She arrived in an ambulance, thin and ghostly pale, a tube dangling from her nostril. Flanked by police officers, she was ushered into the judge’s chambers for a fortnightly ritual she has repeated hundreds of times. Was she ready to end her fast?
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Irom Chanu Sharmila, a 39-year-old poet and activist, gave her usual reply: no. With that, she was taken back to the hospital room where she spends her days in isolation, force-fed a sludgy mix of nutrients though the tube in her nose. This routine has gone on, remarkably, for 11 years.

A recent 12-day fast by the social activist Anna Hazare paralyzed India’s political system, captured the nonstop attention of its hyperkinetic 24-hour cable news media and inspired hundreds of thousands of people across the country to rally in his crusade against corruption.

But in India, where hunger strikes serve as a common tool of protest — playing a prominent role even in the modern state’s creation — not all of them grip the public imagination in quite the same way. Ms. Sharmila’s lonely, nonviolent struggle has endured in obscurity, along with her cause: to get India to remove laws that shield security forces from prosecution in this remote, insurgency-racked corner of the northeast.

She spends her days cut off from her supporters, her family and the news media. The authorities tightly control access to her. Still, her determination is unwavering. “I am strong,” Ms. Sharmila averred, eyes ablaze, in a brief interview in the judge’s chambers. “I am just waiting for God and his infallible judgment.”

India’s capacious borders encompass an astounding diversity of terrain, culture, religion and ethnicity, and at its edges the country has struggled to stay true to its democratic ideals. Nowhere is that clearer than here. Manipur sits on India’s northeastern fringe, along its border with Myanmar, one of the seven northeastern states that sit across the narrow neck of territory that traces Bangladesh’s northern frontier and abuts China, Bhutan and Myanmar. Click here to read more