ABSTRACT
In March 2014, Dinesh Tongbram’s feature film 23rd Century premiered at the Manipur Film Development Corporation and the Bheigyachandra Open Air Theatre in the Palace Compound. These two venues are a short distance apart next to the Hapta Kangjeibung; an historic polo ground still used for polo but also for staging political rallies, the Sangai Festival each December, and various trade fairs. South of the polo ground is the Royal Palace, where the British moved their installed ruler, Chura Chand, after occupying Kangla Fort in 1891, and adjacent to this the Shree Govindajee Temple built in 1846. To the north along the same road is the City Convention Centre, an oversized building for its surroundings, sitting lonely behind a locked gate covered in reflective blue glass and home to a seemingly abandoned government water tanker. The contrast is compelling: the remnants of the independent kingdom at one end of the road and the new spaces of power, modernity and development at the other. The content of 23rd Century weaves the fading past with a warning about the future. Based on a 1992 play, the film depicts the Imphal of the future as overdeveloped and overpopulated. The extension of the railway into Manipur has led to massive influx of migrants, and Manipuris (though the film mostly focuses on Meiteis) have become a minority in the city. The Chief Minister is a non-Manipuri and the rights of Manipuris have been dismantled. Driven to poverty, humiliating forms of livelihood, and subject to violence by the occupying armed forces, the couple at the centre of the film struggle to survive. The film narrates a common insecurity throughout the borderland, namely numerically small populations distinct from the majority ‘Indian’ culture and society being overwhelmed by migration into their homelands. The insecurity is not unwarranted given the massive demographic shifts that have taken place throughout the borderland, but particularly in states where protection for indigenous communities is weak as in Assam, Tripura, and indeed Manipur. Yet what makes the Imphal depicted in 23rd Century even more telling for the themes of this book is that connectivity is the cause of the influx. The railway brings the masses of migrants. It is a death knell. It is the end of isolation. The image of a fictitious Imphal train station adorns the poster and billboards advertising the film. This is the future that connectivity invites, unless something is done about it now. The release of the film comes during a popular movement to implement the Inner Line Permit System in the state (ILP). The ILP is a system of controlled entry, settlement, and monitoring of non-indigenous migrants into borderland polities based on a colonial regulation and currently in force in neighbouring Mizoram and Nagaland. The music video for the lead song from 23rd Century even features clips of the protests calling for the ILP equating the story in the film with the contemporary movement to exclude non-Manipuris from the state. The film also comes at a time of public debate over the merits of the proposed extension of the North East Frontier Railway to Imphal through Jiribam, on the border between Manipur and Assam, due for completion in 2016. Land seizures, displacement, and environmental damage brought by the construction of bridges and tunnels has sparked sporadic opposition, however, the implications of easier entry to Manipur and easier access to Imphal, especially though train travel which in India is still the primary mode of transport for the poor and middle class, strikes at the core of anxieties over territory, belonging, and identity. These anxieties are captured in the film but they also play out in contemporary Imphal where exclusion provides the counterpoint to belonging in a city controlled by state, quasi-state, and non-state actors.
