| Summary/Abstract |
Creative literature and audio-visuals provide alternative sources to archival documents for understanding the cultural history of land. This paper is a small beginning in using creative sources in different languages of Manipur. My analysis suggests that the association between land and ethnicity is a recent phenomenon. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, creative artists represented land as aesthetic symbol for universal emotions. In the 1970s, land was de-linked from political imagination and appeared in the form of leikai (residential address). The 1980s registered the emergence of complex social forces such as ethnic nationalism and a romanticised folk culture. The most remarkable development was the exclusive use of land as a symbol of discrete identities and ethnic homelands. Whereas the ethnic gulf widened between the meiteis of the valley and the tribals of the hill areas, the struggle between the hill tribes intensified in the 1990s.
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