Langban and the Memory of Our Ancestors: Divine Panthou’s Message from Selloi Langmaiching

More than 1,500 Meitei devotees from different parts of Manipur gathered at Selloi Langmaiching in Imphal East on Saturday, September 26, for the 32nd Langban Thanil Ipa Ipu Purol Taret-ki Looklen Katpa, an ancestral observance held during Langban to remember, honour and gratify the departed ancestors.

The programme was held on Langban Thanil at Divine Panthou’s Ishaikol Nung at Selloi Langmaiching, under the guidance of Divine Panthou and organised by Ima Leishem Inat Loishang. Devotees offered fruits and flowers before Divine Panthou and made offerings to Purol Taret, the seven ancestral progenitors, in an observance that seeks to keep alive the bond between the present generation and those from whom their lineages descended.

The gathering was religious in form, but Divine Panthou’s teaching gave it a larger meaning. He presented Langban not simply as a time for performing an inherited ritual, but as a period connecting the living with those who have departed. According to the teaching, the departed souls return to the human world during Langban, and their descendants remember them through Looklen Katpa. The offering therefore becomes an acknowledgement of origin, the present generation exists because generations came before it.

One line captures the foundation of that teaching: without Purol Taret, there can be no Sagei and Salai.

The idea connects present-day identity with ancestral lineage. The seven Meitei Salais—Mangang, Luwang, Khuman, Angom, Moirang, Khaba-Nganba and Sarang-Leishangthem—did not begin with the generation living today. Families carry names and lineages because there were ancestors before them. To remember Purol Taret is therefore not only to remember the dead; it is to understand the roots from which the living trace their identity.

Panthou widened this remembrance beyond one immediate family or lineage. In his own offering, he spoke of embracing all seven Salais. That gives the observance a collective dimension. The ancestor being remembered is not merely “my ancestor” in the narrowest sense. The ritual becomes a remembrance of the ancestral roots of the Meitei people across the seven Salais.

There was also humility in how Panthou explained this relationship. When a family comes with knowledge of its lineage and asks that an offering be made for its ancestors, the offering can be made. What matters is not an empty performance of ritual but remembrance rooted in sincerity and knowledge.

This is where the meaning of Looklen Katpa becomes important. It is an act of satisfying or gratifying the ancestors, but behind the offering lies remembrance. As generations pass, names disappear, memories become faint and descendants can lose their connection with those who came before them. Langban becomes a way of resisting that forgetting.

Panthou’s emphasis on the Thawai, the soul, deepened the message. Respect for those who have departed is also respect for human existence itself. The living may accumulate knowledge, status and pride, but none of these should make them forget their origins. Every generation stands on the lives of generations before it.

The teaching therefore asks a deceptively simple question: if we forget those from whom we came, how long before we also forget who we are?

That question led Panthou naturally to language, religion, culture and identity. Toward the later part of his address, he drew attention to the words used for ancestral offerings. He distinguished the Meitei practice and terminology associated with offering Hei-Soi and Lei-Soi to Purol Taret during Langban from tarpan, a term belonging to another religious tradition.

The distinction was not merely linguistic. For Panthou, indigenous words carry the memory of indigenous practices. When the vocabulary of a tradition disappears, part of the meaning carried by that tradition can disappear with it. The revival and preservation of Meiteilon therefore becomes inseparable from the preservation of Meitei religious and cultural memory.

Yet his insistence on preserving one tradition did not become an argument for denying another.

Panthou invoked Lord Rama to explain the difference. Rama performed tarpan for his father, King Dasharatha, at the Falgu River in Gaya according to his own religious tradition. Let that tradition be followed and respected. In the same way, Panthou argued, the Meitei should be free to remember, satisfy and honour our forefathers, according to the practices and language inherited from Meitei ancestors, including the observances associated with the Ikon, the sacred pond at Selloi Langmaiching.

The point was not to decide which ritual was superior. It was to recognise the right of each tradition to remain itself. The river may be different. The sacred place may be different. The words may be different. The ritual may be different. Yet the desire to honour those who came before us is something people across traditions can understand.

From there emerged the wider message of the teaching: one religion should not obstruct another.

A person may follow Lord Jesus. Another may worship according to the ancestral Meitei faith. Another may perform tarpan according to Hindu tradition. Respecting one does not require erasing the others. Faith should not become a licence to destroy another person’s sacred space, suppress another community’s tradition or compel someone to abandon an inherited identity.

Panthou placed this principle directly against the painful reality of Manipur. He referred to the ongoing violence between Meiteis and Kukis and questioned why people who profess faith should kill one another. The question went beyond the names of religions. If belief in the divine cannot restrain a person from killing another human being, what has that person understood from religion?

“Do not kill people. Love people,” was the essence of his appeal.

Once a human life has been taken, Panthou reminded his listeners, it cannot simply be restored. A child, a woman or any other human being cannot become expendable because of communal or religious difference. The sacredness claimed for a temple, church, ritual or scripture must ultimately have meaning in how one treats human life.

This makes his defence of Meitei identity important to understand in its full context. Panthou spoke strongly about preserving ancestral faith, language, customs and collective memory. But preservation, in his teaching, need not mean domination.

“Just as you have your God, we have ours. Just as you have your identity, we have ours,” was the essence of his argument. One can remain rooted without uprooting another.

That distinction matters greatly in Manipur today. The state has lived through prolonged violence, displacement, mistrust and physical separation between communities. Its crisis has political, territorial, historical and security dimensions that cannot be reduced to religion. But religion can either become another boundary between people or remind them of limits that should never be crossed.

The Langban observance at Selloi Langmaiching offered a different way of looking at identity. More than 1,500 people had gathered not to invent a new identity but to remember an old relationship, the relationship between descendants and ancestors.

There is something universal in that act. None of us begins with ourselves. We inherit names, language, stories, rituals, memories and ways of seeing the world from people who lived before us. Other communities inherit their own. Understanding why our inheritance matters to us should make it easier, not harder, to understand why another community values its inheritance too.

This is perhaps the deeper significance of Panthou’s teaching. Langban becomes a bridge between generations. The living remember the departed; descendants acknowledge the ancestral lines from which their Sagei and Salai emerged; language keeps the meaning of inherited practices alive; and remembrance becomes a way of recovering cultural and spiritual roots.

But roots need not become walls. Knowing where we come from does not require denying where another person comes from. Preserving our religion does not require destroying another’s. Honouring our ancestors does not diminish somebody else’s ancestors.

For a Manipur searching for a way beyond conflict, that may be the most enduring message from Selloi Langmaiching: remember your ancestors, understand your roots, preserve what they handed down to you—and give another people the same freedom to remember and preserve theirs.