Manipur

The chronicle

The Meitei kingdom of the Manipur valley traces its royal line to 33 CE, and the Cheitharol Kumbaba — the court chronicle — records events year by year from that date, though the early portions are retrospective. As a continuously maintained state record it has few parallels, and it makes Manipur's history unusually well documented for a small Himalayan-frontier kingdom.

The kingdom's religion was the indigenous Sanamahi tradition, with its own deities, priesthood and cosmology. Vaiṣṇavism was adopted at court in the eighteenth century under Garibniwaz, and the conversion was pressed hard: the Puya Meithaba of 1729, in which Meitei manuscripts were burnt, is remembered as a cultural catastrophe and is central to the modern Sanamahi revival movement.

Manipur's other cultural exports are the Rās Līlā dance, developed at the court in the eighteenth century and now one of the eight classical dance forms of India, and the martial art thang-ta. Polo was played in the valley long before its export, and the modern game descends from the Manipuri sagol kangjei.

War and accession

The Burmese occupation of 1819–1826, remembered as the Seven Years' Devastation, depopulated the valley and brought the British in. Manipur became a princely state, and in 1891 a succession dispute led to the Anglo-Manipur War, the killing of British officers at the Kangla, and a punitive campaign; the leaders including Tikendrajit and Thangal General were publicly hanged at Imphal, and 13 August is still observed there as Patriots' Day.

Manipur was among the last areas of the subcontinent to see fighting in the Second World War: the battles of Imphal and Kohima in 1944 halted the Japanese advance into India.

The state's merger with India in 1949 — signed by the maharaja under circumstances that Manipuri accounts describe as coercive, and after the state had adopted its own constitution and elected an assembly — remains contested, and is one root of the insurgencies that have troubled the state since.