Moirangthem Muktamani Devi from Kakching, Manipur, was raised by her widowed mother. She married when she was only seventeen and had four children. Thereafter, the family faced financial hardships. She started working in paddy fields by day and sold homemade snacks in the evenings. At night, she crafted knitted items like carry bags and hair bands for additional income. In 1989, a pivotal moment arose when her daughter’s school shoes needed replacement, but there was limited money to run the house. Drawing from her knitting skills, Muktamani fashioned a pair of woolen shoes using leftover yarn. This innovative solution garnered attention when her daughter’s teacher requested a similar pair, and few others followed suit, sparking the inception of her shoe-making venture.
Mukta Shoes Industry was founded in 1990. She began by replicating designs from local shoe stores but soon developed her own unique styles. Her dedication led to participation in various exhibitions, notably the 1997 India International Trade Fair in New Delhi, where she sold 1,500 pairs in just five days. Mukta Shoes Industry specializes in handcrafted footwear made from wool and nylon yarn, gum, and rubber.
Muktamani has trained over 2,000 individuals in shoemaking and employed around 30 artisans in her unit, predominantly women. The team hand-knits shoe uppers for children, men, and women, with each adult-sized pair taking roughly four days to complete. Prices vary from Rs 500 for children’s shoes to Rs 2,000 for adult sizes, and the workers earn approximately Rs 5,000 per month. Her products have reached markets in Australia, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and Dubai, other various Indian states. Muktamani aspires to patent her unique shoemaking technique to preserve its originality and protect it from exploitations by larger firms. Also, she envisions establishing a dedicated training center for the younger generation, ensuring the art of hand-knitted shoemaking endures.
In 2022, the Government of India honored her with the Padma Shri, the nation’s fourth-highest civilian award, for her distinguished service in trade and industry. This accolade recognized her as an “Inspirational Woman Entrepreneur from Manipur exporting and popularizing handcrafted woolen shoes.”
As a global tradition endorsed by the patriarchy, women have always had to work harder to prove their worth. Initiatives spearheaded by men have been celebrated and their success have been looked up as immensely inspiring. For women, comparatively, the opportunities were way lesser for a very long time, and social barriers were huge. Their innovations went unspoken because the problems they dealt with and the solutions they discovered were often home-bound. They did not have the necessary educational degrees or influential network to claim their credit as ‘changemakers’ working relentlessly to make lives better, even with minimal resources. Men did not take them seriously, so no significant support was available from there. The women themselves did not have the confidence to treat themselves with dignity, identify the scope of their intelligence and dream bigger. More remote and rural her location, lacking infrastructure or exposure and other privileges, more cornered was the woman!
Moirangthem Muktamani Devi had won many awards bestowed by state and regional bodies. But receiving the Padmashree Award is especially spectacular and significant in communicating the changing social dynamics of India to the national audience. Her story demonstrates that a special talent that is often neglected as women’s ‘timepass’ can also be used as the shield to fight poverty and destitution. Muktamani Ji entwined a business model around her skill, once her environment signalled that her works were being loved and there would be buyers. She turned her weakness, of not being able to buy new shoes for her daughter, into a strength, where she knitted a pair to help herself. Today her shoes make for great fashion statements. The growing footfalls have brought welfare to many others who started training and working for her.
The government’s selection of such a success story honours women’s craft and enforces that no work is small – it only needs practical wisdom and farsightedness for any talent to evolve into something magnificent. This is an insightful and welcome gesture to commemorate the spirit of any fighter, at any stage of life, whatever the adversity, be it a man or a woman. Every individual carries some distinct gifts which impress the identity of the person. Not everyone needs to be pushed into traditional employment systems. Doors open and new paths are designed when one explores the possibilities of working in a discipline that is suited to their competence and interest.
Selection of Moirangthem Muktamani Devi for the Padmashree Award also underlines the Modi government’s focus on grassroot talents who have walked up the difficult roads, colliding with a thousand barriers that tried to demotivate them. Weaving and knitting by hand is a traditional Indian art practiced by the women in households, which is increasingly losing visibility because the modern generations do not take too much interest in learning it. They don’t consider it to be an art. And even if they do, not everyone has the temperament to roll it into a business and scale it up.
Presence of the Manipuri entrepreneur in the list of Padma awardees emphasises the inclusion of diverse regions and socio-economic demographics in the realms of national pride. As Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi mentioned in the 85th episode of Mann Ki Baat aired on 30 January 2022, “There are many names among the recipients of Padma awards about whom very few people know. These are the unsung heroes of our country, who have done extraordinary deeds in ordinary circumstances.” Hopefully in the days to come, Muktamani Ji’s journey will inspire many other silent sufferers to trust their strength and take a leap of faith, instead of staying pressurized by their weaknesses
(Koral Dasgupta is an accomplished author and content curator)