Published Paper Details:

In the context of historical analysis of women in Manipur, the public memory and voices of the extraordinary women who took part in the nude protest of 2004, are first and foremost the ways in which these mothers has reconstructed their past to negotiate an ever-fluidic process of identity construction. Following the narrative analysis allows for a historical interpretation of these interview-based oral sources to relive the veracity of the accounts they provide as a participant of the event of 2004. As Memory and history confront each other across the tape recorder, video tapes as a documenting device the paper cast a new light into their gendered role in society. From their collaboration emerge a richer, and a more nuanced understanding of the past of womanhood and how motherhood plays a crucial role in the emergence of Meira paibis movement in Manipur and various other forms of activism. The work is based on oral history and traditions to document these women voices using interviews, listening, and understanding womanhood in the marginalized state of Manipur; to reconstruct links among personal experience, collective memory, and broad historical processes to address the role of re-telling in popular consciousness. The reconstruction of their history using the mothers as centre of the study provide a new insights into the narrative and symbolic frameworks they use to explain why things turned out as they did. In conclusion, I look at efforts to rethink the ways in which memory encodes historical processes into experience and the consequent possibilities for oral history, in situating the women of Manipur to augment historical understanding of motherhood and activism.