Marginalised within the Margins: Meitei Muslims in Manipur

Ever since childhood I remember being in highly homogenous groups of friends and familial circles. Such circles have the tendency to numb us to differences, an easy sedate living insulated from those different from us. It was not a shock though considering the direction the country and the state is heading when a friend narrated to me in a series of conversation the travails any muslim girl growing up in Manipur would have most probably undergone. “‘Amina Begum’ is one of one such verbal harassment thrown at anyone wearing the hijab or have wrapped herself up in a scarf or chaddar,” she explained. People like us who are not subject to such particular harassment and targeting based on religious affiliation might even state that such harassment is to be taken lightly. Harassment of such kind is mildly called laknaba, a term as innocuous as eve teasing, a term which could include an array of other activities which are indeed innocuous and thereby makes it difficult for women to argue that laknaba is verbal harassment also, or perhaps what is required is to coin another term which would encompass the ordeal that such an act embodies. While it is more often than not understood and (hopefully) a consensus built around the fact that women undergo harassment at most public and private spaces such harassment of the minorities should be understood as of much more virulent an attack and the fear of being small in numbers is not to be underestimated. The point here is not to compare the degrees of ordeal that women undergo but to state that women belonging to different communities are marked out differently, the minorities always bearing the brunt and in the case of Manipur, the muslims become the other. Just as we are in other parts of the country marked out by our features, they are in their own land marked by other visible markers.

Sites that we as “mainstream”, at least in Manipur (by we, I mean the majority community of Manipur, the Meiteis regardless of being hindus or followers of Sanamahi religion) have taken as sacred if looked at through a different lens gives quite an altogether different picture. For instance, Kangla (in the news for quite some time now) has easily morphed from being a site of kingly subjugation to a site of resistance, if only, for the Meiteis. Manipuri muslims or meitei pangal is the category in the census and such colloquial  words –pangal, hao have in time acquired prejudices by what the majority community prefix and suffix with these words that most people with political sensitivity prefer the English replacement –muslim, tribal. A series of conversation with this friend from the meitei pangal community revealed for me the many flaws of my own community. Her research interest being sacred spaces she interviewed some of the priests in Kangla. It is difficult to identify her as the “other” from her name or her “looks”. She was entertained with her queries for a few days after which she was told in no uncertain terms that she has polluted the space. As a political move there has been many feasts organised in the space of Kangla wherein people from other religious and ethnic communities have been invited, if only for political correctness. The priest also gave her some of his own opinion on how such moves pollute the space of Kangla. Are we to think then that it is only on such marked off days that “the others” are invited, allowed inside the so-called sacred space? It is to be remembered that spaces only become sacred by exclusivity, an exclusivity that more often than not is built on an exclusion, an exclusion that marks certain people as unpolluted and thereby those who are so. It is time we look at such spaces and understand that in the exalted histories of such spaces lie narratives of subjugation/ discrimination.

The meitei hindus of Manipur certainly pride themselves as being separate from hindus of the rest of the country. This is on the basis of the erroneous belief being that they are innocent of discriminatory practices like that of caste. However the notion of purity and pollution has seeped into the very core of all practices. Women are aware of how they are denied access to certain spaces during their menstrual periods. Practices like these have become banal enough to pass unnoticed. We have equally bizarre cases like Municipal Corporation workers sweeping roads being physically and verbally harassed; something as innocuous as the broom has become a potent inauspicious symbol! This idea of purity and pollution also comes in our conduct vis-à-vis the religious and the ethnic minority. My friend was shown the door by a well known meitei intellectual. She has polluted his sacred texts was the reason attributed. That we still live in a time where it is possible to make such disparaging statements and not only that, in effect actually rendering certain areas of research inaccessible to a community and also getting away with it is nothing less than shameful and is to be pointed out as a practice of untouchability, an illegal act. She narrated to me an incident wherein she with her sisters travelling in a bus bound for Mayai Lambi was address by an old meitei lady, “Ebemma will you hold these flowers for me, I got them for a puja, the person next to me is a muslim”. I would have been stunned to be address this way. My friend growing up in an everyday of such acts of shunning directed towards her nonchalantly replied “ Ema eisu pangan ne” (Mother, I am also a muslim). A remark to which the elderly woman nonchalantly said “Phare adudi, ei adum pairage” (It is okay then, I might as well hold the flowers myself). Would not we see this as an act of untouchability directed towards a community? If this anecdote is amusing I should consider it a failed project to attempt to draw attention to such discriminatory practices.

While the name meitei pangal do suggests the indigeneity of the muslims, the term prefixed as it were, with a meitei, yet the question of indigeneity is a growing and a highly contentious issue. The muslims seems certainly marked out, not only in the state but going by the decade that we live in, in all parts of the country. More, so in the north eastern region of the country, due to its proximity to Bangladesh, muslims have to prove their indigeneity and non-Bangladeshi origin again and again. The meitei pangal in spite of their indigeneity seemed forever set apart because of their religion. As in other parts of the country in the regressive times we live in the religion seem to question their authenticity as indigenous people of Manipur. All other ethnicities following other institutional religion or those aspiring to be one (Hinduism, Christianity, Sanamahi-ism) at least in the case of Manipur no not at any point of time have to prove themselves as being indigenous population of the state. In fact for those following non-institutional religion, the question does not even arise. At any point of them one can see that there seem to a mortal fear of people who do not constitute even 10% of the population (according to the 2001 census).

Not too long ago an incident of muslim villagers lynching a muslim couple in Sora Awang Leikai occupied print and screen space for a weeks. This was used as an illustration of the “otherness” of the meitei pangal. This is strange in a violence ridden place where sporadic killing could be seen anywhere regardless of the religious affiliation of the place. However, the ways in which media possess video recording of the killings and questions of media ethics in such a scenario was not questioned. What was questioned was the ethics of the community and not the ethics of policing mechanism and the manner in which the entire process was video recorded and shown in news bulletin erasing only the most incriminating part.

It could be said that issues like the movement asking repeal of AFSPA, resisting acts of violence, resistance to racialised targeting of women from the region in the capital and our indignation against it occupies our time and attention. One should not desist from that. Along with this however it is to be noted that we treat our own minorities with the respect that we demand. While I write this the news of Haji Abdul Salam, first ever Muslim MP that the Manipur state is going to see is doing its rounds. The Congress has woken up rather late in the day to the fact that they need to have some secular credential. It is left to be seen if this would translate into any palpable changes in the way we view the meitei pangals.

Lazy Stereotypes of an Uninspired Mind

A review of Kishalay Bhattacharjee, Che in Paona Bazaar, Macmillan, 2013, Rs 399, pp. 241

Paona Bazaar lies in the heart of Imphal, Manipur. One can describe this place by its proximity to Bir Tikendrajit Road which had seen the infamous fake encounter case in July 2009. In fact many of the landmarks of the town would tell a story of it being part of a constellation of political violence. Che, I would presume, needs no introduction here. The attempt here is to understand this curious juxtaposition of ‘Che’ and ‘Paona Bazaar’ as seen through the lens of a media practitioner. The book ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ largely discusses (but not exclusively) two states –Manipur and Nagaland - of what is unproblematically called the North-east. These two states are not only connected by a common border but also by it falling in the category of ‘disturbed area’. The infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958 has been in place in these states, it is often argued that the enactment of this act is partly related to the peculiar and coerced manner in which these states become a part of the Indian Union. One would therefore expect some amount of nuanced understanding which captures the complexities from a book that claims to deal with the region.

This work of non-fiction with a fictional protagonist whom the writer claims as ‘not representative of any community or culture’ is named Eshei (Meiteilon word for Song) which is a dead giveaway. She is a typical native informant in the book that reminds the reader of dated anthropological writings. The book is to a large extent a narrative mediated through Eshei. The writer does not shy away from beginning the book with racial stereotypes that abounds in the mainstream Indian imagination of the so-called Northeast. The oldest armed group in Manipur – UNLF – mentioned in the initial pages of the book is referred to as ‘working towards a unification of Mongoloid armed groups’, is just one of many such unabashed stereotypes. Comparing cultures on the basis of exotic curiosities –for example, comparing Manipuri and Korean culture based on the practice of putting family name before given name; comparing Sanamahism to Shamanism. Perhaps meant to be amusing, but rather than being funny it ends up carelessly taking down a language especially as in one sentence the protagonist’s fetish for Moreh bras is strangely morphed into its seeming importance among a whole community. Unbelievable as it might sound; the author states that bra (brassiere) is an important word among the Meiteis due to the interrogative pronoun ‘bra’ suffixed at the end of a query.

Moreh, the border town, described as a Manipuri Malgudi in the book of course is a terribly wrong metaphor. Using the metaphor of Moreh being a Manipuri Malgudi, the writer was not even romanticising the town but describing the dirt, grit, ‘prostitution’ and smuggling of drugs which is typical of many border towns in conflict zones across the globe. The writer takes himself too seriously, if the name of the book ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ itself is not enough indication of that, sample these sentences – ‘my ‘motorcycle diaries’ brought me to Paona Bazaar’; ‘I was the Pirate of Paona Bazaar’! In the start of the book itself the writer expresses his disdain for one of his native informant as he had to do his own research, he seem to want everything on a platter and does not shy away from expressing this. This is one of the kinder expressions he uses; he describes people scathingly leaving enough hints to identify the people populating his book. Even a superficial analysis of the choice of qualifiers used in the book reveals much. For instance, Manorama Devi (though her name is not given it is impossible to miss out on the clues) is described as an explosives expert but she was allegedly raped. Allegedly raped? What about her real murder? The protests that ensued after the rape and murder of Manorama Devi have been offhandedly described as creating ‘another stereotype of naked protests’. One is at a loss as to what the statement is supposed to mean. Did it lead to a chain of naked protests throughout the country? No. Does the country recognise rape of men and women in peripheral states by the armed forces? No. Or did he mean that yet another stereotype has been added to those currently proliferating on the northeast? A second or a third reading does not make this clear either.

What is worst than this racial stereotype interspersed in the writing is the lack of  any nuanced political understanding of the region from someone who was at the helm of news from the ‘North-east’ as a Resident Editor for a national news channel. In a rather bizarre juxtaposition he narrates two incidents together – the protest by women who stripped themselves outside the headquarters of Assam Rifles; and another incident six months later where a ‘Meitei girl’ ‘made love to a young army officer’ inside the headquarters of the Assam Rifles. The former was a protest by women, now known as ‘nude protest’, against the rape and murder of Manorama Devi by the Assam Rifles: a protest which also demanded the repeal of AFSPA (though mentioned nowhere in the book). It is unsettling to see the two incidents being described in the same paragraph –protest against a rape where the woman was killed and had gun-shot wounds in her vagina and a woman making love to an army officer.

The lack of respect for his subject is clear from statements like –‘Meitei homes have a confusing front and back yard’ or referring to avoidance of eye-contact as a gesture ‘typical of people in Manipur’ or proffering his idea that a dinner shared with two Tangkhul cousins in Ukhrul which consisted of hot pickle is somehow the cause of ‘their violent streak’. Sample this statement ‘In fact, there is a possibility that every detail in this account will be challenged. That is also quintessentially Meitei.’ What this statement attempts to do is refute any possibility of disagreement. Prior to the disagreement being made he already stereotypes it as a trait of a community. The style of writing is reminiscent of dated writings on the lost innocence of the native, the only difference being that according to the writer the natives are to be blamed for the current state of affairs. It is rather strange that a work of non-fiction that discusses so much on the conflict attributes the loss of personal liberty only on civil society and ‘armed nationalist’ and does not extend the same to the police or the army presence.

 

What one would have wanted was honesty with the times the book dealt with. The book covered a series of politically charged events and people involved.  But the intention of the narrative produced about these events seems to be ridicule rather than looking at the everyday travails of the people. For instance, while trying to take a critical stand on the Assam Agitation, the writer could not come up with anything better than dismissing the leadership as an ‘uninspired bunch’ and describing the years spanning this movement as being a time for young couples to have sex in closed-down schools. The gaze of the writer is definitely voyeuristic. Without explaining much, he also gets away with statements like ‘Insurgency is complex, at the same time boring to elaborate’; calls the NSCN-IM as armed Naga guerrillas and later qualifies his statement and calls them organised dacoits which is a notch lower that the colonial misrepresentation of ‘Naga hostiles’. The writer describes human rights organisations as frontal organisations of armed groups who pick ‘up cases of army and police excesses and drumming up public outcry against the state’. This is quite a painful erasure of the fact that police and army excesses still continue with an alarming regularity.

The problem with the book is not just that he sees the community as a collective without individual thought, trait or agency: a narrative which builds upon easily into the many stereotypes he offers on people as a whole, but also the seamless traversing from one state to the other almost playing with the idea of the ‘Northeast’ as a chunk of landmass conjoined like Siamese twins. It is clear whose side he is on especially as he mentions all the players in the field of conflict and yet conveniently refrains from referring to the State as one of the main beneficiaries of the conflict. The reproduction of existing clichés is however not as damaging as the superficial narration of various events that have had far reaching consequences in the politics of the region in the guise of some sort of social narrative.

For my still-born poet

For some days
I've let words die,
die between utterances,
die without being etched
You said "My metaphors sank
as if a wrecked ship
to the infinitude
of the ocean"
I've come
to bait your words
clasp them
by memory
and poetry

Raping the Other

Articles in local newspapers in Manipur for the past few months have been bordering on a misogynist strain of thought. Many of the articles expectedly commented on women opting out of the traditional phanek, some pointedly on the loosening of morals (of women); some even came up with a thesis of sorts, a strange hypothesis of a conjunction of mobile phones and young wives leading to the latter eloping from marital homes. This would have been laughable if not for the endorsement by many. The idea that whatever women do can be commented upon and be given undue space in the name of promoting a debate (actually too one sided to fall within the purview of a debate) is frightening. A person (I refrain from calling him a writer) bemoaned the Manipuri women choice of clothing which to him does not indicate her as an exotic being. Do we want to be looked at as exotic? The visual that his article evokes is of being caged in a zoo.

Actually his chagrin was over women who chose to wear attire of the other viz; sari or salwar kameez thus looking like the other not his own and therefore not giving visitors to Manipur the expected visual of the exotic. He sounds like a disappointed anthropologist but that is beside the point. That women can choose what to wear and what not to, has escaped this person. While this is just one of a series of articles which uses highly problematic words like chastity, morality (of course all of it referring solely to women) though he beat the others at it by using a phrase - "It does not serve the ethical purpose of their karma". All these while talking about the attires of women!!! We've given up trying to understand what ethical purpose of their (women's) karma means.

Of course as usual the one sentence either of Nupi Lan or Manipuri women being the pride and up-keeper of Manipuri society and culture has to be mentioned. We are also still not sure what upholding Manipuri culture means though we are disinclined to spent time trying to sort that out. Opinions like this in the present repression that we suffer under a repressive state and under repressive multiple authorities (who somehow by some logic) seem to have an authority over us is an extremely unpleasant experience. The latter's article was shot down by many men and women in social networking sites and other forums. Many were however of the opinion that one should just remain silent over such absurdity.

The compliance of silence as a recommendation is even more unpleasant but one that we've received since our childhood and to which we have no reason to heed to. Silence is complicity.

While New Delhi and many other cities burst into protest against the incident of gang-rape, many parts of Manipur too saw a similar protest not against the same incident but against the man-handling, molestation of an actor. The incident -a Manipuri Meitei actor was allegedly man-handled and molested by an NSCN (IM) cadre - one Mr. Livingstone on 18th of December 2012. In the aftermath protests that followed one thing was clear - the crime itself have been put on the backburner and the ethnicity of both the victim and the accused become one of paramount importance threatening the already fragile relationship between two communities.

The protest that followed left a journalist dead. No water cannons, here it is bullets (The only aspect of India Shining that we see here are the silver bullets). The discussion however was not directed against the utter failure of the state to promote and ensure a safe environment for women (and important to emphasised at this point of time is) -women of all ethnicity. One of the first demands at the beginning of the protest in the latter incident was absurd -an apology, not a prosecution of the perpetrator. The absurdity didn't remain there. Now, absurdity is oozing out of everyone -the state government is confused with the Meitei community (not for the first time though), a decision to ban Manipuri films! harassment of individuals heading home of Christmas, maybe all heading home for Christmas were thought to be the other and worst still attempt to rape a minor by suspected KCP cadres on the 24th of December.

Was a crime being committed on both the occasion? If so, the recourse should be the legal and policing mechanisms nor the widely practised shengdokchaba (an apology of sorts) and izzat dabi. (Widely used, the term itself smacks of a patriarchal attitude, compensation for taking away the izzat, the context of which varies but the central idea of lost of honour which is to be compensated monetarily is to be questioned.) The dishonour, being tied to the woman not to the perpetrators, and therefore rape is being used as a tool in communal fall out too, you dishonour our community by doing this to our women and so we dishonour your community by doing this to your women. The idea of ownership of women and therefore their honour conflated with the honour of the community is the problem. Therefore anyone who write/speak with the idea that what women wears, how she speaks, how she should uphold culture should not be seen as innocuous but part of the underlying problem. And men and women who subscribe to this idea would not be offended, outraged when women of another community is molested, raped -after all its raping the other nor yours and perhaps endorsed if this is believed to be done in retaliation. The tragedy of the current protest -each community says the other has blown it out of proportion.

Perhaps we could choose to see the larger picture, question the lack of security of women and men both, remove our ethnic-tinted glasses and maybe optimistically join the protest at the capital and put forward our agenda -to pressurise the government to remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958, an act using which many rapist army personnel go scot free in the peripheral states of the country. Perhaps I am hallucinating. The fact is that a number of rape victims and families have to forego any hope of justice because the perpetrators happened to be army personnel and uses the Armed Forces Special Powers Act as a ruse to escape punishment (and considering the fact that police commando personnel in Manipur also regularly eve-teases, molest, sexually assault and rape women faultily thinking themselves to protected by the same act).

Maybe the same Act had encouraged the state government to use bullets, yes, live ammunitions to suppress the agitation. All these would be quite lost to the protest at the capital, the moment of protest in the national capital could never be anticipated to be utilised for a protest against acts and laws that make violence against women possible. For the mainstream we are the other, a small number to be feared, who make insidious insinuation against the national army or perhaps the idea of the nation itself, for the ethnic other we are the mainstream that choose to protest when it doesn't make us look at the mirror to reflect our ugly selves. Now, we are all lost in a hall of mirrors.

Newspaper and internet discussions and reactions to the 18th December and 24th December incident seem no different from how the Indian state view any collective agony of people - they pitch one victim against the other, one incident against the other, one mass rape against another. We've learnt a lot indeed from the BJP and the Congress hurling 1984 and Gujarat violence against each other. No rape, assault, molestation is any better or any worst than the other, and our frayed emotions at why one incident gets more 'coverage' than the other could provisionally be one reason why we as a collective are not able to demand for a safe environment for everyone or maybe it is the other way around. This is not surprising because women as opposed to what we would like to believe, is not a collective and where we draw our primary identity from is not uniform. Yet, at times like this when one see the opportunity to steer the momentum of the protest (both in the capital as well as in parts of Manipur) towards a conspicuous change one will have to conclude with the dull but familiar tinge of disappointment. The attempt to rape on the 24th of December (under Lamlai police station, Manipur) by suspected KCP cadres lead to a similar mass outrage, the victim, a minor who happened to be on her way home for Christmas seem ethnically identified with that of the accused of the 18th December case. It is however very improbable that the two different protests could ever become a collective one to denounce violence against women. Our selective anger and our mobilisation on lines of ethnicity, religion and other such constructed formations reveal the lack of an intention to engage with crime against women.

For instance one can see that in the case of the mentally challenged minor girl of Moirang, the mainstream identity of the so called world of sane seem to dictate against the victim and thus the highly moral and offensive retort of the victim being tonsured and paraded by women's groups. That the incident happened inside the INA Memorial, a guarded museum complex does not have any bearing on the people's anger or rather the lack of it. Rather the nature of response to the act seems to say -Don't get raped. However, to state cases like this would be ironic, it would be to compare and contrast one incident against the other, why one was picked up for protest, why not the other, it would be analogous to why/why not this rape/molestation. But one could see in the case of Manipur the other raping your community member seems to be treated with more seriousness as compared to an incident where the victim and the perpetrator are from the same community. One can question whether the motive is to truly resist such crimes or rather the potential of the incident to be used politically is what drives them, people appear as if ready with a chisel trying to give shape to a stone of offence. Ethnic colouring of such incident shows the lack of collective will to address issues of safety and provision of a safe environment for women and other sexual minorities. One hopes that the protest would demand justice for all victims of rape/ assault/ molestation, more so when the culprit are in the police forces, armed forces and non-state, the first because they are supposed to be the one upholding the law, the second because we hope that our elected representative believe that the army is hierarchically not above them in our so-called democracy and the last because they claim to be working towards a nation, a nation we hope that respect women, though one cannot be too sure. The current phase of the protest gives us a claustrophobic feeling of living in Topsy Turvy land, once again.

 

This article was webcasted on 4th January 2013 (The North-East blog)

Diurnal City

Night is 
not the enemy
Says 
the dense diurnal city
yet at dusk
Stalks me
Shrill-voices
family
puppet-strings
Fractured straw-cotton
clay puppet
Pulls a string
Before I leave
Warning
Taunting
Chaste, safe
to remain
Insidious
sibling
sneers
His face
dark sunset
over my thighs
Open the gate
Outside, they
with pitchfork awaits
Bolt the door
I am done for

http://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com©

Stroke, by midnight

Your left
didn't speak
too your right
anymore
Stroke,
by midnight
You were
two halves
The morning
a splattered
sunny-side up
The day smeared 
thick rancid butter
on toast
Your smile
distorted
as in 
a hall of mirrors
In the sanitised
white room
silver mercury
like flowers
quivering in a vase
pronounces your fever
in degrees
The monitor
a melon-red cacophony
drew 
a long straight line

https://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com©

Cacophony and Concrete

The city
lingers without
a sense of closure.
Each day relentless
and endless
Like a rehearsal
without a finale;
left me shrivelled
like strands of marigold;
aftermath of festivities.
A night of barsati monsoons;
I wept
With numerous eyes
of moist patches
staring
from moss eaten walls

The city gnaws
and nibble away
the sprouting tender roots
of belonging
I belong somewhere,
elsewhere;
Elsewhere
That bring
news of death
of loved ones,
of tedious living and silent dying.


https://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com©