A morning in Imphal, on the page
The Federal published an excerpt from Hoihnu Hauzel’s Stories the Fire Could Not Burn that reconstructs the final ordinary morning in Imphal before the 2023 Manipur violence escalated, putting local everyday details at the center of a large political story. If you read regionally focused literary nonfiction, this excerpt suggests the book aims to document how ordinary life unspooled into conflict — a posture that’s getting attention right now. (The Federal)
On the morning of May 3, 2023, Imphal still looked ordinary enough for school runs, errands, and family routines, and Hoihnu Hauzel’s new excerpt fixes the camera there instead of starting with flames, mobs, or casualty counts. The piece ran in The Federal on April 9, 2026, as an extract from her book *Stories the Fire Could Not Burn*. (thefederal.com) That choice is the whole point of the writing: Hauzel rebuilds a city through breakfast-table details, churchgoing, memory, and duty, then lets the reader feel how fast “normal” can collapse when violence arrives by afternoon. Speaking Tiger, the book’s publisher, says the book mixes personal history with the history of antagonism between tribal communities and Meiteis. (thefederal.com) (speakingtigerbooks.com) The background to that day was already loaded. On May 3, 2023, a “Tribal Solidarity March” was held in Manipur’s hill districts after a High Court order related to the Meitei community’s demand for Scheduled Tribe status, and violence spread the same day. (outlookindia.com) (thesangaiexpress.com) Manipur’s geography helps explain why the conflict tore so quickly across daily life. The Meitei community is concentrated in the Imphal Valley, while Kuki-Zo and Naga tribal communities are concentrated in the surrounding hills, so roads, markets, neighborhoods, and state power all sit inside a tight, contested map. (speakingtigerbooks.com) (outlookindia.com) Once the clashes began, they did not stay local. Reporting from 2023 described houses and businesses being burned in Imphal after violence first flared in Churachandpur, and security forces including the Army, Central Reserve Police Force, Assam Rifles, and state police were deployed as the state imposed extreme emergency measures. (theweek.in) (sentinelassam.com) By late 2024, official figures cited 258 deaths and more than 60,000 displaced people, which is the scale sitting behind Hauzel’s decision to write about one morning before the numbers took over. Her method is closer to keeping a family album open during a fire than writing a clean timeline after the smoke clears. (wikipedia.org) (thefederal.com) The book itself is being presented not as a detached policy history but as a record of what it felt like to lose a homeland street by street. Speaking Tiger describes it as a book about conflict, geography, movement, and “the difficult work of continuing life” after the ground shifts. (speakingtigerbooks.com) Other recent extracts and essays around the book push the same frame. National Herald called one extract “Silenced, scapegoated and scarred,” while Outlook described Hauzel’s work as drawing on memory, reportage, and personal loss to document how ordinary lives were upended. (nationalheraldindia.com) (outlookindia.com) So this excerpt is not just another anniversary retelling of Manipur in the language of institutions and security briefings. It is a reconstruction of the last hours before rupture in a city called Imphal, by a writer named Hoihnu Hauzel, published in April 2026, when the argument over who gets to tell the story of May 3, 2023 is still very much alive. (thefederal.com) (speakingtigerbooks.com)
