Imphal

I’ll start with brief impressions of Imphal, then will give my recommendations for what to do and eat in the city, and then list some recommended books, movies, and music for Manipur. 

I spent six nights in Imphal in October 2024, having been invited to a wedding there. The wedding took up most of our time, and work commitments took up much of the rest, so we only explored the city for about half a day. We would have stayed longer, but the long running conflict in Manipur had heated up in the months before we went, and there were recent kidnappings, killings, protests, curfews, and (worst of all for our purposes) internet shutdowns, so we decided to play it safe and just do a short trip. I wish we could have spent just a few more nights, but we were going to Dimapur after and at the time of our visit there were only two weekly flights on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sunday flights existed shortly before our trip but they vanished from the schedule the week we were there. We chose the Thursday flight as we didn’t want to spend another five nights there, but we would have done a Sunday flight if we could have. 

I do regret not staying an extra five days, but I ultimately think we made the right decision to cut it short. I didn’t follow the news after, but a month after we left my wife showed me an article about schools in Imphal reopening after being closed for 13 days due to serious unrest. This is possible anytime, so, uh, you probably shouldn’t go. I’ll check back in 2026 to see if things calmed down. I do think it’s reasonably safe to visit, and they could use our tourism money, but also there’s lots of other places to go. 

Since I did so little in Imphal and since I imagine the demand for travel guides is very low in the foreseeable future, I contemplated not writing anything about it. However, I found very little online about Imphal in a format that I like, and the few things I saw there were really cool, and the culture of Manipur is distinctive and very different from anywhere I’ve been. I thus felt I should do a quick writeup, and whatever crappy thing I write will probably be better than anything else out there. Also, maybe by putting this out in the world someone will invite me back and I’ll have a good excuse to spend a few more days there. (I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the blog that I never really go anywhere without an excuse.)

First off, it never felt unsafe in Imphal, nor did it ever feel like there was any sort of conflict happening at all. I didn’t feel the atmosphere was tense in any way. At least within the city, I didn’t notice any more of a police or military presence than anywhere else. I was told we shouldn’t even cross the street without a local accompanying us, but I found crossing the street to be approximately as unsafe as anywhere else in India (still very unsafe and not recommended without a local, but I’ve acquired the requisite Indian street crossing skills to qualify as a local at this point). We initially planned to only go out with a driver/guide, which was recommended to us, but once we got here we felt totally fine doing our own thing. It was pretty chill, by Indian standards. I could do with less honking and saner driving, but you’d never guess the region was a conflict zone, unless you mistook the torn up roads and half destroyed buildings as a sign of ballistic damage rather than the good old civic dysfunction we’re used to in India.

I really liked a lot of what I saw and experienced in Imphal, but the first impressions are pretty bad. It’s a consistently ugly city to drive and walk through, and the roads are horrible. It’s very dusty and carelessly overdeveloped, which is true of all Indian cities, but those tend to also be full of great old architecture scattered among the ugliness, with just enough to give a sense of what once was, in addition to apparent signs of modern wealth. In Imphal I got that sense only in smaller doses in very select pockets. Imphal has been a capital for around 2000 years, but I never figured out why anyone would choose this place to settle. There is the Imphal river, which makes sense to settle on, but I never found it. Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of the mountains and remember that the natural world exists. The surrounding region is very green, hilly, and beautiful, but Imphal itself is mostly a grey and brown eyesore.

It’s an oddly happening place, though. Despite the grubby small town feel I got while driving around, I didn’t feel like I was out in the boondocks like I feel in places that are similar on the surface (even if the contrast between various interiors and exteriors here is striking). There are many, many nice cafes and bakeries, up to the standards of fancy places in big cities. There’s a great looking book store and a few nice looking art galleries. A few movie theaters looked decent and had a good selection of English movies. Live music, theatre, and other cultural events are common. Young people dress stylishly. There’s good looking Japanese, Korean, and Mexican food. And etc. Imphal is higher up on the hipster scale than many cities that are higher up on the development scale (Manipur is one of the poorest states in India). Model this!

What made Imphal stand out for me most of all was the Manipuri culture that I’d love to come back and explore further. The dominant community in Manipur is Meitei (which is what most people refer to when they call something Manipuri), at 52% according to Wikipedia, with the rest of the population primarily made up of different Naga or Kuki tribes. Imphal is even more concentrated with Meiteis, at around 83% according to the 2011 census, while Naga and Kuki tribes are dominant in their own hilly areas. As I understand it, many Naga areas can be visited at the moment (and I attended a wedding in a really beautiful and charming village in the Ukhrul district, one of the prettiest and most idyllic villages I’ve been anywhere) while Kuki areas are a no-go.

I found myself drawn to the Meitei culture of Imphal, with its exotic ancient mountain kingdom aesthetics. Modern Imphal feels like a missed opportunity, but I got the sense of a lost world with a sophisticated court culture and long running artistic and literary traditions. Most of all, though, I just really liked the weird snake/dragon designs I saw everywhere, and the giant sculptures of dogs with antlers. Those were awesome.

I knew very little about Manipur before visiting, but I knew that Meiteis were predominantly Hindu while tribal communities were predominantly Christian. What I didn’t know is that Hinduism only became dominant in the region in the 18th century and  there’s an ancient Meitei religion called Sanamahism which is still practiced by around 14% of people in Imphal. I didn’t have enough time to figure much of this out but deities include the aforementioned antlered dogs that are actually representations of a lion called Nongshāba, and various snakes or dragons including Pakhangba. There’s also the goddess of seduction, Nongthang Leima, whom I thought I may have spotted an avatar of one day, live in the flesh in a surprisingly form-fitting phanek, but after some moments of gazing at the deity my wife slapped me and called me a shameless pig. 

Anyway, even if I’m prohibited from receiving the blessings of the goddess, I would love to do an entire Sanamahism themed trip to Manipur. I’m not sure how much there is to see, as most temples have been destroyed centuries ago, as I understand it, but I loved the few shrines we saw at Kangla and I find it so interesting. Even if I can’t see much, I’ll focus on reading more about it next time.

By the way, it was the king Pamheiba who adopted Hinduism as the state religion, and in addition to changing the name of the kingdom from the Meitei name Kangleipak to the Sanskrit name Manipur, he changed his own name to… Gharib Niwaz? Model this, too!

I find something very exciting about the Meitei script, which is one of the first things that stood out to me driving through the town. It reminds me of scripts in South India and Southeast Asia. It makes Imphal feel more exotic than the tribal parts of the northeast where local languages are written in the Latin script. Interestingly, Meitei became commonly written in the Bengali script after the spread of Hinduism to the region and it is only in recent decades that there has been a revival of the Meitei script. As a result, though many younger generations can read the Meitei script, older generations cannot.

Manipur is apparently important in the history of Polo, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Sports are stupid.

I didn’t get a chance to meet the Jews of Manipur. More info on this website devoted to them: https://www.degelmenashe.org/

Where to Stay

I stayed at two places in Imphal. For the wedding we were put up at Classic Grande Hotel, which is a nice modern hotel and possibly the best in town.  The Classic group has a few other hotels too, I don’t know the differences between them, and they are working on a modern 5-star luxury hotel, said to be the first in the state. These are probably the places to stay if you want upscale hotel amenities and comfort.

On our own we went to stay at a homestay a few minutes away called Hearth of Imphal. It was great and I would definitely stay there again if I ever return. The accommodation is simple but clean and comfortable, and though it’s right by a busy intersection it never felt like it. It’s a very green space and I loved working in the cozy covered outdoor area. The owner Ram is a very nice and interesting guy who is very knowledgeable about Manipur and can help you out with whatever you need. He also has a really impressive bookshelf you can check out while you’re there.

The food from Ram and his wife was noteworthy too. Delicious, healthy Manipuri food, packed with vegetables, some of them pretty unusual, including what I think was the stem of the black rice plant. Very interesting. One meal had wild mushrooms that a German guy who does long stays there had just brought back from the mountains. They were among the best mushrooms I’ve ever had. This is the sort of homestay where I wished I stayed longer just to have numerous other meals there, and I looked forward to each meal, including breakfast, which was a massive eggy affair (though if your diet is eggless I’m sure you’d be accommodated very well) that also included some combination of vegetables, fruit, and beans, served with local sourdough bread and a freshly made ginger, turmeric, lemon, amla juice. Unfortunately the passion fruits they grow on the property weren’t ripe yet, otherwise that would have been added to the mix too! 

The location isn’t really walking distance from any of the sightseeing, but it’s a short drive from the main area and has several nice cafes and a nice grocery store within a five minute walk. I found it to be a good place to work from home, both comfort and location wise. 

Sightseeing

I’ll start by saying that I had contacted Imphal Walks about doing a tour of Kangla, which expanded into talks of a tour of the market and surrounding area, but we ended up not booking the tour because of a heavy rain forecast and some time constraints that just made the thought of booking a tour sound stressful. The tours received great reviews though, and I hope to do one next time! 

Instead we explored on our own, and only had half a day. We pretty much just did two things in Imphal, but they were both awesome.

Ima Market is famous for being a women’s only market, and it is maybe my favorite market in India! It’s massive, colorful, clean, and full of a wide array of beautiful and unusual produce, not to mention clothes and other stuff. My wife bought a wicker purse or something. We spent around an hour wandering in the area and I would love to go back and wander further. I bought some fruit, and the market made me wish I were in town longer and could go regularly for their fruits and vegetables. One of the market buildings had very cool stone deities of Hanuman and Garuda inside. I had a really great time here and would say it’s a must see in Imphal! 

You can eat here too, there are food stalls, but I was concerned about hygiene and I’m not sure it would have been easy to order vegetarian food.

I also went to Kangla Fort, the historic capital of Manipur right in the city center. On an architectural level it’s not especially impressive. Maybe it once was, but the buildings in it have been largely destroyed. There’s not a ton to see, and most of what is there is unremarkable or too new looking. I still loved it though. The weather was perfect when we went, very cloudy and sporadically rainy, and the very green space was just lovely to walk through, with lots of interesting trees. This would be my regular walking spot if I lived nearby. 

They have golf carts with a driver you can hire at a very low cost, and for a slightly higher cost you can get a guide too, but when we asked they told us to wait ten minutes. We didn’t feel like sitting around for ten minutes so we just walked. I’m half happy we walked but also half regret it. The walking was the fun part (at least on a nice day, on a hot, sunny day you should definitely go with a golf cart), but the fort is big and we ended up being there for around 2.5 hours. We could have easily cut that in half with a golf cart and then had time to do a few more things that I had hoped to do. You can rent bicycles too, but I’ve yet to figure out how to ride those things without training wheels. If you can bicycle that’d probably be nice.

Also, without the guide I really had no context for most of what I was looking at. There are a few small signboards here and there, but overall the fort lacks information and I couldn’t find much online. Nor could I find any reviews for the guides online. I often find cheap tour guides in India to be rushed and overly basic and lacking in good communication and storytelling abilities, and I often prefer to explore on my own, but here I was pretty lost on my own. I was okay with that, there’s joy in being lost, but one day I’d like to return with a guide, either in the form of a book, article, or human being.

As for what you should see in the fort, the highlights for me were the things that gave a good look into the old Meitei culture, even if none are that impressive visually. I loved seeing the royal boats, which reminded me of the boats in Thailand. It was also cool to see the Pakhangba temple, though the architecture of the 2010 structure left something to be desired. I wondered what a royal Pakhangba temple would have looked like back in the day (if one existed), but I can’t find any drawings of them. 

The center of the fort has the Uttra, the former coronation hall, flanked by the antler doggies. There are some nearby signs explaining the rock used to dry skulls and a spot where they’d execute people, and yet the very important Uttra building features no information at all. There are some artworks inside showing the origins of the universe according to the Meitei mythology, but it was locked. I would have loved to see that even though it was unintelligible to the lay visitor. Wikipedia has pictures of the artworks and you can see pictures of different iterations of the building over at the Gallery of Manipur Instagram page.

This is all stuff that’s been rebuilt in a way that’s not as charming as I’d like, but there are smaller Sanamahi shrines behind the Uttra which were really cool to see. These are very simple setups, like little forest village shrines, often with cool little snake and dragon sculptures, and I found them very charming, peaceful, and interesting. (Do the tours show you these?) These were active shrines, and there were some local families coming to pray. My favorite shrine I saw was one in the southeast part of the fort, past the Govindajee temple, dedicated to the god of the southeast, which had, amongst other things, a statue of a bird with a scissor beak. 

Another thing I really liked were the Manipuri pole things that I saw around. Not sure what they are called or how to describe them. Clearly I should have done a tour. There are also many pomelo trees in this area. Are you allowed to take a pomelo? Well, I did and nobody said anything when I was walking around with it for around half an hour, though later a lady at the museum told me to keep it in my bag… (It was yummy.)

Outside of that stuff, the best thing to see in the fort is the Govindajee temple, a cool old brick temple you can see from the outside. It’s not extraordinary but it’s quite nice and has some interesting columns and a mix of styles. While approaching it appeared more like an Islamic tomb. There was another nice temple called Brindabanachandra, also worth seeing. There are nice old British buildings, two of which are museums. They’re poorly labeled but are worthwhile. One museum had great old stone sculptures, including one with local deities on it, others with the Meitei script, and others with the Bengali script. The other museum at the opposite end had a lot of old pictures, including of the rulers of Manipur, and some old weapons and other artifacts. I only saw half of both museums as the other halves were closed. 

The fort also had a very nice “rock garden” and the cafeteria had local fritters called bora made out of chives which I thought was quite good. 

There were a good amount of other small things I wanted to do in Imphal. One full day in the city would have sufficed, with another full day to visit Loktak Lake and its surrounding area. I’ll quickly list the other things I wanted to do:

Manipur State Museum

Imphal War Cemetery 

RKCS Art Gallery

Three Mothers Art Gallery

Shri Govindajee Temple (I think you can eat there too, if you show up at the right time.)

Sana Konung Palace (I can’t find it on google maps, but Wikipedia says it's next to the temple? Anyway, you can’t go in.)

Ukiyo Bookstore

I’ll do all of that next time, and just walk around the market area more. Any further recommendations are appreciated. I’d also love to see live Manipuri music and dance but don’t know where to do that. I got to see some Tangkhul Naga music and dance rituals at the wedding. Going to a Naga wedding in a beautiful mountain village is a highly recommended activity, but how you can arrange that I do not know.

A village called Andro also looked like a good day trip. They have a great looking museum.

Food & Cafes

I mostly ate at my homestay (where the food was terrific) or at various wedding functions. I only ate out on the one day we went out exploring, so I didn’t get to explore the city’s food scene which features multiple cuisines (I spotted Meitei and Naga restaurants). I didn’t research a ton but this is the best list I saw for Imphal. If you get a good homestay, though, you might just want to eat most of your meals there. 

I don’t have a great knowledge of Manipuri cuisine but I’ve really liked everything I’ve had, which has mostly been in Shillong, Imphal, and Guwahati. As a vegetarian it mostly doesn’t come across as very unusual, being pretty similar to various north Indian foods in concept, but with hardly any oil or spices, and with herbs used for flavor. Non-vegetarians will have their food flavored with fermented fish, though, and I did have one dish with fermented soybean, similar to what you get in some other parts of the northeast as well. Vegetarians might at some point get concerned, as I did, that some fish slipped its way into their food, only to discover that it’s fish mint, a very interesting ingredient! Bamboo shoots show up too. Maybe I just got lucky but I got a good range of interesting vegetables here without even trying, while in a lot of India I have to plead to get anything that isn’t cauliflower, okra, and a few other basic things. The legume based dishes were on the thicker side too, which I love. I also like the boiled gourd thing they serve food with. I didn’t stay long enough to try their stink beans, sadly! That’s an ingredient I’ve loved in Thailand.

One dish that stands out is singju, which to me feels more like a salad you’d get in Myanmar. I had some other similar dishes that had that Burmese salad feel at a small Manipuri place popular with students in Shillong. These were just labeled “aloo” and “chana” but the preparations were pretty elaborate with herbs and crunchy things. These are all snack dishes and I wondered if these represent a different part of the cuisine, and if there’s an urban/rural divide in the cooking styles, and if the Hindus who brought their religion centuries back also left a big impact on the cuisine. I will explore these questions on future trips. Eromba is another dish that stands out as quite different and unique.

Apparently Meiteis abstain from meat and fish at funerals. I gotta hang around in Manipur and find funerals to go to. If you know someone who dies, please invite me.

The one meal I had at a restaurant was at Luxmi Kitchen near the market. Not extraordinary or anything but a decent, fairly clean local thali place. One veg thali fed two of us. I’m sure if you look around you’ll find better food available, and I did see interesting stuff around the market that I was curious about, but hygiene concerns kept me away. 

Imphal has a lot of pretty nice cafes. We went to a few near our homestay, just to go for walks and grab a quick coffee after lunch (Rooted, Agora, and Lulu’s, our favorite was the tiny and cute Rooted but all were nice) and there are countless others. I found it interesting that there were so many of them in an otherwise pretty run down city.

We took the time to go out of our way to a cafe called Dweller, which was the one cafe that really stood out as doing something unique and special. Dweller is a tea brand (you can buy from their website) that uses local herbs and fruits in their teas. They sell their range of teas in bags or loose leaf, and you can get them all by glass at the cafe in addition to a small menu of Manipuri snacks. We weren’t very hungry but I wanted to try something so I got the singju, which was very good. We also got a really delicious black rice cake and some great black rice cookies to take home. I wasn’t hungry enough for the black rice pancake but would try that next time. I really enjoyed the teas as well, my favorites are the sour ones like the sumac and the raw mango. It’s really cool to see a cafe like that that just does its own thing and embraces being local (they even played local music!). I wish there were more places like this!

Though their cafe was closed when we were there, we tried Forager’s kombucha (bought at Family Shoppe) and sourdough (served at our homestay), both were very good. The sumac kombucha was my favorite.

We also loved Farm Cafe, about 15 minutes away from the city center, at Shalom Farmhouse which was one of the venues for the wedding we attended. Really good baked goods and coffee and in a beautiful green space with views of the mountains. If we were staying here longer term we would totally come here to work for a day.

We reached out to Khubi Chocolate, as of now the only bean to bar chocolate maker in northeast India (though not using northeast beans, at least not yet), but they weren’t operating when we were in town.

Books

I didn’t have time to read any full books on Manipur, sadly, nor did I have time to visit Ukiyo book store, which looked great. 

I planned to go to Ukiyo to pick up one of the books by Linthoi Chanu, who has two story collections and one novel, I believe all rooted in Manipuri mythology. They sound interesting and also… I really like the cover art. 

I was going to ask for more recommendations at Ukiyo. There are books on local folk stories and legends by L. Somi Roy, who also translated some historical books by his mother M. K. Binodini Devi (though from the reviews it's unclear how accessible they are to outsiders). That’s basically my Manipur reading list for now. The only other books I saw just looked like depressing reads about human rights abuses or massive historical tomes that will hurt my head. There’s gotta be more that I just didn’t find. Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway by Duncan McDuie-Ra looked good but is 10,000 inr on Amazon India.

I did read the 35ish page Manipur chapter in Northeast India: A Political History by Samrat Choudhury. I did this a few weeks before the trip and unfortunately forgot almost all of it by the time I got there. Still, I recall the broad strokes and that was valuable. It was a good read, enjoyable and informative, though with a few thousand years of history rushed through it was hard for it to stick. I recommend it though. I found the history very interesting and I hope to learn more one day. 

I also want to read Manipur’s epic Khamba and Thoibi. I found some massive versions of the story that I wouldn’t enjoy, unfortunately I didn’t see any more accessible ones. It sounds awesome. I skimmed through some movie versions of it. Time for a new adaptation, but I don’t know who is qualified to direct it.

Music

I didn’t spend a ton of time with the music of Manipur but I dug much of what I heard. I loved the traditional music that I found just by clicking around on Youtube. Here’s a good album on Spotify from Mangka. I think you could accurately say it sounds like its geography, somewhere in between India and East Asia. 

I also liked new music such as Imphal Talkies, which is politically charged folk fusion. Ereimang is cool too, a mix of Meitei folk music with hard rock sounds. Only a few songs but I like them all, though I guess I’d like it more if they took the hard rock sounds out. The metal band Serpents of Pakhangba isn’t my thing, but I guess I admire them for doing something different.

Cinema

I didn’t have much time in Imphal but I still made an effort to visit two old cinemas!

The Rupmahal is in between Kangla and Ima Market and is a nice old art deco structure from 1948. It began life as Manipur’s leading theatre venue, later became the Imphal Talkies cinema, and is now back to its original purpose. When I peeked through the door they were rehearsing, and there was a poster for the recently held drama festival. Glad to see this is still being put to good use as a cultural venue.

I also went to Tanthapolis Cinema (near the Dweller tea cafe), which was formerly Shankar Talkies which opened in 1980. Cool building! The theater shows Hollywood and Manipuri films and actually seems like a decent theater. In the same building is the office of the “Film Forum,” which I’ll get to shortly. 

I had picked out some other cinemas to visit, I think all shut down, but didn’t have time. Most were clustered in the Paona bazaar area, including the Pratap and Usha cinemas. I also wanted to go to the Machu Cinema, a bit outside the city. I failed to find the history of it, but it’s a really flamboyant building that I’d love to see. If I had time I would have tried to see a movie. Kumecs Cinema looks like a decent theater. They mostly show Hollywood movies, but I just checked and there’s currently an anime on the schedule. (I was impressed at what seemed like a more sophisticated selection of films than most of India, but the prevalence of non-Indian movies will be understood shortly…)

I also spotted on google maps the rather large Manipur State Film Development Society building. I don’t get how this exists. They have screenings there too, sometimes showing classic Manipuri films. I’ll check it out next time.

I asked my Imphal native friend whose wedding I attended about his childhood moviegoing experiences in the city, and he told me about a common practice where theater owners, unable to get prints of new Hollywood movies, would show beat up old prints of earlier films in the same franchises. So, instead of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla, Imphal audiences were treated to some older Godzilla film print that likely found its way in from Myanmar. The same went for James Bond movies. I’d love to see some old photos of the theaters when they did this, I’m curious what the posters and marquees showed. This is actually my first time hearing about this happening, but I’d guess it was a pretty common practice in similar markets back in the film days.

My friend mentioned another cinema oddity of Imphal. There’s an old school cheap grungy restaurant called Nikheel Cafe that used to be decked out with posters of Spaceballs. Nobody knows why. He said the last time he went there were still some posters, and he’d expect them to still be there today. I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to visit, though I did drive by a few times. Google shows only a few pictures of the interiors but no posters are visible in them.

I didn’t find anything to read about moviegoing in 20th century Imphal, but I read two excellent articles on the even crazier 21st century film scene in Manipur. Being a movie buff in Imphal by Shamik Bag was published in 2015 in Livemint, and the longer Manipuri Masala by Suhit Kelkar was published in The Caravan in 2014. Both talk about the ban on Hindi films (active since 2000!), the local unofficial censor board, which is something of a buffer between the filmmakers and militant groups, the threats Manipuri stars receive if they take parts in Hindi films, and more. Here’s an excerpt from the Livemint piece:

“The Film Forum has rigid guidelines on language, costume, action, realistic portrayal and use of props, among other things. Non-compliance could mean that the films do not get clearance and are, therefore, barred from commercial screening.

Since 2012, for example, the guidelines demand that an additional Manipuri traditional costume be worn for every foreign attire sported by actors in a film. “If you wear jeans thrice on screen, you have to wear Manipuri dresses four times. We also ask for realistic portrayal of song sequences rather than the fantastical sequences we see in Hindi cinema involving dancers and multiple locations,” Surjakanta says.

Doren still looks incredulous when he recalls a Manipuri film where the body of a male character was blurred. He only found out after he had watched it that the man, playing the role of a politician, was wearing kurta and pyjama in the mainstream Indian style—a proscribed act. Since it was too late to reshoot, the film-maker agreed to the Film Forum’s proposal to blur the body. “Thus, throughout the length of the film, we saw this blurry mass moving around,” he laughs.” 

And here’s an excerpt from the Caravan piece, discussing the economics of the industry:

“In 2000, the state’s dominant separatist group, the People’s Liberation Army of Manipur, called for a ban on Hindi films… DVDs of Hindi films are still available at shops in Imphal, for about Rs 20 each. But at the shop tended to by Arimbam Joychandra Sharma, in Paona Bazaar, the main stock-in-trade is a wall of Manipuri DVDs, which start at Rs 35.

Joychandra, a slightly built, clean-shaven 24-year-old, told me he was an aspiring producer himself, but the increasing costs of managing his brother’s shop made chasing that dream difficult. The brothers pay local film producers for exclusive rights to copy and sell DVDs. For example, they paid about Rs 4 lakh for the rights to the recent chart-topper Tamoya Gee Ebecha, starring the big names Bonny and Bala, and burned between 50,000 and 60,000 DVDs. Joychandra estimated it would take three or four days to recover the investment through retail sales to walk-in customers, as well as wholesale ones to tiny video parlours, stalls, and vendors who operate out of steel trunks on street corners.

“Five years ago, the rates were Rs 40,000,” Joychandra said, “and the profits financed the rights for three films.” Today, the average price for exclusive rights has risen to Rs 1 lakh. As the market grew, so did the number of competing wholesalers, and pirates. The Film Forum’s Surjakanta Sharma remarked that “even a rickshaw driver can become a producer here,” since the barrier to entering the industry was low, and its stars accessible. Yet the increasing costs have meant a deferral of Joychandra’s film-making dreams. “I hoped to make a movie this year, now I am not so sure,” he said. In the early days, a film could be made for as little as Rs 3 lakh; now budgets average between Rs 7 lakh and Rs 10 lakh. Surjakanta Sharma, at the top of the pile, pockets R1 lakh in director’s fees alone for each of his films. He told me that about 75 Manipuri films are made every year—if a film is one of a dozen annual hits, it could earn as much as Rs 15 lakh.”

The article also discusses the shift from film to digital in the early 2000s and the filmmaking boom that followed. Though the new Manipuri films mostly look terrible, it’s hard not to love the DIY spirit of them:

“Technicians installed pirated copies of editing software, and learnt how to use it from the internet or from printed manuals. Cameramen, directors, make-up artists—almost everyone was trained themselves. Some of the actors came from traditional Manipuri theatre, the Shumang Leela, but most were untrained. Imphal still does not have a formal acting institute, and a do-it-yourself tradition persists.

Industry veterans generally agree that the first feature to use digital footage was 2002’s Lammei (Forest Fire), which was screened in Imphal’s Friends theatre. Two of its song sequences were shot digitally, while the dialogues were shot on film. Screening the movie was a challenge—both in terms of getting official sanction from the government, and dealing with threats of violence by separatists. There were technical problems, too, Meitei told me, since the theatre had no provision for digital projection. Meitei and the producer, Premjit Naoroibam, scrambled to get a digital projector, and eventually managed to borrow one—meant for holding screenings in villages—from a senior police officer.”

Both articles are highly recommended! I’m curious to know how things have changed since these were written around a decade ago. I watched a bunch of recent trailers and saw a lot of untraditional clothing, so I think the diktats have loosened up a bit. The movies still don’t seem good, though.

With all of those challenges and in my opinion the even bigger challenge of a small market size in a poor region, is it possible to make good movies? There do seem to be some. The most iconic filmmaker of Manipur is Aribam Syam Sharma (whose success was primarily before the reign of censorship began). I’ve seen the recently restored Ishanou, his most famous film internationally, having played in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes in 1991. This is the only film from Manipur that I know of that has played in a major category in a major festival, and one of the only films from the entire northeast to do so, though some of Sharma’s other films have had success at smaller international fests too.

I admittedly was bored by Ishanou, though maybe I’d like it more now that I’ve been to the region. I watched some clips and trailers of his other work and would love to see more. Sanami looks cool. He has some really interesting looking documentaries, including one on local martial arts and one on M. K. Binodini Devi who wrote many of his films.

Manipur’s top filmmaker of the past decade is probably Haobam Paban Kumar, whose films have played at some international fests and are generally well regarded. His stuff looks kinda sleepy to me but I’ll watch them. 

There’s not much else I can find. Every now and then the National Film Awards deem a Manipuri film good enough to win best Manipuri film of the year, but most years they can’t even find one they want to award. I watched the trailers I could find for the winners over the past few decades and none really inspired me. I’ll try to watch some, though.

One recent bright note was Boong which played in some Discovery category at TIFF in 2024 and received good reviews. Produced by Excel, surprisingly, I believe it’s their first non-Hindi film. 

I watched a number of trailers for more mainstream films from Manipur and though they’re mostly embarrassing, I found some that looked decent, though they mostly didn’t seem like anything I needed to add to my mental watch list. A few stood out though. While the more serious dramas looked overly staid, I’m compelled by a few pre-colonial tribal action-adventure movies that I found. There’s the Meitei language Rongdaife and the Tangkhul Samkhok. They’re ultimately too cheap to look good, but they’re wild and specific and have some verve to them. I’d watch them! Someone give these guys more money.

Lastly, here is some old footage of a market (Ima?) and some festival, courtesy of the BFI. There’s also WWII newsreels from British Pathé, and there’s great footage in an old Films Division documentary.