I remember a conversation I once had with a friend in Manipur where the phrase “Imphal is not a city!” was emphasised. I listened, nodding, turning my head to look around at the hazy skyline of the old Khwairamband Market. There were people all around, almost all in colourful dresses. Street vendors dotted every corner, garbage and waste crowded unofficial dumping squares.
It was humbling to realise that it could be an argument that Imphal is not a city. I would, of course, disagree. But it is undoubtedly a discussion we all reflect on from time to time. Growing up in Imphal and also having spent time away from it has given me a broader perspective on the place. Imphal is a city to me not just because of its infrastructure but because it’s where I can enjoy a breakfast of puri with hot uti gravy and halwa, where the TV cable works, where I don’t have to wait for a jeep for 30 minutes, and where school vans exist. I used to notice the difference when I stayed away from Imphal as a child. During my stay in Amakcham, while fighting with the neighbours, I remember yelling, “I am from Imphal! You are all lawai macha (villagers)!” I was but a child but I knew Imphal meant an elevation in the standard of everything.
Yet, the opposite viewpoint is not without merit. It’s a perspective worth considering for it challenges the more romanticised idea of what a city should be. Imphal is not alive after 7 pm. Every shutter will cascade into haunting darkness after the sun retreats from the sky. Women in the Khwairamband Market will chase after diesel autos, stuff themselves inside, six seven of them in one vehicle, along with their bundles, to return home in the last gaari.
As a millennial, a vignette of early Nineties grotesques crosses my mind. Coming back to the city and staying in a dingy rented room where the wall shakes every time trucks drive past does humble the arrogant child who shouted “lawai macha” to her friends in Amakcham rather quickly. I remember standing in line for regular frisking and searches of our rooms. News of murders and rapes entered our lives early. As children, we were nonchalant to the horrendous atrocities, the unlawful behaviour. But protest and unrest were part of our school schedules, morning schedules and sleep schedules. So, who were the bad guys, I used to wonder. What is it that this city fears so much? Growing up, there was no government better than the previous one. Only the worst. We knew because it was a common joke at the leikai hoten — small breakfast eatery – how none of our leikai roads were maintained unless it was election time. Hoten is where we kids were introduced to politics for the first time. While we waited for our puris to arrive, we absorbed the heated arguments of the elders with their newspapers and their radios. We didn’t know who was who, but we were quite sure that AFSPA was the main bad guy. Later, we would find out that it was not a person but a law especially made for people like us, away from the country we joined very recently. A law that allows the lucrative killing of just about anybody. The rest are heroes-turned-monsters – our own dipped in the horrors of extortions and covert scourging.
Imphal, however, still stands, witnessing all of this protest and resistance. But is this city only about the unrest? The bustle of Khwairamband at 4 am wouldn’t agree. Exotic — some might even consider it offensive — it is a spectacle when the best of the harvest from every corner of this state is on display: The cash, the mouths that spit numbers, and the heads that do thousands of calculations in an instant.
And yet, this phantasmal promise of prosperous and productive lives in the city does dissolve into roars and bloodbaths when the time calls for it. Which is often.
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While we feel nothing much has changed for it to be called a city, Imphal is impatient to be considered fast and happening, to be counted as a reputed urban centre. Its youth are not at home. Some for all the wrong reasons, but many with hope they have rightfully snatched from the chaos and stitched to perfection in art spaces, concerts, street stalls, campuses, bookstores and cafes. These are the spaces where divides fail in the face of young love, fun and activism. In a place where news and views are regularly shut down, Imphal stands precariously open for all to come and unite.
Imphal is a city at heart, imbued with the spirit of the young. But the battle of Imphal continues. Be it in the 1944 context or through the continued efforts of those in power. If given a chance, Imphal seems ready for love and peace. At its heart, after all, it is a small, unfortunate city with a bit of everything.
Chanu (Potsangbam Linthoingambi Chanu) is a writer from Manipur who explores Manipuri socio-cultural themes and indigenous folk perspectives in her work
