The spiral of violence that has gripped Manipur from May 3 leaving more than 60 dead and scores injured will have brought back a familiar sense of unease in a State not unused to such flareups in the past. The latest conflict was triggered by a ‘Tribal Solidarity March’ against the Manipur High Court’s March 27 order that revived an old demand to give the majority Meitei community Scheduled Tribe status. The grouse of the dominant hill tribes belonging to Nagas and Kukis is that the Meiteis who live in Imphal Valley, are in a majority and already have a bigger say in the affairs of the State. It’s a complex situation and needs careful handling as Sanjoy Hazarika writes in his book Strangers No More: New Narratives from India’s Northeast (2018).
Talking about the Northeast, he says: “…the core issues facing the States are: politics, policy, law and disorder, violent uprisings and painful reconciliations, offence and defence, conservation and oppression, history and the contemporary reality, stereotyping and breaking out of the mould, hope and despair.” Most of these issues plague Manipur as well. It has seen long stints of unrest due to insurgencies and other factors which have led to the State being under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act since 1958, and thereby hangs many tales, not least the extraordinary hunger strike by rights activist Irom Sharmila from November 2000 to August 2016 demanding the law’s repeal.
Picking up the pieces
Manipuri women have played a huge role as agents of change and protest, be it women warriors of the Nupi Lan who fought in the 1904 and 1939 wars or the Meira Paibi women and their night vigils to keep their sons safe from army atrocities. They also largely bear the burden of picking up the pieces after every act of violence which takes lives and destroys homes. In Crafting the Word: Writings from Manipur, edited by Thingnam Anjulika Samom, 26 women writers and a visual artist share their experiences (in Meiteilon or Manipuri, Tangkhul and English) “of being a woman in a patriarchal order”. In the Introduction, Samom says that the writers, including four Sahitya Akademi winners — Maharaj Kumari Binodini, Sunita Ningombam, Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi and Moirangthem Borkanya — talk about their “negotiations and compromises with society and tradition and their struggles to grow and forge a new path.”
Several writers reflect on the impact of conflict on the lives of women. In ‘My Children’s Photographs’, Ningombam Satyabati chronicles the story of a mother who has lost her children and husband in a bomb blast; Maya Nepram writes about the struggles of ordinary people in the time of conflict in ‘Crimson Tides’; Mufidun Nesha captures a mother’s helplessness in her poem ‘At the Morgue’ (Of those taken away beyond the gate/Of those concealed, disappeared,/The destination is the morgue.); Tonjam Sarojini’s poem ‘Don’t Wait’ chronicles the atrocities carried out under AFSPA. Nahakpam Aruna’s essay, ‘The Journey of Women’s Writing in Manipuri Literature’ is also a social, cultural and literary history of the Meiteis and indigenous tribes down the ages. She writes about the third generation of women writers, born between 1960 and 1980, who witnessed a “further deterioration of the social fabric, the sharpening divide among communities, widespread violence, ethnic clashes and extra-judicial killings by both the underground and state armed forces,” and lived to write about them.
Experiencing violence
Reporting from the ground for his book Despite the State, M. Rajshekhar recalled how even in chance meetings in Manipur he found that people — or someone close to them — had experienced violence. For her book, Mother, Where’s My Country, journalist Anubha Bhonsle conducted close to 200 interviews, pored over dozens of documents and court testimonies and revisited places to describe the “stories and silences of people” she met and spoke to. “Effects of a conflict persist differently among different people,” she writes in the introduction for the stories from Manipur she gathered — “stories of struggle and loss, of closure or a lack of it, of denial of memory and justice.”
If Bhonsle’s starting point is Irom Sharmila’s fast, Teresa Rehman writes about the women who ripped their clothes off in front of Kangla fort in Imphal to protest against the rape of Thangjam Manorama by jawans of the Assam Rifles in 2004. In her book, The Mothers of Manipur: Twelve Women Who Made History, each mother or Ima recounts her act of defiance, with Ima Nganbi saying she remembers shouting, “We are all Manorama’s mothers. Come and rape us.”
Hazarika, who was part of the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee set up after the rape of Manorama, writes in his book about a mother at a hearing who told them: “I wish to say just one thing to you. I wish simply that no mother of this country goes through what I have gone through. That is my only wish.” There is a long history of protests, police firings, and blockades in the State. The chapter, ‘The Manipur Cauldron’, explains the reasons why communities are pitted against one another in the State, and the difficulties in arriving “at any formula which would be acceptable to all sides.”
