Mary Kom's Collaborative Autobiography

This chapter demonstrates how Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom's An Autobiography: Unbreakable is a 'mediated,' collaborative, and authorized autobiography. Writing in the context of autobiographies of American athletes, James W. Pipkin calls such an autobiography as "a kind of authorized biography rather than a true autobiography" (9). However, Duncan McDuie-Ra is critical of how Mary's 'successful' life story was co-opted within the narrative of the Indian nation-state and of how she "has come to represent a Northeast that Indians can embrace," while "figures such as dissident Irom Sharmila represent a Northeast that Indians wish to forget" (304). While this chapter agrees with McDuie-Ra when he speaks of the construction of Mary into a figure of "a national hero," it is, however, wary of the way he discusses this construction-totally ignoring the violence, often gendered, associated with such a construction. Further, he claims that his arguments are based on how this figure of "a national hero" is constructed in her autobiography, apart from the role played by the national media. What he has ignored is the contradictions within the autobiography-the silences and fissures that indicate Mary's 'silent' refusal to be constructed thus. This chapter then interrogates the politics of collaborative writing of Mary (the author) and her translator-editors, or, more specifically, mediated writing, through an examination of these silences and fissures vis-à-vis the production of Mary's autobiography while raising pertinent questions on authorship. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.