Ritual has been predominantly theorised as a formalistic, representative and symbolic practice. Formalism implies finite forms of ritual, which are symbolic representations of the social and cultural order. Ritual objects are a primary embodiment of such notions, only suitable for deciphering long chains of social codes and stratified meanings which are partial to the human participants. Objects are empty, hollowed out and only good for carrying the subjective world. Even though ritual practices generate mixed assemblages of humans and nonhumans equally, we remain trapped in the epistemological cloak masquerading as an ontological priority of humans. The case of Phanek (a sharong-like lower-garment worn mainly by the Meiteis of Manipur) and its embeddedness in protest sites especially pose significant challenges to formalist-representative theories. Phanek is a very enigmatic figure: a taboo object soiled by the menstrual blood, which males cannot touch, yet a signifier of cultural supremacy. Through women’s significant participation in protest movements, phanek is an unmissable object in the visual culture of Manipur’s politics. The taboo becomes a weapon; thrashing the male police force with phanek becomes more effective than lathis. A debate in binary form emerge — is it an object of patriarchal oppression or a tool for gender liberation? This again falls back to anthropocentrism. The paper instead argues that phanek within the ritual context embodies an agential quality arising from a degree of autonomy from the sociocultural surround. The taboo arises only via the separation of phanek from the body; we need to account the history of this internal space. The paper argues that the proximity and separation of the phanek from the body gives us clues to a new theorisation of ritual as infinite folds creating an interiority and an outside, which sets us away from an emerging danger of cultural authoritarianism in political assemblage