The Torchbearers of Manipur is a comprehensive history of the Meira Paibi, one of Northeast India’s most remarkable traditions of women’s collective political action.
Beginning with the historical memory of Nupi Lan and the anti-liquor Nisha Bandh campaigns, the book traces how neighbourhood women carrying flaming meira developed into a powerful network of community vigilance, protest, mediation, and human-rights activism.
The narrative follows the movement through the militarised decades of insurgency and counterinsurgency, examining the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, arrests, searches, encounter controversies, civilian resistance, and the emergence of a wider human-rights movement in Manipur.
At the centre of the book is a detailed reconstruction of the 2004 Thangjam Manorama case and the extraordinary protest at Kangla, where Manipuri mothers transformed their own bodies into one of the most powerful symbols of resistance in modern Indian political history.
But this is not a celebratory history alone.
The book also asks difficult questions about power within civil society: Is Meira Paibi a feminist movement? When does community protection become moral policing? Where is the boundary between peacekeeping and vigilantism? How did the movement become involved in territorial, migration, indigenous-rights, and identity politics?
The concluding chapters examine the movement during the 2023–2026 Manipur conflict, carefully separating documented events, allegations, official claims, arrests, judicial findings, and competing community narratives. They explore the experiences of Meitei, Kuki-Zo, and Naga women and ask whether the moral authority created through decades of resistance can be rebuilt across ethnic boundaries.
Drawing upon official records, India Code, Supreme Court proceedings, commissions of inquiry, Ministry of Home Affairs notifications, Shodhganga research, peer-reviewed scholarship, human-rights documentation, contemporary reporting, and archival sources, this book offers a balanced and source-conscious account of a movement too important to be reduced either to heroism or condemnation.
A compelling study of women, grassroots power, human rights, militarisation, identity, and the unfinished struggle for peace in Manipur.
Product Highlights
- Complete history of the Meira Paibi movement
- Nupi Lan and the origins of women’s political mobilisation
- Nisha Bandh and anti-liquor activism
- AFSPA and counterinsurgency in Manipur
- Thangjam Manorama and the 2004 Kangla protest
- EEVFAM and alleged extrajudicial killings
- Feminism, motherhood and women’s political agency
- Community justice, moral policing and vigilantism
- Territorial integrity and Inner Line Permit politics
- Detailed analysis of the 2023 Manipur conflict
- Meitei, Kuki-Zo and Naga women’s perspectives
- Chronology, research appendices and documentary notes
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