The Manipur Game Theory

ON A SUNNY winter morn­ing at Khuman Lampak stadium, Imphal, a football match is underway. As girls from two local clubs fight it out, an elderly phanek-clad woman squats and watches the game from the ground’s sidelines. In the award ceremony afterwards, the woman joins the team. Clutching the memento, along with the girls who tower over her diminutive frame, she cracks the slightest of smiles for the cameras before her.

This scene, five minutes into Andro Dreams, sets the tone for national award-winning filmmaker Meena Longjam’s new Manipuri language documentary. Andro Dreams is a compelling portrayal of the quiet but steadfast journey of Phanjoubam Laibi Devi. For 25 years now, the 63-year-old Laibi has helmed an all-women football team in Manipur’s Andro village.

However, it was only two decades after Laibi established the Andro Mahila Mandal Association Football Club, or AMMA FC (named for the scenic village it draws its players from), that Longjam learned about them in a newspaper article.

That summer, Longjam journeyed 25 km from Imphal to Andro to seek out the elderly woman. When she told her that she wanted to make a film on them, a bemused Laibi shot back: “A film? But we don’t sing and dance.”

That was in the spring of 2017. Cut to November 2023, Andro Dreams — a 63-minute documentary on Andro’s all-female football club directed by Longjam and co-produced by Dubai-based Jani Vishwanath—premiered as the opening film for the non-feature section at the 54th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa. It was the third film by a Manipuri filmmaker to make it to the prestigious film festival, and the first ever by a Manipuri wom­an. “I told her even our clubhouse has a thatched roof—what will you film?” Laibi says with a laugh. “But she [Meena] followed us for so long. To a point, every­one in Andro stopped noticing her.”

Longjam, an independent film­maker from Imphal, is used to this: the trepidation initially, and the “almost indifference” that follows. “It’s almost like they seem to say: ‘Do what you must, just don’t bother us too much,’” Longjam says.

It’s been a similar trajectory with all her three films. In 2015, her first, Auto Driver, depicted the struggle of Imphal’s only woman auto driver. It earned her the National Award. A few years later, she made Achoubi in Love (2018), centred on the elderly Achoubi, who go to all ends to take care of dying Manipuri ‘sagol’ ponies. “I like to tell stories from the periphery of Manipur, stories of women that are hardly told,” she says.

In Laibi’s, she found one that was in equal parts sweet and sombre. “I had read the story, but when I met the woman, I couldn’t believe she was the president of a football club,” Longjam says of their first meeting. As the film shows, it is indeed endearing to watch the old woman, often seen huddled in a corner of her living room, as her team follows a noisy football World Cup final on a flickering televi­sion set. But on the other hand, Longjam says there was a darker side to Laibi’s story. “Over the years, as I dissected her life, I was taken aback.”

In 1959, Laibi was born as the fourth girl child to her parents in Andro— a village whose traditional beliefs and customs are somewhat distinct from many Hindu Meitei-inhabited areas of the Manipur valley. Almost immediately spurned by her father for her gender, Laibi survived only because of the intervention of an aunt. The discrimination perhaps shaped her, and made her quietly champion women’s rights in a deeply patriarchal village. She became the first woman to matriculate—and graduate college—in her village, refused to get married (“if he looks after me and lets me move around freely, only then I would agree,” she says, of marriage in the film), and immersed herself in social work. In 1983, she established the Andro Mahila Mandal Association, a self-help-group aimed at empowering women through weaving and sericulture. More than a decade later, it branched out into a foot­ball club for girls—funded in whole by money earned from weaving. “Women work the hardest in villages, but a boy is always preferred over a girl child,” Laibi says, “But girls can do anything boys can do. Not many believe so in the village, so I started working for the upliftment of women.”

Given Manipur’s strife-torn history, this was even more crucial. In the late 1990s, when the separatist insurgency was at its peak, there was always a risk of losing youngsters (boys and girls) to armed groups. “So that they don’t go astray I decided to channelise their energy to the sport,” Laibi says, “More­over, football was inexpensive. All you needed was a ball to begin.”

But it was never that easy either. Longjam says that Manipur was a “powerhouse of sports,” but not many knew the “struggle a player had to go through to become a sports person”. While Laibi’s optimism and never-say-die attitude is well highlighted, her documentary sheds equal light on how rural, impoverished Manipur animates the life and the game of young women.

For instance, before a stressful national qualifier match, some players claim to be “possessed”. During the key match, they collapse, after which the game must be called off midway. In an­other, the team’s most promising player, Nirmala, elopes and almost drops out of the team. While it is rare for a married woman to play football (“In Andro, once married means ‘finish’, no for the educa­tion or sports,” says Laibi), her in-laws allow her to, at Laibi’s intervention. But as soon as Nirmala is recruited by a Beng­aluru-based club, her briefly successful footballing career comes to an end: she is pregnant.

“I like to tell stories from the periphery of Manipur, stories of women that are hardly told,” Meena Longjam, filmmaker

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Longjam says she preserved these instances because she wanted to show the things “the way they are, without sugar coating” anything. She felt this strongly over the five long years she shot the film, whenever she got time off from her full-time job as a professor of culture studies at Manipur University of Culture in Imphal.

She remembers approaching the film with a skeleton narrative empha­sising Laibi’s incredible story. But as she filmed, another story emerged organi­cally—that of Nirmala, who eloped and got pregnant.

“Documentaries, after all, are a stark representation of reality,” Longjam says, adding, “Elopement—because of financial constraints —is a common feature of rural life in Manipur.” In the film, at one point, so many players elope that they don’t have enough members to form a team!

But despite these hiccups, AMMA FC survives. “We have survived only on the kindness and goodwill of others,” Laibi says. In 2014, the club almost closed—but was saved by the interven­tion of Thokchom Bikram Singh, a mar­keting professional, who moved back home to Imphal and introduced some structural changes to AMMA FC, giv­ing it a new lease of life. It was around that time that the football ground, surrounded by hills, was donated to the team by the villagers.

Visited by squawking hens and the occasional cow, the lush green ground has become a lifeline for the girls of Andro. The film closes with a new batch of footballers on the field. Against the hill-lined skies, as they try to pass and kick the ball with vigour, for the first time, Laibi watches from the sidelines.

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Tora Agarwala

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