Women who refuse to let Manipur’s 500-yr-old market forget itself

Imphal: She is 85, but she shows up anyway. Hemam Memma no longer walks as fast as she once did. But every morning, she makes her way to her stall in Imphal's Ima Keithel — the Mothers' Market — and arranges the metal ornaments she sells with unhurried precision, placing small ritual items carefully beside them as she waits for customers. There is no urgency in her movements. There doesn't need to be.

She has been doing this for over four decades. Her mother did it before her. And in a state currently tearing itself apart, Memma's quiet, daily return to this stall may be one of the most defiant acts happening anywhere in the country right now.


Long before the sun touches the rooftops of Manipur’s Imphal, the Ima Keithel is already alive. Traders haul fresh vegetables in from the villages. Hawkers set out their goods. Tea stalls flicker open in the half-dark. And thousands of women — old and young, from the hills and the valley — take their places in a marketplace that has been running, without interruption, for over 500 years.

Wars came. The British came. Famines, pandemics, and now one of the most protracted ethnic conflicts in modern Indian history — all of it came. The Ima Keithel did not close.

Widely regarded as the world’s largest all-women-run marketplace, the Ima Keithel is not merely a bazaar. It is a living institution — part economy, part memory, part political statement — that has outlasted every force that tried to diminish it. In a state fractured along community lines, where movement is restricted and trust has collapsed, this market remains one of the last spaces where the old Manipur — complicated, plural, stubbornly alive — still shows up for work every morning.

“I have been sitting here for more than 40 years," Memma said softly, adding that her mother gave the space to her while she was still alive.

The stall is not a job. It is inheritance, identity, and memory, compressed into a few square feet of stone floor. She has watched the market weather things that broke govts and shattered communities. "Corona came. Violence and unrest came. But the market never changed its spirit," she said.

She kept coming back, even during the worst of it. The sales, though, told a harder truth. "Sales fell sharply after the conflict. Now, things seemed to be improving a little, but not as good as the older days," she said.

The conflict that erupted in Manipur in May 2023, didn't spare the market. The Ima Keithel had always been a place where those divisions dissolved under the pressure of shared livelihood. Now, the divisions had followed everyone inside.

Asem Nirmala, a middle-aged vendor, remembers what it looked like before. "We vendors at the market were like an extended family, united by the struggle for livelihood. We want things to improve so that they can also come and trade here. Ima Keithel can provide for everyone, and this market has been a source of livelihood for centuries for people, much more than the govt can provide," she said.

The Kuki women who once brought bamboo stools, seasonal herbs, and vegetables to sell here — they no longer come. The geography of conflict has made that impossible.

Gurumayum Lembisana, joint secretary of the Roadside Vendors’ Welfare Association, believes the crisis has reshaped trading patterns, and many new local markets and stalls have popped up.

"If the Ima Market collapses, Manipur collapses," she says bluntly. "This is not only the backbone of our economy, but reflects the soul and spirit of Manipur, and all concerned must unite to carry forward the legacy of this market."

Ima Keithel’s resilience is not new. The market famously became the epicentre of the ‘Nupi Lal’ movements – women’s war against colonial policies in 1904 and 1939. Those protests cemented the identity of Manipuri women as political actors.

The market’s architecture has changed over the years. But its essence remains. The mothers of Ima Keithel continue to sit, not simply for a big profit, but to assert that life, livelihood and shared space will not retreat. In the heart of Imphal, the Ima Keithel continues to hum — quieter than before, perhaps, but unbroken.