Women Bringing ‘Outside’ Home: Imphal and Its Returning Young Women Migrants

Migration to the cities is a household phenomenon in the entire Northeastern region of India. For people in Manipur, the English word ‘outside’ serves more as a noun that means ‘anywhere outside Manipur’. In the ‘outside’, these migrants take on adjacent identities for navigating their way through different cultures and phenomena. However, when they return home for good, they come back to cities, towns and villages that function in ways completely different from the cities they were thriving in. The researcher, a young woman from Imphal, focuses on the stories of women who call Imphal home. This paper is divided into three main sections: i) the reasons of their leaving and returning, ii) how they are navigating this new home every day, and iii) what changes they would like for their city. These sections try to describe how young women who have returned home from outside are actively involved in the cultural production of the urban space that they live in, and how each woman has her own unique experiences and opinions. The paper also tries to bring out the overarching gender and development issues related to this phenomenon.