What the Idea of Manipur's Thekedaar Missed to Spotlight: How We Buried Our Legacy

This new “Idea of Manipur” did not sprout from the soil of Valley; it was imported, incubated in seminar halls and CSO brochures, then force-fed to a state already bleeding from ethnic fault lines. 

It arrives cloaked in the language of inclusion, yet its first casualty is the Meitei legacy—the 2,000-year chronicle of kings who forged a kingdom, who scripted the Cheitharol Kumbaba, who defended the land against Burmese invasions while hill tribes were still forging their own pacts. 

Why does this idea insist on burying that ethos? Because a plural Manipur cannot stand if one community’s history towers unchallenged. Rewriting the past to fan this fragile unity is not reconciliation; it is cultural bulldozing, a quiet coup against the very people who carried Manipur’s name through centuries of siege and sovereignty. Peaceful coexistence demands no such sacrifice—let every community live as itself, history intact, without Meitei heritage paying the price for someone else’s guilt-free mosaic.

Manipur now teeters on the brink of fracture as demands for Naga Sovereignty is rumoured to be settled into a simple Naga Autonomous Council and a Kuki one—both under a Sixth Schedule like arrangements—push the state toward three rigid ethno-territorial silos: Meitei in the valley, Kuki in the south, Naga in the north. 

But in this scramble to box the big three, where do the Pangal, Nepalis, Telis, and other smaller tribes fit? Must we erase our layered history—rewriting Pangal as “forever Meiteis,” Nepalis as “ancient settlers,” or Telis as “indigenous caste”—just to squeeze them into someone else’s homeland? 

No. Let Pangals live as Pangals, Nepalis as Nepalis, Telis as Telis, each with their own heritage intact, not forcibly melted into a dominant narrative. The true Idea of Manipur is not assimilation by revision, but peaceful coexistence in a shared state—history unchanged, dignity undiluted, and every community secure in its own skin.

The Pangals (or Manipuri Muslims), for all their integration, remain conspicuously absent from the Federation of Haomee’s cultural pillar—a symbolic representation of the seven salai (clans) that form the backbone of this land. Their exclusion should not be weaponized as grievance. What matters is not symbolic inclusion in ancient structures, but unwavering dedication to the land that nurtured them.

Loyalty is proven in action—defending Manipur in 1826 and 1891, rebuilding after 2023—not in demanding retroactive parity in a heritage one did not forge.Yet the fracture runs deeper than public sermons. The 17th-century matrimonial bond that birthed the Pangal identity—Meitei women marrying Muslim settlers, raising families in the valley, blending phanek with kurta, burqa with Kokkhum—was once a living bridge of syncretism. 

Today, that bridge is crumbling under the weight of rigid Islamic edicts imported from outside. A Meitei woman marrying a Pangal man faces little communal backlash; she is absorbed, her children raised as Pangal. But reverse the union—a Pangal woman falling in love with a Meitei man—and the reaction is visceral. Maulvis and elders unleash curses, ostracism, even threats of violence against their own daughters. Girls are disowned, labeled apostates, forced into silence or exile.

I have heard the venom firsthand: Meitei religion branded as shirk, Sanamahi deities as something very cheap. These are not private mutterings; they are in the minds of some radical leaders. The pain of a mother cursing her daughter for loving across faith lines is a wound no seminar on “shared heritage” can heal. 

Let us pose the uncomfortable question: when the first Muslim prisoner of war settled in the valley and Meitei daughters chose to marry them, birthing the Pangal lineage, did the ancient Meitei system of outcasts or chastity decrees vanish overnight? Did the Cheitharol Kumbaba suddenly erase the social codes that guarded bloodlines and kinship? 

No. Yet today, the very offspring of those Meitei women—raised in the same soil, speaking the same tongue—glare at Meitei men as mortal foes, as if history itself has been weaponised against the womb that bore them. How does a mother’s choice become a grandson’s vendetta? This is not coexistence; it is inherited fracture, where yesterday’s union is recast as today’s betrayal, and the Idea of Manipur demands that Meiteis alone swallow the bitterness of their own diluted legacy.

This asymmetry—this one-way tolerance—exposes the hollowness of claims to equal indigeneity. If the bond forged in the 1600s is now policed by 21st-century fatwas, what remains of the syncretism our scholars celebrate?

Today, in the seminar halls of Imphal and the intellectual circles of Delhi, a tragic spectacle unfolds: Meitei scholars, the supposed custodians of this glorious past, are leading the charge to erase it. They are not coerced by external forces but are willingly rewriting history to accommodate every migrant narrative, declaring all who set foot on this soil as "indigenous." This is not inclusivity; it is self-annihilation. 

And the question that haunts every conscious Meitei is this: Are our intellectuals genuinely afraid of the communities they appease, or have they succumbed to a deeper malaise—a fear of being labeled exclusivist in a world that demands perpetual apology for one's roots?

The tragedy is not new, but it has reached a crescendo in recent years. A wave of seminars, symposia, and CSO-backed discourses under the banner of "Understanding the Idea of Manipur" has swept the state. These are not neutral academic exercises. They are ideological battlegrounds where the Meitei past is systematically dismantled to make room for fabricated continuities. One community, arriving in waves during the 17th and 19th centuries, now claims ancient linkages through selective readings of court chronicles—chronicles written in Meitei script, preserved in Meitei palaces, and safeguarded by Meitei kings. 

Another citation trots out the administrative gazettes—clause no. 2, no less—for "pragmatic governance," anointing pre-1961 residents as the sacrosanct indigenous, and branding Manipur's "Indigenous people" as Yelhoumee. Who are these Yelhoumee, if not the valley's original sons and daughters, the keepers of Lai Haraoba and the Puya scriptures, now diluted by a cutoff that conveniently folds in waves of arrivals from beyond the nine hill ranges? 

Indigeneity cannot be a Manipur-only riddle, elastic enough to swallow outsiders while the world clings to UNDRIP's unyielding anchors—ancestral ties and distinct cultural roots. This is no governance; it is a sleight of hand, burying Meitei primacy under a 1961 veil to peddle a "united" Manipur that erases the very ethos it claims to protect.

And who champions these revisions? Not outsiders, but Meitei politicians, historians, anthropologists, and scholars—our own.Take, for instance,  Land grants given to loyal servants—standard practice in any monarchy—are reinterpreted as evidence of co-ownership. Marriages between Meitei royalty and women from neighboring tribes, once diplomatic alliances, are now cited as proof of equal indigeneity. This is not scholarship; it is sophistry.

What drives this capitulation? Fear, undoubtedly, plays a role. The ethnic violence of 2023, where Meitei villages were targeted and thousands displaced, left a scar. Scholars who once spoke of cultural primacy now tread carefully, aware that assertive narratives can inflame tensions. But fear alone does not explain the zeal with which some Meitei intellectuals embrace erasure. 

There is a performative guilt at work—a postcolonial hangover that equates pride in one's heritage with chauvinism. In their bid to appear progressive, they adopt the language of the oppressor: "We must decolonize history." Yet in doing so, they colonize their own past, replacing Meitei agency with a bland, ahistorical multiculturalism.

Across the world, indigenous communities fight to reclaim their narratives. In Latin America, a young Mapuche parliamentarian dons traditional attire and speaks in her native tongue to assert her people's place in the nation. In New Zealand, Māori scholars demand that colonial histories acknowledge pre-European sovereignty. Even in India, tribes in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh mobilize to protect their distinct identities. 

But in Manipur, the Meitei—the only community with a documented, uninterrupted kingdom—are the ones volunteering to dissolve their legacy. We are the Taliban of our own civilization. This self-destruction is not without precedent, but never has it been so intellectually justified. In the 19th century, Meitei kings adopted Vaishnavism, sidelining Sanamahism to align with broader Hindu currents. That was political strategy. 

Today's erasure is ideological surrender. Our scholars cite global examples to justify their stance: "Look at the Cherokee," they say. "They married Europeans, yet remain indigenous." But they conveniently ignore the counter-question: Did those English husbands become Cherokee? Did their descendants claim tribal leadership without adopting Cherokee law, language, and lineage? 

The Cherokee Nation today requires blood quantum or lineal descent—precisely the kind of exclusivity our intellectuals decry as "divisive."Or take the Portuguese in Goa. For centuries, they encouraged intermarriage, granted land, and built a Luso-Indian culture. Yet no one argues that the Portuguese are indigenous Goans. Their churches stand, their language lingers in Konkani dialects, but their claim to primordial belonging is laughed out of court. 

Why, then do we entertain similar logic in Manipur? If a 17th-century migrant who served in the king's army and married locally becomes indigenous, then every British officer's descendant in India deserves ST status. 

The parallel sharpens when we examine the Anglo-Indians—children of British soldiers and Indian women, born in cantonments from Calcutta to Madras. For generations, they lived in railway colonies, spoke English at home, and attended convent schools. They contributed to India’s bureaucracy, sports, and music—think Engelbert Humperdinck’s mother or Ruskin Bond’s lineage. 

Yet when independence came, Anglo-Indians were not granted Scheduled Tribe status, nor did they demand to be called indigenous Bengalis, Punjabis, or Tamils. They formed their own constitutional category (Article 366(2)), with nominated Lok Sabha seats until 2020, precisely because no one pretended their fathers’ marriages erased the distinction between colonizer and colonized.
 
Their identity remains hybrid, respected but never conflated with the ancient peoples of the soil. In Manipur, however, a man who arrives in 1947, marries a Meitei woman in 1950, and raises children in Imphal is declared “bona fide Meitei indigenous” in seminar papers and government affidavits.
The Anglo-Indian never asked to rewrite Kipling as a Tamil bard; why do we allow migrants to recast themselves as co-authors of the Cheitharol Kumbaba?

This pattern of favored integration, followed by selective claims of indigeneity, finds an even more poignant echo in the story of Muslims in Manipur—known as Pangals—who entered the scene much like the Portuguese did in Goa, from the 17th century onward. Historical records trace the arrival of the first Muslims to around 1606, during the reign of King Khagemba, when Pathan and Bengali soldiers from Sylhet (now in Bangladesh) were captured or allied in battles against invaders from Cachar and Burma. 

Impressed by their valor and skills—particularly in artillery and craftsmanship—the king not only spared them but granted lands, integrated them into the army, and explicitly permitted marriages with Meitei women. This was no mere tolerance; it was royal favoritism, mirroring Afonso de Albuquerque's Política dos Casamentos in Goa (1510 onward), where Portuguese men were incentivized to wed local Konkani women, often after conversion to Catholicism, with promises of property and status to secure the colony. 

In both cases, kings or governors saw strategic value: in Manipur, Muslims bolstered defenses against Burmese incursions; in Goa, intermarriages stabilized Portuguese rule amid a hostile Hindu majority. By the 17th century, these unions had produced hybrid communities—the Luso-Goans in one, the Pangals in the other—blending faiths, cuisines, and customs while retaining core religious identities.

Yet herein lies the profound difference, one that exposes the selective amnesia of our Meitei scholars. In Goa, after 451 years of colonial rule ending in 1961, the descendants of those Portuguese settlers—Luso-Indians—never staked a claim to being "indigenous Goans" in the primordial sense. They proudly embrace their mixed heritage, with Portuguese surnames like Fernandes or D'Souza adorning Konkani-speaking Catholics who vote in Indian elections and celebrate both Christmas and Shigmo. 

The Portuguese legacy is acknowledged as colonial, not autochthonous: their forts and basilicas are UNESCO sites of "Portuguese influence," not native patrimony. No Luso-Goan demands Scheduled Tribe status by citing Albuquerque's marriage edicts or four centuries of intermixing as proof of pre-colonial roots. The Portuguese, for all their integration, remain a chapter in Goa's colonial history, their hybridity celebrated without erasing the Konkani Hindu or tribal lineages that predated Vasco da Gama.

Contrast this with the Pangals, who today unequivocally claim indigeneity as "Meitei Muslim," woven into the fabric of Manipuri identity. Through generations of intermarriage, they spoke the language, draped phaneks alongside kurtas—becoming, as scholars note, an "indigenized community" like no other in India. They fought alongside Meiteis in the 1891 Anglo-Manipuri War, shared the devastation of the Seven Years' Devastation (1819–1826), and even contributed in the civilization of Manipur. This deep assimilation is admirable, a testament to Manipur's syncretic ethos. 

But indigeneity? That's where the parallel fractures. Unlike the Portuguese in Goa, who never blurred their settler origins into native claims, Pangal narratives—bolstered by some Meitei academics—insist on equal footing with the Meiteis, whose kingdom predates Islam's arrival by over a millennium. The Cheitharol Kumbaba mentions them as valued subjects, not co-founders; their 17th-century entry, however favored, postdates Meitei chronicles by centuries. 

Yet in today's discourses, this is reframed as "shared heritage," with Pangals positioned as indigenous stakeholders in land rights and ST demands, echoing broader ethnic assertions that dilute Meitei primacy.The difference boils down to context and consequence. 

In Goa, decolonization drew a firm line: Portuguese rule was foreign, intermarriages a tool of empire, not a bridge to indigeneity. Post-1961, Luso-Goans integrated as Indian citizens without upending Goan tribal or Hindu claims— their hybridity adds flavor, not entitlement. 

In Manipur, however, the lack of a sharp colonial rupture allows favored migrants to evolve into "insiders," their claims amplified by scholars fearful of "exclusivism." Did the Portuguese ever claim the same as Muslims in Manipur? Absolutely not. Albuquerque's policy was about perpetuating Portuguese dominance, not dissolving into Konkani indigeneity; their descendants today honor that distinction, not contest it. 

Our intellectuals, in their haste to appease, ignore this lesson: True integration respects origins, lest it become erasure. By validating Pangal indigeneity through marriage and grants—while Meiteis shrink to "one among many"—we repeat Goa's history backward, inviting settlers to redefine the soil they till.

This flawed logic extends to another oft-cited "contribution"—service under the British Empire during World War I. Millions from occupied colonies—India, Africa, the Caribbean—were conscripted or enlisted as labor corps, including over 1,000 men from Manipur who formed the 22nd and 37th Manipur Labour Corps, dispatched to France in 1917 to dig trenches, haul supplies, and repair roads under relentless shelling. 

These were not volunteers in the romantic sense; they were recruited by the Raja, paid meager wages (often in arrears), and sent far from home to serve the Crown's war machine. Similarly, the Manipur Levy—raised in the 1820s and formalized after 1891—was a paramilitary force of locals, including Meiteis and other communities, tasked with guarding borders and suppressing rebellions on behalf of the colonial Political Agent. 

Both groups were workers, enlisted to serve masters or rulers, not free agents offering selfless sacrifice. To claim special indigenous status or land rights today based on such service is to misunderstand history: Gurkhas fought in Flanders, Sikhs in Mesopotamia, yet no one argues their trench-digging entitles them to ST status in Belgium. 

The labor corps were paid (however poorly), the Levy salaried; their loyalty was to the paycheck and the king’s command, not a blank check for rewriting indigeneity. Contribution under duress does not confer origin.The root of this betrayal lies in a profound insecurity. 

Meitei intellectuals, educated in Delhi and Kolkata, return home haunted by the specter of being seen as "valley chauvinists." They overcompensate, embracing every claim—no matter how ahistorical—to prove their secular credentials. This is not generosity; it is cowardice dressed as scholarship.

Also Read: Why 40 villages demand separation from Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi and Churachandpur districts

This is not the path to peace. True harmony emerges from mutual respect, not manufactured equality. The Nagas have Nagaland, where their customs reign supreme. The Mizos have Mizoram, a state carved to protect their identity. The Meiteis, confined to 10% of Manipur's land, ask only to preserve their narrative in the valley that birthed their civilization. 

Yet even this is deemed too much.Our scholars must ask themselves: Whom do they serve? The truth, or the transient approval of those who will never reciprocate? When a community with no written history before the 17th century claims co-authorship of the Cheitharol Kumbaba, do we applaud their imagination or defend our archives? 

When migration records from the 1940s are suppressed to uphold a 1961 cut-off, do we call it pragmatism or perjury?The Meitei intellectual class stands at a crossroads. They can continue their pilgrimage of appeasement, rewriting textbooks until the kingdom of Manipur becomes a mythological footnote. Or they can reclaim their role as guardians of a civilization that survived Burmese devastation, British conquest, and Indian integration. 

The choice is not between exclusivity and inclusion, but between authenticity and oblivion.To the young Meitei scholar reading this: Your ancestors did not fight seven wars against Burma to see their descendants apologize for existing. 

This lament is not born of malice toward any community, but of a rational plea for clarity and fairness. I respect every group that has lived in Manipur since time immemorial—the Meitei, Tangkhul, Liangmai, Kabui, Thangal, Anal, Maring, Chothe, Chiru, Maram, and various other hill tribes whose oral histories predate written records. I equally honor those who arrived in the last 200 or 300 years, whether as refugees, traders, soldiers, or settlers, and have since woven their lives into the fabric of this land through toil, marriage, and shared suffering. 

Followers of Sanamahism propose a clear-cut division for a lasting solution: let Sanamahism remain the unbreakable benchmark of Meitei identity. Those who embrace it—whether born in the valley or joined through marriage and ritual—carry the name Meitei with pride. Those who choose otherwise—be they Pangal Muslims who uphold Islam, Meitei Christians who follow the cross, or any other—must forge their own distinct identities, live as equal citizens in Manipur’s shared land, but without claiming the sacred Meitei mantle. 

When you raise your voice against a Pangal, pause—deep in their veins flows the same Meitei blood that courses through yours. They are not outsiders to be banished; they are your very own, born of Meitei mothers who chose love across faith, woven into the valley’s fabric for four centuries. Speak not in hate, but in the recognition of shared ancestry; only then can Sanamahism’s clarity coexist with Pangal truth, healing Manipur without erasing a single drop of its mingled heritage.

No forced assimilation, no rewritten history, no diluted legacy. Let every community stand in its truth—Sanamahism for Meiteis, Islam for Pangals, Christianity for converts—and let peaceful coexistence, not ethnic blurring, be the foundation of a healed Manipur. This is not exclusion; it is clarity. This is not division; it is honesty. And only honesty can end the cycle of resentment.

Labels like "indigenous" or "bona fide citizen" matter little in the grand scheme; what truly counts is how deeply one has stood for Manipur in times of crisis and what one's commitment is today. 

Have you defended its borders, preserved its peace, and invested in its future without demanding to rewrite its past? That is the measure of belonging. 

No one sails to Great Britain today, reminding the British of their grandfather's labor in the trenches of World War I, and demands citizenship or land as recompense. 
History acknowledges service, but it does not rewrite origins. 

Let us build a Manipur where every resident—ancient or recent—earns their place through present loyalty, not retroactive claims. Only then can we heal, united not by fabricated equality, but by honest coexistence.