| Summary/Abstract |
Although contemporary Manipuri poetry is preoccupied with violence and the politics that has plagued the state, a return to modernist poetry, prominent in the 1970s, reconfigures the discourse surrounding identity formation in Manipur. The essay focuses on the modernist poet Thangjam Ibopishak to study the change in the constitution of identity in a pervasive military culture. It argues that Ibopishak's poetry is an important intervention in our understanding of societies characterised by processes of militarisation, and the victimised subjectivities that emerge from that milieu. His poetry, marked by irony and satire, invents a new poetic idiom to address issues such as military excess, victimhood, censorship and the poet's own position as subject.
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