Manisha Koirala looked resplendent in a white kurta and an angelic smile, her orange dupatta flying as she swung back and forth to the tune of 'Pyar hua chupke se'. The scene is from 1942: A Love Story, the last Hindi film I remember watching on the big screen in Manipur. That day my friends and I had skipped school, where I usually sat comfortably in the back row. In the theatre, sitting in the front row and watching Manisha tower over us, was painful on the neck. But who could have known that this was to be the last Bollywood-induced neck strain I was to feel in Manipur?
This was back in 1995, at a time when the cinema halls in Manipur showed mostly Bollywood and a few Hollywood films. A Manipuri film was also released around that time, Madhabee, and became a big hit. Yet the vast majority of the time it was posters of Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Raveena Tandon, with an occasional Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, that occupied the hoardings and public walls. Over the following decade, however, the Bollywood posters slowly began to vanish, followed by the Hollywood posters. The last I heard about a Hindi film being shown in a Manipur theatre was Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, in 1999.
The following year, in September 2000, a separatist group known as the Revolutionary People's Front banned the screening of Hindi films in the state, along with the distribution of all Hindi satellite channels. Considering Hindi films to be a form of cultural imperialism, the group said that Bollywood was undermining the culture of Manipur. Soon there was no trace of Hindi films, television serials, song sequences or even songs on radio stations in Manipur. Except for the government-controlled Doordarshan, all satellite channels broadcasting Hindi films and serials quickly disappeared.
The ban had a significant and immediate impact on the local culture, at least that which had sprung up in recent decades. During Holi in Manipur, where the festival is celebrated over five days, the final day's chitrahaar had always been a wildly popular event, at which the youth would dance to current hit Hindi songs. (Many years back, my brother met his future wife at such a festivity, while she was dancing to 'Mere haathon mei nau nau churiya'.) At this event during the years after the ban took hold, the vacuum was temporarily filled by songs in South Indian languages, as well as Bengali, Punjabi, Bhojpuri and so on. On television, too, serials and whole channels in these languages were briefly screened. But these proved unable to sustain the interest of Manipuri audiences.