Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re) examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur

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 contexts. 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, political, and ideological constructions of normative femininity.