Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
Overview
The Imphal Review of Arts and Politics, published at imphalreviews.in and often shortened to IRAP, is an English-language digital review journal from Imphal, Manipur. It describes itself as a web portal to interrogate the currents of history, arts, psychology, economics, politics and more, beneath the surface of events that make news in Manipur and the Northeast region. That single sentence explains its format: this is not a breaking-news wire and it does not try to be one. It is a journal of long essays, reviews and commentary that takes the week's headlines in Manipur as a starting point and asks what lies underneath them.
In a media landscape dominated by fast updates, the Review occupies a deliberately reflective niche. Its articles are signed, argued pieces, often running to essay length, written by its editor and by academics, writers and commentators from Manipur and the wider Northeast. For readers who want to understand why Manipur's politics, ethnic relations, economy and culture behave as they do, the Review is one of the few English-language platforms publishing sustained analysis from inside Imphal itself.
Editor and the Free Press School of Journalism
The Review's editor is Pradip Phanjoubam, one of Manipur's best-known journalists. University and lecture listings identify him as Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics, and he is a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Phanjoubam began his journalism career in New Delhi with national newspapers including The Times of India and the Business and Political Observer, and from 1996 he was editor of the Imphal Free Press, the English daily he led for many years. His signed editorials form the backbone of the Review, and articles on the site close with the byline identifying him as the journal's editor and an author of books on the Northeast.
The Review is powered by FPSJ, the Free Press School of Journalism. Its office address is given as the Free Press School of Journalism, Manipur Relief Association Complex, New Checkon Road, Palace Gate area, Imphal East – 795005, Manipur, and its contact emails are those of the school. Photographs on its contact page show batches of journalism students, including a visit with a Japanese delegation to the Imphal Peace Museum at Maibam Lotpa Ching. The journal therefore has a teaching institution behind it: it is both a publication and, in effect, a demonstration of the analytical journalism its school trains students to write.
What the Review Publishes
The site is organised around review and discussion categories rather than news desks. Its Arts coverage includes essays on Manipuri cinema and theatre — for example pieces on the filmmaker Dinesh Naorem taking the Manipur conflict to the global stage at IFFI 2025, on Manipur's vanishing film heritage, and on the plays of Ratan Thiyam and the search for ideas of history, conflict, justice and rectitude in his work. Its Books section carries reviews and literary essays, from Bertil Lintner's work on Myanmar to accounts of the Imphal Book Fair and discussions of colonial-era writing on Manipur. Its Economy section runs from highway crises and shortages of essential commodities to entrepreneurship, cooperation policy and agricultural diversification in the state.
Politics and society provide the heaviest material. Editorials have examined education and official corruption as keys to Manipur's future, the moral questions raised by the state's ethnic conflicts, hill–valley disparities, demography anxieties in the Northeast, the history of the NRC debate, and the memory and forgetting that surround the Battle of Imphal and Kohima. Recurring tags on the site — ethnic identity, immigrants, wetlands, town planning, administration, letters — show the breadth of a journal that treats a drainage problem, a festival or a land dispute as entry points into larger questions about how Manipur is governed and how its communities live together.
Coverage Focus: Manipur and the Northeast
The Review's territory is Manipur first and the Northeast second. It writes about Imphal's institutions — Manipur University, the state administration, cultural bodies and festivals such as Yaoshang and the Sangai Festival — and about the hill districts and borderlands, including Ukhrul and the state's frontier with Myanmar. Regional essays place Manipur inside the wider Northeast story: the Treaty of Yandabo, the politics of the Sixth Schedule, China's and Myanmar's elections and conflicts, and the Asia-Pacific realignments that affect India's eastern borderlands.
Since May 2023, Manipur has lived through a prolonged ethnic conflict between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities that, as the Review itself noted in 2026, had completed three years, leaving close to 260 people dead and around 60,000 displaced. The journal has covered that catastrophe not with daily casualty counts but with essays on conflict reportage, moral responsibility, coexistence and the way forward — arguing, in one editorial's title, that there is no alternative to working towards peaceful coexistence in any integral geography. That long-view treatment of an ongoing tragedy is the clearest example of its editorial method.
Press Freedom Context
The Review operates in one of India's most difficult environments for journalists. Manipur's press has long worked under pressure from both the state and armed groups, a history documented in coverage of the Imphal Free Press years. In January 2021, Manipur police booked journalists under sedition and anti-terror provisions over an article; speaking to ThePrint at the time, Phanjoubam, identified as editor of the FPSJ Review of Arts and Politics, said media in Manipur was becoming less and less free, and argued that publishing what militant groups say is news and does not in itself amount to endorsing those views. The episode is part of the journal's public record and helps explain its persistent attention to free expression, state power and the space available for dissent in the Northeast.
That context also shapes how the Review is read outside Manipur. National and international readers, researchers and students of the Northeast use Imphal-based analysis to correct the thin, incident-driven coverage the region usually receives. A journal edited by a journalist who has reported Manipur for three decades, and who lectures at institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University on subjects including secularism and ethnic friction, carries a particular weight in those discussions.
Contributors and Editorial Voice
Although Phanjoubam's editorials anchor the site, the Review is a multi-author journal. Bylines visible across its sections include academics and writers such as Dr. Aniruddha Babar, Aribam Bishwajit, Dr. David Khomdram, Ksh. ChitraBhanu Devi, Tayenjam Bijoykumar Singh and others writing on law, cinema, economics, literature and public life. Open letters, including one addressed to the Vice-Chancellor of Manipur University, appear alongside reviews and reported essays, giving the journal the character of a public forum for Manipur's intellectual life rather than a single columnist's blog.
The editorial voice is argumentative and literary. Editorials open with poetry and historical reference — one recent piece begins with Yeats's The Second Coming to frame Manipur's disorder — and proceed through history and political analysis to a judgement. Readers should therefore expect opinion, clearly signed and owned, rather than neutral wire copy. The Review's promise is depth and candour from a known editor and a known address in Imphal, not detached objectivity.
Digital Presence and Archives
The Review is published entirely online at imphalreviews.in, organised by category and author pages, with searchable archives organised under IRAP Archives and lists of recent articles. Its dating shows a weekly rhythm for major editorials, with additional reviews and essays published through the week, and its archive runs back over several years, allowing readers to trace how its arguments on ethnic identity, education or centre–state relations have developed. The copyright line on the site reads IRAP, powered by FPSJ, underlining the school connection.
Because it is a small, editor-led journal, its digital presence is the website itself rather than a large social media operation. That simplicity suits its purpose: essays are written to be read slowly, searched later and cited, and the archive functions as a growing record of Manipuri public argument in the 2020s.
Audience and Community Role
The Review's audience includes readers in Manipur's valley and hills, the Manipuri diaspora, students and teachers at the Free Press School of Journalism, academics working on Northeast India, and policy and media readers elsewhere in India who need more than headlines from Imphal. Its community role is to keep a space open for reasoned, long-form disagreement in a state where public debate has often been squeezed by conflict, blockades and official pressure. By training student journalists in the same building that publishes the journal, it also invests in the next generation of Manipuri media.
How to Read the Review
Readers can start from the imphalreviews.in homepage and follow the category pages for Arts, Books and Economy, browse by author to follow a particular writer, or use the tag pages to trace a theme such as ethnic identity or town planning across several years. New readers unfamiliar with Manipur may find the editorials on education, coexistence and the conflict the most accessible entry points, while researchers will value the dated archive. The journal lists its Imphal East office address and the Free Press School of Journalism email addresses on its contact page for correspondence and submissions.
