable component in knowing the how and why things are as they are, but that does not provide a way or a means to rectify the malady that has set in. That job is an altogether different branch, a different institution to tackle this matter and eradicate it from the root, and I would dare admit that there is only one institution that I still have high hopes in…the Rangbah Shnong (the village headman).
In a certain sense the whole objective of disciplining a child belongs to the village and the society the child belongs to – it is not so much the family as many would like to think – and though some of the goals of imparting discipline at the family level are inextinguishable, ever present, unforgettable and fixed with the aim of building up a common morality within the village on one hand while on the other it is expected to assimilate competing morality norms and ideas, modern society has given these old ways a deathblow with the advent of ‘Child Rights’ and ‘Child Abuse’ laws so that now the old ways have to be either set aside or attuned to the new laws, leaving parents with the need to be constantly on their guard less they accidentally violate some stipulation that the child has learnt from his/her peers and has to face the embarrassment of being chastised in front of his/her own children. But, if we are going to tackle the menace that has now gripped our children, we need these rights and privileges of the child to be subordinate to the duty of a parent, and this is where the problem lies. Parents are left asking themselves “how is it possible? how could it have actually happened to the society in which we live in? we men and women who have been raised so sternly, by well constituted parents, in the rights and wrongs in social life?” And now even greater questions arise; how do we go about bringing back some authority from where it has been taken away?
There is only one way – lawmakers need to be reminded that the worse memory we have is the one that disciplined us: the more severe the penalty the more certain we were of not entertaining any idea that might bring it upon us once again. The severity of the penalty imposed provides an especially significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness. As Khasis, we certainly do not regard ourselves as a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, still less as the kind that live only for the day; but we need only look to our former manner of punishing a wrong doing to understand what an effort it costs to tame the individual to be worthy of being called a man who honours God and the people (tip briew tip Blei) and lives by the sweat of the brow (kamai ia ka hok).
As long as the State or more precisely, Government knows that it is appointed as the trustee on behalf of the citizens and is required for their sake to regulate their different minor and major customs for their own welfare, it will most probably always decide to preserve some customs and do away with others and among the customs that it must preserve one stands out…the institution of the Rangbah Shnong (RS) or Village Headman. In a way we are somewhat fortunate that with the present Government we still have a Chief Minister and a bureaucracy that seeks to involve the RS to stem the drastic decline of life in Shillong. There are numerous wrongs that the Government is wary of and in all these aberrations Govt believes the RS can play a very constructive role. When we contemplate these honorary roles that the RS will be called upon to take, to be sure, we may feel a considerable sense of suspicion and repugnance towards some of the men who shoulder these responsibilities, and this is expected. There will be promises made and promises broken, but to inspire trust in the promises made, to provide a guarantee of the seriousness and sanctity of what the Govt may set out to do in this regard, all stakeholders such as those acquainted with child rights, family law, penal laws, rehabilitation procedures, etc together with the RS, should be included in a Special Cell that can be constituted for this purpose so that miscreants of the kind this letter is concerned with are dealt with in a manner that is intune with our ancient customs and adapted to modern day laws.
