Trauma of Manipur’s violence-hit children shows in their art — from AK-47-armed men to burning homes and people hanging from trees

IMPHAL: A man hangs from a tree, his neck twisted at an angle. To the right, a house burns, flames swallowing the roof. Above the smoke line, on the hills, four figures stand on a ridge, rifles pointed downward. Below them, bodies. One lies face down beside a bicycle. Another, arms outstretched, is circled in red. The scribble is in graphite. Only the blood has colour.

The artist was a 10-year-old Meitei boy.

He sketched it in pencil and ink inside the Trade & Expo Centre relief camp at Lamboikhongnangkhong in Imphal West in Aug 2024, where mats were spread wall to wall and children sat in narrow rows, their school year suspended. Volunteers had distributed paper and crayons that morning. The instruction was simple: draw what you feel.

Across Manipur, in camps set up inside colleges, govt halls and community buildings — from Ideal Girls’ College in Akampat to classrooms in Kangpokpi and temporary shelters in Sajiwa — other children responded to the same invitation with similar precision. Pages that once carried arithmetic and handwriting exercises now held houses burning, bodies lying still, figures running and smoke advancing across the horizon.

“These aren’t reports,” said Keisham Pradipkumar, chairperson of the Manipur Commission for Protection of Child Rights. “They are memories replaying themselves.”

In one camp, a boy drew a house with its roof on fire. Halfway through, he paused, erased the door twice, then redrew it with a heavy bolt across it. He pressed so hard the paper tore slightly at the edge. When a counsellor asked why, he said the door needed to be stronger this time.

Among the drawings Pradipkumar showed was one in which gunmen stood on a slope firing into smaller figures below. The villagers appeared mid-flight, their feet angled toward the lower margin of the page. At the bottom stood a house with a single padlock drawn so large it dwarfed the door. The child said he had made the lock oversized so no one could break in.

Another drawing, showed a woman at the edge of a fire, her arms extended not in triumph or surrender but in something harder to name. Around her lay smaller figures — some upright, some horizontal, one turned toward another as if shielding them. The flames were drawn evenly across the roofs. Red pooled where the bodies fell. The rest remained monochrome.

Pradipkumar described the images as “spatial memories” — impressions mapped onto terrain. The violence was rarely abstract. “Many of these children saw what they were drawing. They are not inventing dramatic scenes,” he said.

Official state figures list approximately 18,000 displaced children living in relief camps. Child rights advocates place the number closer to 25,000, including those living in rented accommodation, with relatives, or outside the state.

“We have to pay attention to both presence and omission,” said a clinical psychologist working with displaced children in Imphal. “Children process experience visually before they can organise it into language. Early drawings often capture threat. Later drawings may reflect what the child longs for. Neither stage tells the whole story.”

Child psychiatrist Dr Jina Heigrujam, who visited several relief camps to identify children experiencing PTSD, said counselling was essential to prevent longer-term mental health conditions. “If stress is prolonged and the child isn’t able to adjust to it, what happens is there are a myriad of mental health issues that can come out of it. Most common is post-traumatic stress disorder or depression in childhood or anxiety.”

Heigrujam added: “In order to help them out, we’ve dived deep into the layers to understand how badly they are affected. To do this, there are lots of techniques. One that works well with children is art therapy.”Since 2024, at least four minors linked to the displacement have died by suicide, three of them inside or near relief sites. Community workers in districts including Bishnupur and Jiribam documented additional cases that did not enter formal records. The numbers are small compared to the scale of displacement, but they have unsettled those working inside the camps. “When a child takes that step, it is rarely about a single incident,” Pradipkumar said. “It reflects accumulated distress.”