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  • A Window on the WorldA Remote Corner of Asia Puts on a Play about 9/11
  • L. Somi Roy (bio)

When I direct a Sumaang Leela play I address it to four specific persons in the audience—an innocent child [...,] a guru [...,] a deaf person [...,] and a blind person [...].

—Birjit Ngangomba, director, World Trade Centre (in Das Sharma 1996:157)

Three months after 9/11, the Sana Macha Nachom Artistes Group of Im-phal premiered a two-hour-long sumaang leela performance called World Trade Centre (2001). The sumaang leela, as Manipur's courtyard theatre is called, drew upon the extensive media coverage and local emotional reaction to the death of Jupiter Yambem, a banquet manager at the Windows on the World restaurant in theWorld Trade Center's North Tower. He was one of four people from Manipur, myself included, who were living in New York at the time of the attack. Still immensely popular in repertory, the play has been one of the big hits of Manipuri theatre in recent years.

Manipur is on the Myanmar border, accessible only by treacherous roads plagued by landslides and extortionist hold-ups by insurgent secessionist forces. It's safer to take an Indian Airlines flight. You lift off, leaving behind the clogging Calcutta heat, and wing eastward over the vast cracked-mirror plains of Bangladesh. An hour or so later, the jet crosses the border again, and you are once more back in Indian territory, in the Uplands of the country's forbidden and restless northeastern region. Its blue-green mountains watershed South Asia from Southeast Asia as they cascade down to the Bay of Bengal.

Most people, even many in India, aren't aware of this part of the world. Cartographers at the New York Times unfailingly lop it off in the paper's coverage of the subcontinent, impatient perhaps that it does not conform readily to the triangle that comes to mind when one thinks of India. The Indian government does not help matters much. The Upland states of this northeast region have been pretty much closed off to foreign nationals ever since it became a part of [End Page 68] the newly independent country in 1947. And none is more inaccessible than tiny, embattled Manipur, a mountain state, not much larger than Long Island, which was strong-armed into the Indian Union in 1949. It is but one of eight northeastern states rife with armed ethnic separatist and secessionist movements in India's secret 40-year war in the hills.


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Poster for World Trade Centre in the style of popular Indian films. These posters are painted by local artists and printed in Manipur. (Courtesy of L. Somi Roy)

In the central valley of Imphal—about the size of Rhode Island and home to the state's one million plus Manipuris—Indian soldiers driving around would have stuck out even without the bristling guns mounted on their armored trucks. The people under their surveillance look different and are obviously of Tibetan, Burmese, Chin, Thai, and Khmer ancestry. The actors of the Sana Macha Nachom Artistes Group, like everyone in the valley, are regularly patted down, interrogated, and detained at Indian Army checkpoints as they crisscross the valley with their play.

I saw their World Trade Centre in April 2002 at a performance in Tentha village, about an hour south of Imphal, the capital of Manipur. We got there late, walking in on the evening's preamble: a bout of buttock-baring mukna, wrestling Manipuri style, lithe combatants locked, immobile, like stag beetles. So we missed the usual scenes of the audience gathering for a sumaang leela performance in Manipur: men and women, young and old, converging slowly in the evening, after dinner, some with lanterns, some carrying rush mats and cushions; Manipuri girls, colorful as an exotic aviary in their sarongs of saffron, peacock, emerald, gold, walking in small flocks; young swains covertly flirting with them, while avoiding sharp-eyed older folk. There is little room to misbehave in the leikai, or neighborhood, setting of a courtyard play; there are few strangers here in any leikai and haven't been for...

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