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South Asian History and Culture
ISSN: 1947-2498 (Print) 1947-2501 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20
Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance:
(Re) examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur
Panchali Ray
To cite this article: Panchali Ray (2018) Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re)
examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur, South Asian History and Culture, 9:4, 435-448, DOI:
10.1080/19472498.2018.1535543
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2018.1535543
Published online: 18 Oct 2018.
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Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re)
examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur
Panchali Ray
School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
ABSTRACT
This essay is a (re)examination of the Kangla Fort protest in Manipur
(2004), where 12 imas (mothers) enacted a spectacular nude protest,
with banners reading ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh’.
Based on interviews with the imas, I examine how the notion of ‘political
motherhood’, along with a shared affective economy of hurt and pain
produced a protest, both spectacular and singular, in its symbolic, as well
as actual resistance against the atrocities of the Indian army. The 12
women who protested are members of the Meira Paibis (torch bearers),
who draw their strength from their identity as mothers. Thus, their
narratives, memories and articulations of the nude protest is saturated
and conditioned by patriarchal idioms of ‘motherhood’, and how the
‘mothers of Manipur’had to rise up, to save Manipuri people from the
masculine Indian state. The essay grapples with the double bind that the
notion of ‘political motherhood’poses: on the one hand, the imas
operate within the paradigm of benevolent patriarchy, drawing their
strength from sacred and religious traditions that legitimise their roles
as peacemakers; on the other hand, the event of the protest destabilizes
and ruptures all social, historical, and cultural norms that constitute the
members of the Meira Paibis as grieving mothers. In this essay, I argue
that the spectacular and radical act of protesting nude in broad daylight
speaks to the crux of recent feminist theorizations on subjectivities,
where agency is understood as something that is not pre-discursive
and prior to power, but produced by historically specific, concrete con-
texts. I argue that the singular and the spectacular act of protest gives a
completely new meaning to agency, and even if momentarily, redefines
the politics of resistance within a field over determined by social, poli-
tical, and ideological constructions of normative femininity.
KEYWORDS
Sexual violence; Political
Motherhood; Women’s
Movement(s); Agency; Meira
Paibi
Introduction
In 2004, the city of Imphal was shaken out of its stupor when 12 women stripped naked in front
of the Kangla Fort, with banners reading ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh’. The
protestors were no ordinary women; they were imas (mothers) belonging to the sacred and
revered Meira Paibis (a mother’s group), and Imphal is no ordinary city; it is the only city (except
Srinagar) subjected to the draconian AFSPA (Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act). Who were the
Meira Paibis? Why did they take to such a bold act to register their protests against sexual violence
and atrocities of the Indian army? We know the facts: the brutalization, rape, and murder of
Thangjam Manorama Devi, who was accused of terrorism by the Assam Rifles commandment; the
CONTACT Panchali Ray raypanchali@gmail.com
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
2018, VOL. 9, NO. 4, 435–448
https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2018.1535543
subsequent naked protest of the 12 imas in front of the Kangla Fort, and the shock waves it sent
through the country. They are well documented and well reported facts, and yet, I wonder, if one
can recoup a history of an event which has been widely recorded, but with so less said and written
of the affective and emotive spaces it occupies. How did this event break from the traditional
methods of protests by the women’s movements, and what are its implications in terms of
feminist theorizing on resistance and agency? Manorama’s death sparked a protest that went
beyond the traditional understandings of agency, yet, this embodied language of pain, resistance,
and agency sits uneasily with the identities of the protestors, i.e. of a mother. An identity that is
essential for the performance of their everyday resistances in Manipuri society, an identity that
legitimises their nonconformism to traditional rituals, customs, and norms which subsequently
allows them to take to the streets in their demands for justice.
I went to Manipur (2016) to speak to some of the imas who protested in front of the Kangla
Fort. I was not interested in the facticity of the event; what intrigued me, was the act of
remembering, and the meanings given to it. Given that nationalist projects almost always use
the image of the ‘mother’to claim legitimacy, and garner social and political support, what are the
ramifications of a nude protest by the ‘Mothers of Manipur’? After more than a decade, how do
the same women remember their protest? How do they reconcile this one instance of a spectacular
protest that ruptures all norms of intelligibility, with quotidian relations embedded in a patri-
archal society? Manipur has been facing intra-sectarian/ethnic rivalries and armed secessionist
movements for a number of decades, and like most conflict zones, women have taken the role of
peacemakers and negotiators between the state and the rebels, as well as between different ethnic
groups. The Meira Paibis are no exception. Drawing their strength from rituals, customs, and
norms (both sacred and religious), and acting on their purportedly maternal dispositions to
protect and nurture, the Meira Paibis have been a leading force in peace processes in the state.
Thus, this essay grapples with the double bind that the notion of ‘political motherhood’poses:
on the one hand, the members of the Meira Paibis operate within a benevolent patriarchy, and
draw their strength and legitimacy as mothers from sacred and religious traditions to take on roles
of crusaders and peacemakers in a conflict zone. On the other hand, the instance of the protest
destabilizes and ruptures all norms that makes intelligible and recognizes the 12 women as
mothers. I argue that the radical embodied language of resistance destabilized all norms of
recognition that interpellates the protestors as respectable mothers acting on their maternal
instincts. This essay, thus, raises questions on power, subjectivities, agency, and resistance within
broader contexts of nationalism and inter-sectarian conflicts.
Gender, violence and nationalism
Sexual violence has been central to feminist theorization on the relations between gender, violence,
community, and nationalism. The enunciation of the discourses on rape emerged from a recognition
of women’s bodies as sexualised sites of control and domination that reinforces male power.
1
From
perpetuating and solidifying ‘compulsory heterosexuality’,
2
as a process of intimidation,
3
to violating
community honour,
4
sexual violence is conceptualised as pre-emptive, retributive, and a tool to mark
the body of the ‘other’. Brownmiller notes that rape is primarily a political act that operates within the
larger matrix of male domination over women, but it is also an act that expresses this political
dominance.
5
In India, rape is theorized and politicized as not just an expression of patriarchy, but
located at the interstices of other structural and institutional social and political inequalities: most
reported rape have been institutional rape (custodial rape), structured by social inequalities (to
strengthen class and caste norms), and perpetuated by moral and community gate keepers (punishing
women for transgression).
6
V. Geetha contends that sexual torture is derived from a heterosexual
imagination that tends to inflict on the non-normative body, sexual acts that are considered ‘immoral’
and ‘unnatural’–whether they are women, transgender, political or religious dissidents –as a way of
inscribing ‘otherness’onto them.
7
In fact, sexual violence does not necessarily operate on existing
436 P. RAY
inequalities, but actively scripts such inequalities into being. Rape constitutes subjectivities, reinforces
feminine vulnerabilities, and constitutes victimhood; the ‘gendered grammar of violence’uses existing
social inequalities to produce notions of both illegitimate and legitimate violence, where the latter
enjoys social acceptance and minimum/no opposition.
8
Particularly, in context of national security,
rape is a legitimate, infact, even a necessary tool to punish and ‘fix’women who are perceived as a
threat to national integrity and security.
9
The fraught relationship between nationalism and gender, and the role of sexual violence in
shaping national identities is a well-researched field, particularly for postcolonial nations. The
histories of nations whose birth were accompanied by a redrawing of borders, partitions, and
ethnic genocide cannot be extrapolated from the history of women’s bodies, which were sites of
contests over meanings, as well as inscriptions of nationalisms.
10
Feminists also argue that women
located in militarized and conflict zones face an intensification of violence in their own intimate
spaces, such as forced marriages, family honour, selfless motherhood, enforcement of chastity, and
wifely virtues.
11
It is now commonplace knowledge that women’s bodies are both the sites of
contesting cultures, as well as the mediums of cultural transmissions, and repertoires of national
collectivities. Particularly in South Asia, women’s bodies and sexualities have been intricately
linked to honour and shame of the family, as well as the community.
12
The female body is the
signifier of cultural purity, medium of producing progeny for the community, symbol of honour
and embodies aspirations of nationalist imaginations. Rape is not just about women’s bodies and
femininities, it is also about masculinities. The loss of agency for men, as they helplessly watch
their ‘own’women being raped, and their inability to prevent the ‘dishonouring’of their com-
munity is a failure of the trope of male-protector of the woman/nation. Cynthia Enloe demon-
strates how, the projection of a ‘dangerous world’makes men embrace hegemonic masculine
ideologies of protector-saviour, while women behave as the self-sacrificing mother, who will think
only of the protection of her children.
13
Manipur and women’s movement(s): the meira paibi or the ‘torch bearers’
The recent focus on Irom Sharmilla Chanu and the breaking of her 16 years of hunger strike
(August 2016)
14
has brought both national and international attention back to Manipur, and the
various movements, organizations, and individuals that have been resisting and demanding the
removal of AFSPA. In this section, I focus on the women’s movement in Manipur known as the
Meira Paibi (torch bearers in Meiteilol language) who has been resisting the ‘occupation’of
Manipur by the Indian state. Manipur is located at the far eastern edge of the country, and shares
its boundaries with Myanmar. Ever since its formation, Manipur has been witnessing multiple
separatists, and inter-ethnic rivalries leading it to being classified as ‘disturbed’by the Indian
Government (1980–2004); this classification also meant an increasing and unjust militarization,
as well as extraordinary laws that constituted and defined the quotidian life of the people. The many
separatist movements and insurgencies have led the state to witness decades of violence, no/
minimum development or employment, armed extortions, and civic dysfunction.
15
The imposition
of AFSPA, in particular, has precipitated much of civil and guerrilla resistances. AFSPA allows
extra-ordinary powers to the Indian Armed Forces, as well as the paramilitary forces. An armed
personnel can fire on any individual acting in contravention of any law and order, or for carrying
weapons (or anything capable of being used as a weapon), or even assembling in a group of five or
more. Under AFSPA, persons suspected of unlawful activities can be detained for 24 hours, with
unlimited extensions/renewals, and any premises can be searched without a warrant. Most sig-
nificantly, the AFSPA guarantees impunity to members of the armed forces operating in disturbed
areas.
16
The mass protests, including the naked protest at the Kangla Fort led to the removal of
‘disturbed’status in the Imphal valley in 2004, but AFSPA has not been withdrawn till date.
The Meira Paibi came into being, as a mother’s movement (1970s), in response to production,
distribution, and consumption of illicit alcohol and drugs within the community. Initially, the
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 437
collective was named as Nisha Bandi, whose members were biological mothers of the community.
The change in name came with a change in context and the nature of oppression, as well as
resistance: from reforming the community and preventing consumption of drugs and alcohol, as
well as prevention of domestic violence, the focus of the collective became state atrocities on the
Meitei community. As one of the members narrates,
The Indian army picked up one of the boys from the neighbourhood for no fault of his, and illegally detained
him. We protested outside, and said we will not leave till he was handed over us. The whole night we stood in
front of the gates with torches in our hands. They finally released him. He was brutally tortured, but he not
“disappeared”like many before him. That is when we realized our power. As women we could fight the
occupiers. And that is how we got our name, Meira Paibi: Meira meaning torch and Paibi meaning bearer.
17
The Meira Paibi is traced to the two Nupi-Lans (women’s war) that were waged against the
colonial British Government and local ruling classes, once in 1904, and then in 1939, for
preventing export of rice, as well as initiating constitutional and administration reforms.
Women were central to Manipuri democratic politics that fought against colonial and feudal
powers to bring social change.
18
The members of Nisha Bandi were women who formed groups in
their respective localities to prevent alcoholism and domestic violence, even taking punitive action
against drunken men, brewers, and distributors with the approval and sanction of the community.
Women’s participation in the public sphere is not new to Manipur; some scholars trace it to the
existence of certain institutions, such as Lallup-Kaba (which prevailed in Manipur in the 1800s).
According to the Lallup-Kaba, all able-bodied men had to render forced labour to the state for a
certain number of days. Thus, it was not benevolent patriarchy, but feudalism that led women to
enter the realm of economic transaction towards the maintenance of the family. Consequently,
women became active participants in trade and commerce which has now taken the shape of the
famous ‘Women’s Market’/‘Ima Keithel’.
19
The Meira Paibis are exalted members of the society, drawing their strength from sacred
traditions that few dare to challenge. Strict rules guide their organization, and non-attendance of
meetings and protests can socially isolate a member. The members wear a costume that has both
religious and mourning significance –a white shawl and a beige coloured phanek (a kind of wrap
around skirt that covers the lower torso).
20
When I met two of the imas (who had protested at
Kangla Fort in 2004) at a ceremony that enacted ritual mourning and celebration of martyrdom of
a teenage boy killed by the Indian army, all the members of the Meira Paibi were dressed similarly.
As one of the ima said, ‘This is our costume, we identify with this dress. It is religious. It is
sacred.’
21
The members of Meira Paibi take torches and patrol the streets at night, sometimes as a
vigilante group, and sometimes in protest. Their resistance and collectivity is based on an
opposition to oppression –in this case, it is the shared experience of being oppressed by the
state, rather than the family. Their identity as mothers is central to their politicization, and their
articulations of resistance. As Ima Lourembam Nganbi says, ‘when our children are suffering, can
we as mothers remain silent?’
22
The Kangla Fort protest: performance of politics/politics of performance
Women in democratic movements have often fallen back on the framework of motherhood to
articulate their demands, anger, grief, and frustrations. Some well-known mother’s groups that
emerged initially in the decades of 1970s and 1980s were in dictatorial and fascist regimes in Latin
America: ‘Madres de La Plazo de Mayo’(Argentina), ‘Co Madres’(El Savador) and ‘Grupo Apoyo
Mutuo’(Guatemela). Their primary demand was government accountability on the abduction and
disappearance of their children. In Europe and Central Asia, there was ‘Mothers for Peace’
(Belgium), ‘Mothers against Silence’(Israel); in South Asia, there is the ‘Mother’s Front’(Sri
Lanka), ‘Association of Parent’s of Disappeared Persons’(Kashmir, India). In North East India,
which has been witnessing intense militarization and inter-ethnic strife, almost every state has a
438 P. RAY
mother’s association who are instrumental in negotiating peace between the Indian state and the
secessionist movements. A famous example is the Naga Mother’s Association.
Scholars, however, have pointed out that while such mother’s associations do politicize
motherhood in an attempt to open up legitimate spaces that allow women to engage in issues
of peace and security, hitherto denied to them, it did not necessarily challenge the militaristic
gendered order. Moreover, it is not a fight for universal peace, but protection of their children that
lead to the mobilization of women as mother’s groups.
23
Thus the struggles of the mother’s groups
are deeply embedded in nationalist and ethnic identities and movements. The debate on ‘political
motherhood’is an old one: while feminists agree that mother’s groups fall back on tropes of
sacrificing motherhood –appealing to the state through ‘tears and curses’
24
-which re-establishes
both biological and social norms that legitimizes nurture, care, and guardianship as the sole
responsibility of the woman-mother; it also opens up spaces for collectivities, communities, and
mobilization of women in otherwise impossible spaces. Feminists have pointed out that the
exclusion of women from the category of ‘political actors’has meant that it is men who are
accepted as citizens, and women as the necessary ‘outsider’,
25
thereby making the identity of the
‘mother’an important entry point for women to enter the political arena.
Samir Kumar Das in his provocative essay on the Kangla protest makes a distinction
between ‘pure motherhood’and ‘political motherhood’; the former longs for reunion with
her child irrespective of the politics s/he is involved in, and the latter stands up for the political
cause that the child is engaged in. The mother is committed to the justness of the cause, and
this commitment is what makes motherhood not only political, but also connects ethnicity to
democracy. While Das does point out that motherhood is possibly the only entry point that
women have for engaging in peace initiatives, he also asserts that all women are mothers –
political mothers. He states, ‘every woman is mother –potential or real –and there is a mother
in every woman.’
26
Ifindthepositioningofall women as mothers, even if it is political, a
rather slippery slope for feminist politics. I am not suggesting that agency be perceived as
teleological where women must shed their gendered identity to be ‘good subjects’of feminism,
but to argue that all women deploy tropes of maternal care and nurture to resist, question,
challenge, and hold accountable militarized state regimes is to tie such affects to biologically
defined heteronormative imaginations of the sexed body. In anticipation of such a counter
argument, Das states that feminist agendas that expects women’s movements to question
patriarchal norms, is ‘pure’and ‘clinically sanitized’and largely results in women’s movements
remaining autonomous from ethnic movements.
27
This is a tension that has accompanied most popular movements. Feminists have demonstrated
that though women have participated in armed/democratic/popular movements in equal terms with
men, patriarchal norms that discursively produce masculine and feminine subjectivities have been
hard to displace.
28
This is not unique to Third World women. American feminists have also expressed
their disappointment and anger, when male comrades insist and expect hierarchical gender norms
operating within the household to be automatically extended to democratic public spaces.
29
However,
the constant focus on oppressive patriarchal norms that freeze Third world women into a passive
victim has played an important role in the divide between liberal feminists in the Global North and
feminists of the South. As Mohanty points out that the over-emphasize on ‘achievements’and
‘failures’as opposed to imagined free white liberal democracy is central to the humanist tropes of
the ‘free’,‘knowing’individual without taking other cross cutting axes of oppression in account.
Instead, focusing on coalitions rather than identities, identifying struggles rather than shared oppres-
sion, which disrupts the representations of the Third world woman as frozen in a congealed universal
narrative of victimhood, would be more productive for feminist politics.
30
Maternal love has almost always been central to the politics of sexualities and cultures of
revolutions; while radical Left groups have been critical of bourgeois display of emotions such as
love, longing and desire, maternal love has been central to the birth of both the male revolutionary
and the nationalist ‘hero’. The supposed power and force of the natural feminine urge towards
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 439
nurturing and care drives her to seek objects of nurture –in this case, the disappeared-
incarcerated rebel-victim. The sacrifice and devotion inevitably associated with such quests in
turn underlines innate feminine virtue. It is this affective space that ‘pure’motherhood occupies
that leads her to form collectives, build solidarities, and take on the role of a vigilante to prevent
further incarceration/forced disappearances/torture of members of her community –thus reinfor-
cing the women-biology-reproducer matrix. In this context, it is difficult to imagine the pure and
the political as binaries, but rather as mutually constitutive categories. When does affect remain
pure and when does it get politicized? Is affect and politics necessarily in opposition? Does ‘pure
motherhood’not include rage against larger inequalities and injustices, and is ‘political mother-
hood’devoid and drained of emotions? How does pain enter politics? How do women opposing
state oppression in militarized zones articulate their resistance? The feminist task then would be to
foreground the oppressive structures in which women in movement(s) operate, to tease out the
fissures and gaps, to locate moments that rupture norms of ‘reproductive heteronormativity’that
govern and produce subjects.
The locking of masculinity with revolutionary impulses, and femininity with the maternal
instincts even within militant movements has often functioned as a double bind. On the one
hand, the norms of motherhood allows women to rupture gendered spatiality of the public/private
divide through the performance of grief, thus forcing patriarchal authorities (state/army/commu-
nity/nation) to recognize the politicization of such bodies and affects. On the other hand, the
performance of motherhood pivotal to resistance and movements reduces and objectifies women
as mothers. The question remains, what does the performance of affect (maternal grief, for
instance) that challenges militarized masculine states, by using the very idioms of patriarchy
imply for feminist politics? How does one dodge charges of ‘essentialism’within feminist politics,
when one tries to locate mother’s groups agitating for peace? The question of essentialism is a
dogged one. The last few decades has seen a protracted battle between social constructionist
feminism and feminism of differences, where the latter has argued that the very act of naming/
defining/categorizing ‘woman’has been to essentialize her. In this context, I find Elizabeth Grosz’s
argument regarding contamination of feminist politics quite persuasive. Arguing against ‘purity’
of feminist politics, she claims that there can be no feminist position that is not, in some degree,
almost always implicated in patriarchal power.
Feminists are not faced with pure and impure options. All options are in their various ways bound by
constraints of patriarchal power. The crucial questions are, which commitments remain, in spite of their
patriarchal alignments, of use to feminists in their political struggle? …the decision about whether to “use”
essentialism or to somehow remain beyond it…is a question of calculation, not a self-evident certainty.
31
It is, but understood, that in a highly masculinized, militarized society, political motherhood could
be a way of opening up otherwise closed doors for women to participate in political processes. The
cultures of politics that renders agency/victimhood to bodies caught in the matrices of politics,
revolution, movements, and nationalism is destabilized with the performance of political mother-
hood. On the one hand, women asserting themselves in male dominated spaces are surely
feminist, and on the other, the idioms used to enter these spaces are grounded in discourses
that have historically secured women’s submission to male authority. Women mourning for the
dead, particularly the image of the mother mourning for her lost child is tied to (hetero)normative
nationalist fantasies. The performance of mourning which operates within sanctioned boundaries
of domesticity, femininity, and kinship is challenged by political collectives even when if it is
firmly anchored to the identity of the mother –mourning the loss of someone unfamiliar,
unfamilial, unrelated, and unknown. The Meira Paibi play a symbolic and ritualistic part in public
events that mark and mourn the ‘martyrs’of Manipur’s struggle for freedom. The act of mourning
by a mother in a public sphere is a political act that questions the sanctity and the singularity of
both grief and loss, whose legitimate space of expression can only be the confinement of the
private. However, patriarchal norms, even if stretched, allows the political mother to protest the
440 P. RAY
loss of a child through tears, curses, and penance: with Manorama’s death, the performance of
bereavement found expression that far exceeded patriarchy’s sanction of legitimate affective
behaviour. Movements are built over a shared economy of affect: righteous anger, a sense of
injustice, a need to assert one’s own humanity.
32
An outpouring of grief that crystallizes into an
assertion that deployed an embodied language of pain meant to shock and shame brings into
focus the failure of institutional mechanisms of justice, and in this context, pinning down the
custodian of justice as the perpetrator. The outpouring of rage, pain, and hurt and the effective
manner in which such affect enters politics, leads one to ask about the heterogeneous nature of
resistances. How does the project of assertion and insistence of right to be heard deploy affect?
When I asked the imas of what led them to take such a radical step, the answers varied from grief,
rage and helplessness. ‘We were so angry, so filled with rage. This had to stop, it had to stop now.
We decided we will challenge the Indian army. Manorama was the last nail on the coffin. We did
as we thought best’.
33
It was not just about failure (of constitutional justice), but the law itself
(AFSPA) which became the target of the protest. The protest, therefore, was not just resistance
against violations, but against the State. The impossibility of appealing to legal apparatuses (where
the State was the perpetrator) meant that some members of the Meira Paibi had to find other ways
of expressing their rage, grief, as well as their helplessness. The Kangla protest thus embodied a
language of pain and hurt which rejected liberal notions of justice, which would have meant
asking the state-violator to protect its citizen-victim. Instead, the protestors invited the perpe-
trators to own up for what they really are –not protectors but violators.
Most political protests are enacted through the body –from gathering in public places, marches,
and picketing to self-immolation etc. However naked protests have to be located in historical and
cultural contexts: the body as a site of humiliation and shame is not just about gender, but equally
marked and constituted by ideologies of racism, classism, casteism, colonialism, homophobia, trans-
phobia, and other markers of oppression. Dalit and tribal women, trans and other non-conforming
bodies have always been stripped and paraded nude as an exemplary punishment, for breaking norms
and other similar transgressions. Only recently, two Dalit families including women and children were
allegedly stripped naked publicly in the state of Uttar Pradesh by the police, for daring to seek justice
under the Schedule Caste Atrocities Act against upper caste neighbours. When their complaints were
refused, they sat in protest outside the police station leading the police to beat and strip them of their
clothes.
34
Stripping one of clothes and making bare the body to public spectacle is to reduce the body
to its bare element. In this case, when a Dalit body historically subjugated, routinely stripped, mauled,
lynched, raped, made to perform degrading task (including eating excreta), and constituted as a
polluting body, steps forward to demand justice, s/he destabilizes the politics of recognition, norms,
and social order. Hegemonic politics and coercive practices constitute a Dalit body as abject, residing
in the margins, peripheral to modern-democracy. Any attempt to destabilize such centre-periphery is
met with violent retribution, often to humiliate and teach a lesson that s/he will never forget, to strip
him/her of all rights (even the right to cover oneself), and make her/him forego all notions of (newly
acquired) self-respect.
Feminist scholars have written on the resignification of the naked body from shame and humiliation
to anger, protest, and feminist agency. Many have drawn parallels between Mahasweta Devis’short story
‘Draupadi’
35
and the nude protest at Kangla Fort. Gayatri Spivak in the introduction of her translation of
‘Draupadi’writes that Mahasweta Devi’s rewriting of the episode of Draupadi’s disrobing in Mahabharat
shows where male leadership ends: in Mahabharat, Draupadi’s disrobing is thwarted by divine/Dharma
36
; on the contrary, Mahasweta’s Dopdi is stripped naked by the representatives of the law, and she remains
publicly naked at her own insistence. This according to Spivak, is where ‘benign’,‘divine’male leadership
ends.
37
Whereas Draupadi was protected by Dharma, Dopdi was stripped by modern law; where
Draupadi asks for protection (by being clothed), Dopdi insists that there is nothing she needs to hide,
and ‘tears it [the cloth] with her teeth’. Here a rapeable and vulnerable woman (read tribal-terrorist) talks
back to the highly masculinized state apparatusthrough her body, by refusing to wear clothes. This act of
refusal displaces and questions the paternalistic claims of the Indian state. Sundar Rajan, for instance,
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 441
argues that Dopdi’sresistancemustbereadasa‘deliberate refusal of a shared sign system’as well as an
‘ironic deployment of the same semiotics’that produce ‘counter-effect of shame, confusion and terror in
the enemy (what is a man?)’.
38
Deepti Misra, however, strikes a note of caution in drawing similarities
between Dopdi and the protesting members of the Meira Paibi. She argues that with these utterances ‘Are
you a man? …there isn’tamanherethatIshouldbeashamed’, Dopdi effectively re-inscribes the
relationship between shame, nakedness and sexual violence, implying that if there was a man present, she
would have been ashamed, and since she is unashamed, then the one gazing at her nakedness is not a
man. Thus Misra argues, ‘the idea of masculinist protection remains’. However, the protesting mothers
frame their nakedness as a challenge, rather than a taunt, and they severe the causal relationship between
male gaze and female shame, and redirects their utterances to the masculinism of state violence, and the
not the manliness of men.
39
Their protest, ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh’taunts the
failure of the Indian state’s liberal-legal claim as protectors. It is a critique of the rule of law, a mockery of
its mechanisms. It is a critique of the claims of security forces as paternalistic and benevolent protectors;
instead it reinforces and resignifies the armed forces as violators-perpetrators, and by extension the
Indian state’s‘occupation’of Manipur as violating.
In the meeting prior to the protest, many imas gathered together to decide on the course of action
and only a few decided to go ahead. ‘We never told our families, we did not talk to our (male) friends
outside the organization in the movement. We decided to keep it to ourselves; if people knew they may
want to stop us’.
40
The creation of a feminine space for resistance, where male leadership, control, and
patronage is rejected, allowed women to protest through their bodies, which effectively did not lean
back on masculine idioms. The act of voluntary removing clothes by protesting mothers, destabilizes
all imaginations that are associated with motherhood,and legitimate expressions of feminine resis-
tances. The mother is central to imaginations of the nation –vulnerable to the threat of the ‘other’but
never sexually active, rather, tamed and asexual. Sexuality of the mother-nation is acknowledged only
to foreground the nationalist narrative of a vulnerable nation-mother and valiant son-protectors.
41
The nationalist readings of the naked protests have been that the Indian state’s violence was so
terrifying, that even mothers protested. For the imas, the identity of the mother is central to their
memories of the protest:
Manorama is our daughter, she is me. If my daughter lies naked, how can I be clothed? When Manipur has
been stripped of its clothes, how can we as mothers be quiet? When your daughter has been stripped naked,
how can you be clothed? I knew that we had to do this –for my daughter, for our children.
42
It is an inversion of the anti-colonial narrative of women as nation-mother, needing valiant sons to
protect her –it is now the ‘Mothers of Manipur’that have stood up to protect Manipur from the
aggressive, rapist Indian nation. Central to this nude protest was the performance of motherhood.
43
Some scholars writing on the naked protests have emphasized on the ‘powerlessness’,‘hopelessness’,
‘desperation’,and‘disempowerment’that the naked protests symbolized.
44
Headlines screaming, ‘Look
what armed forces have reduced Manipuri women to’,
45
and ‘Protest Nude: Last Resort’
46
emphasized on
the brutality of the oppression that Manipuri people were facing, which led the members of the Meira
Paibitotakesuch‘desperate’measures; as another feminist journalist wrote, ‘the women’sprotestswould
have gone unreported if it had not been so dramatic[…]itsuggeststhattheyweretrulypushedtotheend
of their tolerance’.
47
This reification of female victimhood is a common narrative, in trying to explain or
appropriate women’s agency at a moment when it seems to have detached itself from gendered social
relations. Such readings necessitate an obliteration of politics, struggles, and choices. To further locate the
questions of resistance and its implications for feminist politics, I bring in the question of agency and
norm. The historical and cultural specificity of the political participation of women in North East has
always been within the framework of motherhood –the members of the Meira Paibi are not just socially
exalted, but deeply involved with civic and religious life of the Meitei community. Does the conformism
and participation of the members of the Meira Paibi in the social, religious practices that advocate
patriarchal ideologies of docility and submission render them non-viable subjects of feminism? Their
active involvement in socio-religious movements that sustain principles of female subordination is tricky
442 P. RAY
terrain for feminists. One of the mothers of the Meira Paibi, remembers her fear, guilt, and anxiety viz-
a-viz her family to me,
I did not tell anyone I am going to disrobe in front of Kangla fort. Before leaving, I touched my husband’s
feet, asking for his forgiveness in my heart, for lying to him. A husband is equivalent to a god. And I have
lied to him. I left the house with tears in my eyes.
48
How does one juxtapose this narrative of submission with the radical act of disrobing in front of
the Kangla Fort? Judith Butler argues that to shift from epistemological accounts of identity to one
that is located in signifying practices, and to understand identity as a practice, one must depart
from the understanding that what is once signified as an identity remains fixed; instead identities
come into being through a constant reiteration.
49
Gendered subjectivity is maintained and
reproduced by a continuous submission to norms, social power, and gender regulations. Thus
agency becomes a question of reworking ‘passionate attachments’
50
to subjection which in turn
allows a subversion of identity
51
that provides opportunity for resistance. The act of the disrobing
is a displacement of the normative role of the mother, or even the ways an ideal Meitei woman
can protest. To inhabit the norms of motherhood, opens up possibilities of movements, mobility,
and collectivizing, otherwise denied to women in Meitei society. I do not intend to place the
protest at Kangla Fort within the dualistic framework of agency/submission, but to read it as a
slippage in the performance of political motherhood –an act that exceeds the desired goal.
Agency is no longer understood in terms of personhood, of the relative autonomy that the
individual has from the social, but a singular moment that resignifies the very conditions that
guarantee subordination.
52
Interestingly, at the moment of protest there were no slogans, no
banners that emphasized on motherhood; the challenge remained outside the framework of
gendered kinship, as the mothers presented themselves as sexualized bodies to the Indian army,
and not the maternal, asexual grieving mother.
We knew we would protest naked, we had already decided. We did not wear any underclothes, tore the
stitches of our lungis so that we could remove our clothes faster and without any obstruction. We moved
from different directions so that no one would stop us. We already had the two banners with us asking the
Indian army to rape us and to take our flesh.
53
If identifying themselves as Manorama’s mother was what allowed them to mobilize, organize,
and politicize, their performance of political motherhood far exceeded their goal. The under-
standing of gender as a constituted identity opens up the possibility of gender being constituted
differently, and thus possibilities of agency.
54
The reliance on norms in constitution of identities is
useful in trying to understand the co-existence of submission and resistance. Whereas the mothers
are bound up with the very norms that feminist seek to contest, how does one locate agency and
resistance? The Kangla protest can be located as a singular, spectacular moment that actively
contested, countered, and challenged gendered identities and normative subjectivities, thus open-
ing up possibilities of newer identities. The protest successfully broke the binary of ‘political’and
‘personal’motherhood by drawing on pain, anger, and hurt to rupture powerful norms that
interpellate them as grieving mothers.
Though Meitei women are active in the public realm, it is only married middle-aged mothers who
enjoy relative freedom. It is a rigid sex-segregated society, where young unmarried women are constantly
supervised, disciplined, and expected to adhere to strict social norms. Women’s participation in political
movements is restricted to married women who are biological mothers. Only such strict adherence to
reproductive heteronormativity opens up the possibilities for women to break the private/public divide.
As mentioned earlier, members of the Meira Paibi take great pride in their costume, the beige skirt and
white shawl, symbolic of their exalted status as Manipur’s mothers, legitimized and sanctioned by
religion, patriarchy, and culture. The shedding of this dress at the site of protest is symbolically a break
with cultures and discourses that produce them, even if momentarily. It is this one moment of excess that
breaks faith with all that constitutes a member of the Meira Paibi. The relation between norms of
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 443
recognition and survival in the social world is reworked, as the very interpellations that constitute the
members of the Meira Paibi are renegotiated. Wendy Brown argues that under certain political frame-
works, ‘injury’itself becomes essential to the identity of the oppressed. The politicization and mobiliza-
tion around this ‘injury’, what she calls ‘wounded attachments’, ensures being constituted by it,
successfully foreclosing possibilities.
55
This fetishization of the wound, whereby protesting women are
seen as injured mothers, where pain enters politics only through channels of maternal love means to be
bound by the Law –family/community/nation. Mourning, lamenting, agitating for the disappearance/
loss/incarceration of their own successfully ties the movement down to familial, ethnic, and national
allegiances. While the performance of mourning by women publicly in a strictly segregated society is an
act of displacement, to tie it down to the identity of a mother is to allow norms of family/community/
nation to flourish unhindered. In this context, the protest at the Kangla Fort remains a singular act –it
breaks the ‘wounded attachments’of the Meira Paibi to the ‘injury’of the grieving mother, to reconstitute
itself as sexually active women challenging the Indian state to ‘rape’them: in this one moment, they undo
and resignify their identity as ‘mothers’, as well the representation of the state as benevolent protector.
Concluding remarks
I would like to end with Irom Sharmila Chanu breaking her fast, and the backlash she faced from
her community. It may seem that Sharmila and the Meira Paibi are divergent, but they are
divergent only in terms of the differing norms within which they crafted their movement; in both
cases, they appealed to extant tropes of gender. While Sharmila, unmarried and childless, went on
a fast to protest AFSPA, the members of the Meira Paibi relied on the norm of motherhood to
register their protests. Sharmila’s decision to end her fast, to marry, and to enter mainstream
politics brought in allegation of betrayal of the struggle of Manipuri people against the Indian
state.
56
During her fast, Sharmila transcended the flesh and blood body and became synonymous
to abstract body of Manipur. Her iconization was premised on the pre-sexual, the celibate ascetic
model of political martyrdom. These factors contributed to her exalted status. For her to return to
the social –to food, marriage, and elections –destroys the basis of her iconization. The return
from the abstract to the feminine, everyday, desiring, hungry body delegitimizes Manipur’s
struggle against the paternalist occupying Indian state. The exalted status of the Meira Paibi too
depended on the asexual, maternal body of the mother; however, the Kangla Fort protest
displaced the foundations of that very identity. The focus on the ‘desperation’of the mothers is
an attempt by society’s obvious confusion of the rewriting of the script that confers intelligibility
to subjects. The naked protests brought to the foreground the fictive claims of regulatory
mechanisms that produce intelligible subjects.
Vijaylakshmi Brara ends her essay, ‘Performance: The Gendered Space in Manipur’in a rather
dismal note, ‘today the women’s collectives are expected to remain in the background, ready to
strike the moment the situation demands, and then retreat gracefully when the results present
themselves’.
57
This sounds familiar. Scholars working on women’s participations in democratic
movements have argued that, it is only when there is a crisis that women are allowed to step out of
normative feminine roles to make cause against a common enemy, and when the crisis subsides,
they slip back into their gendered roles. But the question remains, can such transitions and
transgressions be so easily co-opted? What does the politics of performativity imply for subjectiv-
ities? Can we shift the normative frameworks of recognition and intelligibility around, without in
some way being undone by them? How does a singular moment of displacement rework or
destabilize the framework of cultural and social intelligibility that enables future politics of
resistance?
I end this essay with some thoughts: can popular movements be feminist in terms of challen-
ging fundamentally patriarchy’s agenda for women, in displacing gendered norms that produce us
as intelligible subjects? Can women function within broader movements in languages that are
completely new, without drawing on existing patriarchal constructions of ideal femininity? The
444 P. RAY
fundamental relation between norms, subjecthood, recognition, and survival ensures that one can
never fully operate outside social relations that govern patriarchy; instead one can seek multiple-
singular moments that questions, challenges, displaces, and subvert norms and push for articula-
tions of newer possibilities. A feminist politics that recognizes the role of discourses, language, and
significations in constituting subjects, instead of a transcendental subject located outside the
gendered hierarchy may be more useful in understanding how we can think and understand
articulations of freedom and agency of women, located in otherwise very patriarchal spaces.
Notes
1. Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime.”26–35; Brownmiller, Against Our Will etc.
2. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”631–660.
3. Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings.
4. Iveković,Captive Gender.
5. Brownmiller, Against Our Will.
6. Chakravarti, Rape, Class and the State. http://www.pucl.org/from-archives/Gender/rape-class.htm
7. Geetha, “Some Thoughts on Extreme Violence and the Imagination.”85–91.
8. Marcus, “Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention”385–403.
9. Enloe, Manoeuvres.
10. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Menon and Bhasin Borders and Boundaries, Chenoy Militarism and
Women in South Asia and Batool et al Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora.
11. Kannabiran, ‘Introduction.’133 –137.
12. Viswanath, “Shame and Control: Sexuality and Power in Feminist Discourse in India.”313 –333.
13. Enloe, Manoeuvres;1
2–13.
14. Irom Sharmila Chanu also known as the ‘Iron Lady’is a Manipuri civil rights activist, political activist, and
poet and is best known for her hunger strike from November 2000 in demanding the repealing of AFSPA
(Armed Forces Special Powers Act) from the Indian state of Manipur. Sharmila, after witnessing the
massacre of 10 civilians, on 2 November 2000, in the town of Malom, by the Assam Rifles, one of the
Indian Paramilitary forces operating in the state, went on a hunger strike which she ended on 9 August 2016,
after 16 years of fasting against the draconian act that gave armed forces impunity. Sharmila has been
recognized by many peace and human rights organizations and has been awarded the Gwangju Prize for
Human Rights, the first Mayillama Award of the Mayilamma Foundation, lifetime achievement award from
the Asian Human Rights Commission, the Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize and the Sarva Gunah
Sampannah ‘Award for Peace and Harmony’. In 2013 Amnesty International declared her a ‘Prisoner of
conscience’. She entered mainstream electoral politics in the state of Manipur in 2016 and lost.
15. Duncan, Borderland City in New India.
16. Mathur, “Life and Death in the Borderlands: Indian Sovereignty and Military Impunity.”33–49
17. Personal interview with Ima Gyaneshwari on 02.09.2016.
18. Thockchom, “Meirapaibi: The Role of Women’s Movement in Meitei Society.”151–159.
19. Mukherji, “Meira Paibis: Women Torch-Bearers on the March in Manipur”. Available at https://www.
mainstreamweekly.net/article2533.html
20. Brara, “Performance: The Gendered Space in Manipur.”335–349.
21. Personal Interview with Ima Lourembam Nganbi on 03.09.2016.
22. Ibid.
23. Gillath, “Women against War: Parents against Silence.”142–146.
24. Alwis, “Motherhood as a Space of Protest”152–174.
25. Chenoy, Militarism and Women in South Asia.
26. Das, “Ethnicity and Democracy Meet When Mothers Protest.”63.
27. Ibid; 56.
28. Sanghatana, We Were Making History; Roy, Remembering Revolution.
29. Sargent, “New Left Women and Men: The Honeymoon is Over.”ix-xxix.
30. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders.
31. Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism.”
32. Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for Our Times”331–358.
33. See note 17 above.
34. Police allegedly strip Dalit family naked in UP for filing complaint. DNA. 9 October 2015. Accessed at http://
www.dnaindia.com/india/report-police-allegedly-strip-dalit-family-naked-in-up-for-filing-complaint-2133171
Video of Dalit family allegedly stripped by police creates storm on social media. The Hindu. 10 October 2015.
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 445
Accessed at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/video-of-dalit-family-allegedly-stripped-by-
police-creates-storm-on-social-media/article7742836.ece.
35. Dopdi/Draupadi, a santhal (tribe residing in the state of Bengal)woman is a Naxalite (radical left group)who
had been ‘apprehended’by the armed forces and gang raped. When presented the next morning to the officer
(Senanayak) who ordered her rape, she refused to be clothed. She walks up to Senanayak, and utters ’&
What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but can you clothe me again? Are you a man? [&] there isn‘ta
man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my clothes on me.’Devi, “Draupadi.”19-38.
36. Draupadi, is one of the most celebrated women in the Indian epic Mahabharat. Married to five princes
simultaneously, she is the only example of polyandry in our ancient texts. Her husband loses her to his
cousins in a game of dice and she is dragged to the court, and being dependent on more than one husband is
designated as a prostitute. The victors pull at her sari with the view of stripping her naked in full court and
she silently prays to the God Krishna. She continues to remain clothed as the sari miraculously keeps
reproducing itself.
37. Spivak, “Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword.”1–18.
38. Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for Our Times”331 -358.
39. For more discussion on the distinction, see Misra, ““Are You a Man?”Performing Naked Protests in India.”
621.
40. See note 17 above.
41. Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation.
42. See note 17 above
43. Bora, “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal.”341–360.
44. Brara, “Performance: The Gendered Space in Manipur.”340.
45. Gokhale, Tehelka. July 31, 2004 cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre.
46. Gokhale, Tehelka. July 21, 2004 cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre.
47. Sharma, “Manipuri Women’s Dramatic Protest”cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre.
48. See note 17 above.
49. Butler, Gender Trouble; 145.
50. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power;7.
51. Butler, Gender Trouble.
52. Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
53. See note 17 above
54. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,”1.
55. Brown, States of Injury.
56. Yengkhom Jilangamba, however argues that mainstream media’shighlighting of Manipuri people’s‘rejection’
of Sharmila is a re-enactment of an old binary of inhabitants of North-East as wild and savage; the imagery of
the iconic figure rendered homeless by the very people she sacrificed her life for is a testimony to this binary.
Jilangamba, “Sharmila and the Forgotten Genealogy of Violence in Manipur.”15–19.
57. See above 44; 348.
Acknowledgments
I thank Rajashri Dasgupta, Thingnam Anjulika Samom, and Nandini Thockchom without whom this research
would not have been possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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