On the 12th of October 2024, BOOM’s North East Facts Network organised the Manipur Roundtable attended by dedicated scholars, activists, and social workers from the diverse communities of the state. They came together to discuss the intricacies of the Indian state of Manipur. The idea was to go beyond binary narratives of the conflict and probe deeper into the other issues. They shared insights on various important aspects – ranging from disabilities to textiles and women’s movements, queerness to folklore, tribal institutions to the marginalisation of the Meitei Pangals, and so on – highlighting social issues and scholarship within the state of Manipur that do not receive the kind of attention that conflict does.
Disabilities education and welfare in Manipur
Pauzagin Tonsing, Director of the Centre for Community Initiative (CCI), talked of the areas the organisation focussed on – disability, advocacy and community improvement, sustainable livelihood, and disaster management. They are currently running the Malsawm Initiative, a school for children with disabilities including but not limited to visually impaired, hearing impaired, intellectually disabled, and autistic children. They have a specific curriculum to cater to their needs. They also run therapeutic services and community outreach programmes. They also do advocacy work and have established the Manipur Hill District Disabled Union (MHDDU) because the welfare for persons with disabilities is often neglected. The Centre for Community Initiative is currently providing tailored services to around 200 disabled students in Churachandpur.
According to Tonsing’s assessment, the percentage of physical disability is higher in Manipur as compared to other parts of India. Though it might not seem so from available data, the ground reality yields a different picture. The census enumerators are not disability experts, and as such have time and again failed to include many persons with disabilities in the census. Typically, they tend to collect information on those with visible disabilities, while ignoring others with intellectual disabilities. He emphasised on the need to collect accurate disability data to be eligible for development schemes and programmes to advance the welfare for PwDs. Presently, most schemes are concentrated in the urban areas and other areas are neglected. Most schools also do not have measures and trained persons for the inclusion of disabled children, which is an area he hopes the government will urgently look into.
Digitalisation of Meitei manipuri folklore
Dr. Sylvia Sagolsem, Assistant Professor at the GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Visakhapatnam, talked of her recent project which examined the folk narratives of the Meitei Manipuri community. She highlighted the ongoing digitalisation of Meitei Manipuri folklore, or phunga-wari, available on video sharing and social media apps. Primarily led by indigenous players, the folklore is continuously evolving with wider dissemination of the indigenous folklore in the form of animation, digital illustrations, graphic comics, and so on. These are often accompanied by some kind of meta text turning digital materialities of the phunga-wari into an “innovative form of cultural identity expression that also incidentally renders a form of digital cultural archive of folk traditions engendering a new mode of digital storytelling of oral traditions”.
Dr. Sagolsem further discussed the agency of the platform users, who are both amateur producers and prosumers of this subculture. The importance of preserving cultural heritage was stressed upon as well, where she explored the possibilities of using digital technologies to imbue renewed significance to cultural revitalisation. She also sees cultural heritage as a way to address popular misconceptions of Manipur and Northeast India. Folklore can become an instrument for self-representation and reimagination of our selfhood and identity, in the context of how Northeast India continues to be viewed by dominant discourse through interpolated binaries of violence or exoticism.
Tribal institutions and indigenous religions in urban areas
Dr. John Gangmei, Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work, Rajiv Gandhi University, talked about the problems he grew up hearing about especially with regards to the Zeliangrong Naga customary practice of courtyard burials. With rapid socio-economic development and urbanisation, the available space was shrinking, which posed challenges for the tribal institutions and indigenous communal practices. Attempts to find burial spaces in rural areas have also been unsuccessful, as land provided met with third party resistance. After struggling for around three decades, a space in the outskirts of Imphal was arranged through networking with other villages to form the Community Burial Committee.
Dr. Gangmei also noted some uncommon practices that arose due to the lack of space including burial of the dead on the riverbanks and dismantling verandahs to bury the dead underneath. Some landless believers of the indigenous religion called Tingkao Ragwang Chapriak were even forced by circumstances to convert to Christianity due to the availability of cemeteries in the vicinity. Despite repeated requests to the government, viable long-term solutions have not been found. Burial rituals are responsibilities of the village institutions. Dr Gangmei noted the absolute lack of information of tribal institutions or customary laws in the mainstream educational curricula. It is only through personal curiosity that he sought out to research this field. He briefly discussed the idea of “adaptive governance” and highlighted the multiple changes that tribal institutions have undergone over the years. Mainland India needs to learn about the significance these institutions have in the lives of the tribals.
Queerness in conflict-ridden Manipur
Kumam Davidson Singh, founder of Matai Society and co-founder of The Chinky Homo Project, emphasised the importance of talking about queerness in a state like Manipur, where escalations of violence and destruction have continued for almost a year and a half. Queerness is a political stance that defies heteronormative binaries of “male” and “female” and discrimination based on sexuality. Queerness has also evolved to be a larger political discourse that acknowledges systematic discrimination based on gender, religion, class, ethnicity, and so on. For Davidson, queerness is not merely about gender and sexuality, but also a staunchly anti-majoritarian and anti-authoritarian position. It demands accountability in political leadership and governance. Queerness as a lived reality and a fight for rights in Manipur, or across India and elsewhere, remains underrepresented and invisibilised, which is precisely why he believes it is important to talk about it even amidst armed conflicts. During conflicts, discrimination against queer people increases manifold while media reporting of such discrimination decreases.
Davidson briefly discussed his work at the Matai Society. He contextualised the history of the queer movement in Manipur within the larger global LGBTQIA+ movements. Queer and trans records and archives show the visible amount of queer activism and voices against armed forces, civil society, and natal families, as early as the 1980s. At present, he notes the aggressive resistance to queer-trans discrimination amongst the youth. In Manipur, queerness is much more indigenous and local, and the awareness and expression of queerness differs from community to community, and region to region. Queering the understanding of conflict itself, Davidson pushed back against Manipur being often compared to the state of Kashmir. According to them, one must be mindful of the differences in both these contexts in terms of the trajectories and the factors involved. Manipur is an Indian state granted statehood in 1972 by the Indian government, albeit with resistance and separatist movements. There are diverse racial, linguistic, and ethnic groups in the state.
Kuki-Zomi-Hmar women in Manipur
Dr. Deborah Darlienmawi, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Allahabad University, traced the emergence and activities of women’s organisations and social problems in Manipur. She relates to the audience about her doctoral work on three different women’s organisations – Hmar Women’s Association, Zomi Mothers’ Association, and Kuki Women’s Union – all of which emerged in the 1980s and 90s. They have been catering to the needs and struggles of women in their respective ethnic groups. Women’s organisations also tend to be divided along ethnic lines, although there have been instances of women going beyond community divides to help each other. Since these tribal societies follow customary laws, Dr. Darlienmawi noted how they limited women’s access to rights.
She believes that the contributions of these ethnic women’s organisations are influential and beneficial, especially in terms of making women visible in the public space. Located within the patriarchal setup, Dr. Darlienmawi notes that many women’s organisations all over the world begin with focus on women’s issues, with feminist issues and concerns being raised at a later point by some women. Dr. Darlienmawi discussed mainland notions of tribals as those people living without clothes and living in jungles. She also debunked the popular misconception that women in Northeast India are empowered, when women across different states and communities of Northeast India have different levels of freedom and power. Lastly, she talked about how the idea of women’s movements in Manipur are limited to only Meira Paibis and Irom Sharmila, when in fact Manipur is much more diverse.
History of Meitei Pangals
Dr. Pusham Azad Babu, who recently completed his PhD in Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, debunked the numerous misconceptions surrounding the Meitei Pangals of Manipur. The Meitei Pangals are ethnic Muslims residing mainly in Imphal Valley. He briefly touched upon the origins of the Pangals and their migration to the valley centuries ago and consequent assimilation into the traditional systems of Manipur. The relationships of the Pangals to other communities in the context of violence, conflicts, and political assertions were also touched upon.
Despite the community having a history of more than 400 years, the anti-immigration sentiment prevailing in Assam during the !980s, as expressed in slogans of “Go back foreigners”, had also reached Manipur. Dr. Azad Babu addressed misconceptions about the identity of Meitei Pangals as being synonymous with Muslims from outside Manipur, which has played a part in ethnic violence against the community in the 90s. He talked of the co-existence of the Meiteis and the Meitei Pangals throughout the centuries marked by inter-marriages and sharing of knowledge. Meitei Pangals were given land to settle upon by the Manipuri King. He also pointed to historical sources which mention that with the introduction of Hinduism in the early 18th century, religious persecution of indigenous faith began, which led many Meitei people to convert to Islam to evade the persecution. Meitei Pangals were a protected and patronised community during that time.
Textiles, weaving, and Tangkhul Naga women
Thingminao Horam, who recently completed her PhD at the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, shared how her academic expertise is rooted in a deeply personal and familial connection with the weaving community in Manipur. Her mother and grandmother were skilled Tangkhul weavers. Women from her family always viewed higher education as a means to escape the highly laborious work of weaving. Ironically, Horam finds herself drawn back to these weaving practices, documenting, researching, and writing about the textile traditions of her community. When she began her research, she was shocked to find the absence of academic studies on Tangkhul textiles or textile traditions of Manipur. This motivated her to create a body of knowledge that could serve as a foundational resource for understanding textile traditions.
The introduction of the Burmese loom in Ukhrul district in the 1990s reshaped the textile production and gendered labour dynamics of the Tangkhuls’ contemporary textile production. Textile traditions are deeply rooted in culture, labour, space and capital and constantly evolving alongside contemporary social and economic conditions. Dominant narrative tends to view Northeast Indian crafts through an outmoded orientalist and developmentalist lens. This narrow focus ignores the dynamic capitalist engagements of artisans who actively shape and sustain thriving craft industries. Understanding textile traditions from Northeast India can offer unique insights into indigenous practices, cultural politics, spatial relations, and trade networks, which are perspectives often absent from mainstream textile scholarship. She also highlighted the popular misconception of “egalitarian” tribal societies, when in fact notions of women’s labour are often dismissed as mere handicrafts. After navigating fieldwork, translating oral histories, and analysing ethnographic data, Horam believes that this knowledge needs to be presented beyond academia for broader public engagement with indigenous textiles.
The scholars also shared resources and book suggestions on how to understand Manipur in all its complexities. Pauzagin Tonsing lamented at the lack of academic studies on disability studies in Manipur but said there are articles, reports, and videos available on the subject. Dr. Sagolsem suggested a YouTube channel called Pupu Folk TV, which has many animated videos of popular folktales of Manipur. Dr. Gangmei referred to fellow-Naga scholars from the state, namely, Richard Kamei, Samson Kamei, Gangmumei Kamei, and Rocky Raile. Davidson mentioned sources like Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and Zubaan in addition to institutional archives and digital media. Dr. Darlienmawi suggested Lal Dena’s In Search of Identity: Hmars of North-East India and TS Gangte’s The Kukis Of Manipur: A Historical Analysis as insightful resources for understanding the Kuki, Zomi, and Hmar tribes. Azad Babu gave suggestions like the historical chronicles and puyas, which have mentions of the Muslims. He also mentioned digital resource E-Pao! and Salam Irene’s book The Muslims of Manipur to have a more nuanced understanding of Manipur’s ethnic diversity. The speakers also briefly discussed the intricacies of the ongoing Manipur conflict and ethnic violence, the role of the centre, and the importance of rebuilding trust between communities towards a possible pathway to peace in the state.
You can check out the session here.