Religion and religious institutions regardless are no longer fit for the purpose they were established; about that we can safely say there is unanimity. However the fault does not lie in them but in us individuals because the instincts under which they were established have been lost in us and so we are losing the institutions in the process. We have become unfit for these great institutions, and not that the institutions have become unfit. The power to organise required that people listened and obeyed but do we obey anything these days?
Democracy and the freedom it guarantees has made sure that any organisation, religious or parental or otherwise, is to be challenged and contradicted in the most insane ways even at the cost of a decline in development and progress and even at the cost of questioning every moral authority and law so that knaves and thieves have found a place for themselves in organised religious and secular houses, where they make hay by manipulating modern democratic systems with its imperfect manifestations.
These “wolves in sheep’s clothing” justify the manipulation of everything good we have inherited and have caused the decay of religion and the State. Do not cast the blame on the institutions – blame the people because these people are in it for themselves and not for the society. This is particularly true in Meghalaya.
The Khasis were once upon a time a society that looked up to their elders and they willingly and instinctively sacrificed their freedom and liberty to the institutions that were passed down to them from their forefathers.
Then came Christianity and they began losing those instincts under which their institutions grew, out of which their future would grow and they stopped growing in the Khasi way because another way was pointed out to them – a way that would not only give them an advantage in this life; as we are witnessing these days but an advantage in the afterlife as well, and they believed that, and they willingly went along with this new path.
The entire Khasi nation, i.e. the Khynriam, the Pnar, the Bhoi and the War, began losing their instincts out of which their inherent institutions grew, out of which their future was meant to grow. Perhaps nothing went so much against the grain of what they were to grow into as the spirit of this new way which injected into the Khasi way of life forgiveness without punishment, just a confession and a certain price and an instruction to take one day at time. And when one lives one day at a time one lives fast…very fast and very irresponsibly.
The priest took over the role of the parent and this they called freedom. That which made the old institutions reliable and honoured and feared began to be despised, hated and rejected and whenever one heard the word ‘authority’ one began to believe that one was in danger of what one was trying to get away from. The authority of the parents was taken away from under their feet and they submitted to it. The decadence in the value of the ‘clan’ (the Kur) and the authoritative system that the clan system imposed wilted under the onslaught of this new religion and the people instinctively opted for that which defied the old tradition thereby hastening its end.
Take for instance the marriage system, whereas the Khasi married into the clan, the modern concept brought with it the dictate that “a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife….” It is obvious that everything sensible in the old system had been replaced by this new way, which is however no objection to marriage but to modernity.
The rationale of the modern marriage system now lay in the legal responsibility of the man as the centre of gravity in marriage whereas formerly the centre of gravity was in the clan. Marriages went along perfectly well then…today marriages are barely limping along on shaky legs, with Shillong taking the top spot in the number of single mothers in the country.
The rationale of marriage in the olden days with the clan taking the responsibility lay in its indissolubility in principle: it acquired a sense of permanency something that could be accepted and relied upon without shame or shyness even if the result was the outcome of the passion of the moment – though the norm was that marriage lay in the responsibility of the families for the selection of a mate. With the increasing indulgence in love marriages in these modern days, we have eliminated the foundation of marriage – that alone which makes it an institution….. (To be continued)
