Venue: Seminar Room, Australia India Institute
Presenters: Dr Duncan McDuie-Ra Professor of Development Studies and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Imphal is a militarised, violent, and frequently dysfunctional city. It is city where military, paramilitary and underground groups compete to control different neighbourhoods, services, and black markets. It is regularly shut down by bandhs and blockades and experiences chronic water shortages and power cuts making it an easy caricature of the ‘troubled periphery’ for the national media and scholars alike. Yet the same city is home to a burgeoning private health sector attracting patients from across internal and international borders. This talk explores this so-called 'health city'; a place of blood banks, cosmetic surgery clinics, and ghost stories carved out of a reserved forest. The success of the health city has radically altered the landscape. The gentrification of the once-anarchical Langol foothills brings Manipur's fraught inter-ethnic politics into the frame as settlers fleeing conflict outside the city face evictions and fight back. Crucially, most of this battle takes place 'off-stage', as it were, while the Indian and Manipuri Governments remain preoccupied with military control of Imphal and its transformation into a gateway city connecting India with Southeast Asia. The health city tells a compelling story of neoliberal India as told from its unruly frontiers.
Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of Development Studies and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW, Sydney.
from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/6372-borderland-city-in-new-india-blood-banks-blockades-bryan
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