Manipur: Tribal students’ body defy ban, screen hindi movies in Strife-hit State after 23- year gap

INTERNATIONAL DESK: Screening of Bollywood movies marked a return to strife-torn Manipur on Tuesday, around 23 years after militant organisations enforced a ban on them.

It was on the occasion of the 77th Independence Day celebrations that the Hmar Students’ Association (HSA), a Kuki-Zo tribal students’ organisation, screened Bollywood film “Uri: The Surgical Strike” at Rengkai in the hill district of Churachandpur.

A projector was set up to screen the film for a select audience from 7:30 pm. The screening witnessed an attendance of over 100 people, who turned up for the historic event. A film from the 1990s, “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” was also lined up.

Incidentally, “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” was the Hindi movie screened at a theatre hall in Manipur for the last time in the late 1990s.

The HSA screened Bollywood movies to exhibit its defiance against the ban imposed on Hindi films. “As Indians, we must have access to arts and movies produced from all parts of India in public theatres,” Lalremsang, an executive member of HSA, said.

Lalremsang explained that the main reason cited the militants for the banning of Hindi films was that they considered Hindi films as foreign films which influenced Meitei/Manipuri culture in a bad way. “The state government till today backs this ban but we do not subscribe to it,” he added.

Churachandpur had a couple of theatres but they were later shut down after the ban on the screening of Hindi films was imposed. Several others in the Meitei-majority Imphal valley were shut down as well, it was informed.

“People here (Churachandpur) love to watch Bollywood films,” the student leader said.

Back in 2000, the insurgent group Revolutionary Peoples Front issued a diktat, banning Hindi or more specifically Bollywood movies, for allegedly destroying Manipuri culture, language and the local film industry. The outfit was of the belief that Bollywood went against Manipuri values.

In due course of time, the militants resorted to confiscation of thousands of video cassettes of Hindi films and music, burning them as a mark of protest against the “Indianisation” of Manipur. The ban killed off the movie theatre business in the state.

It was also because of this ban that the biopic on Manipur’s champion boxer MC Mary Kom could not be screened in the state where she was born. Bollywood heroine Priyanka Chopra played the lead, reprising the role of the boxer in the movie.

Of late, Manipur has been witnessing widespread ethnic clashes between majority Meitei and tribal Kuki communities since violence erupted on May 3, with over 160 people killed so far and thousands displaced. (THE SENTINEL)