Kuki Studies

This paper examines the role of community based organisations in resilience building within the North Eastern states of India. There is a plethora of indigenous practices and value systems in the largely egalitarian societies of the North East that help them in facing disasters without much assistance from the state. To demonstrate this, value systems as well as a practice among the Kukis known as tomngaina and khankho will be taken as a reference point to show how CBOs are obliged under these value systems to assist anyone within the community in the face of any kinds of disasters. The study assesses the historical past as well as from 2015 Manipur landslide, the 2016 Manipur Earthquake and hailstorms, particularly to prove or disprove the role played by community’s cultural value systems and practices in building resilience. However, among the ethnically divided and antagonistic groups in the region they are so bound to restrict to themselves, within their own ethnic groups, despite their value systems. An attempt is also made to highlight the challenges that CBOs are confronted with in disaster resilience building.

This book explores the Kuki uprising against the British Empire during the First World War in Northeast frontier of India (then Assam-Burma frontier). It underlines how of the three-year war (1917–1919), spanning over 6000 square miles, is crucial to understanding present-day Northeast India. The essays in the volume examine several aspects of the war, which had far-reaching consequences for the indigenous population as well as for British attitudes and policy towards the region — including military strategy and tactics, violence, politics, identity, institutions, gender, culture, and the frontier dimensions of the First World War itself. The volume also looks at how the conflict affected the larger dynamics of the region within Asia, and its relevance in world politics beyond the Great War.

Drawing on archival sources, extensive fieldwork and oral histories, the volume will be a significant contribution to comprehending the complex geopolitics of the region. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South and Southeast Asian Studies, area studies, modern history, military and strategic studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency studies, tribal warfare and politics.

The coming of Christianity among the Kukis is now more than a century. Centenary of the gospel among the Baptists was celebrated in March 1996 with a theme “Christ the Hope of the Ages” and the Evangelical Presbyterians in 2010 with “Power of the Gospel” as a theme respectively. Within the twentieth century almost the entire population had been swept by Christianity and now Christians constitute more than 90 percent of the total population. This essay discusses the advent of Christianity among the Kukis and analyse the attempts made by church leaders to unify Kuki churches. It also made an enquiry into the reasons for the failure of such attempts to church unification and its implication on Kuki society.

"Section 1: Politics
1. T. Lunkim - Traditional System of Kuki Administration
2. P. Hangsing - Understanding the Politics of the Stateless Kukis: Was it by Choice?
3. Tongthang Touthang – The State of Kuki People in the Hills of Assam
4. Seikhogin Haokip – Genesis of Kuki Autonomy Movement in Northeast India
5. Seilen Haokip - What Price, Twenty Years of Peace in Mizoram (1986-2006): A Kuki Perspective
6. Nehkholun Kipgen - Why not Kukiland for Kukis
7. Letminlun Khongsai - A Study of the Birth of Kuki Students’ Organisation in Manipur
8. P. Gangte - Kuki Nation towards Political Unity and Consolidation
9. R. Sanga - Impact of Electoral Politics on Traditional Institutions
10. Peter Haokip – I Have a Dream: My Vision of a New Kuki Society

Section 2: Culture
11. Paokhohao Haokp - Reinculcating Traditional Values of the Kukis with Special Reference to Lom and Som
12. Nemminthang Lhouvum - Traditional Thadou-Kuki Religious Beliefs and Practices
13. Lalgin Chongloi - Impact of Christianity on the Thadou-Kuki Marriage
14. Hemkhochon Chongloi - Integrating Christian Faith and Kuki Khankho towards Cultural Renewal"

This article reviews the various essays on the Kuki-Naga conflict of the 1990s. More than a dozen essays have been written on the conflict by scholars from both the ethnic groups in conflict and also by other concerned persons from different perspectives. Recently two doctoral theses were published as books. The conflict which was mainly fought on land and identity resulted in uprooting hundreds of villages, with the loss of more than a thousand lives, destruction of valuable properties and internal displacement. The British colonial policy of governance in the Northeast frontier of India and the rise of ethnic nationalism among both the Kukis and Nagas in the post-independence period were the roots of the Kuki-Naga conflict.

The disruption of old trade routes by colonial rulers, the Partition of 1947 and India’s import substitution economy deprived northeast India of its natural markets. Of late, there has been much talk about the potentials of India’s Look East policy in transforming the region. The inclusion of the northeastern region as an important component of this policy in 2003 is dubbed as the new paradigm of development in the Northeast. The policy envisages the region not as the periphery of India, but as the centre of a thriving and integrated economic space. Thus, many people see it as an excellent opportunity to integrate not only with mainland Indian economy but also with its neighbouring countries in the east and even beyond. In contrast, others view this policy as an extension of India’s imperialism in a new form in that the Northeast will only provide a bridge between the rest of India and East and Southeast Asia. The main argument of such critics is that India is more concerned with the eastern neighbours and not its northeast. The article, while recognizing ‘borders’ as crucial in attempting to address the problems of the Northeast, assesses the prospects of ‘Looking East’ through this region and the challenges posed to it by post-colonial territoriality and other domestic problems. The integration of the Northeast economy with the neighbouring countries is basically implemented through the security-centric border management, wherein the opening of borders is limited to border trade points and fencing the rest of the erstwhile open borders. This increasing restrictive regulation and bureaucratic formalities on movement of people and goods across borders distort the traditional crossborder economic dependence and erode social ties with ethnic kins on the other side of the border. The article also explores the possible community–geography trade-offs in such borderlands.

This article explores some of the traditional ideas and practices of indigenous democracy among the various communities in North East India. Traditional institutions of governance in the region are repudiated today as autocratic and authoritarian, or at best oligarchic. This oversight is imminent unless their cultures and customs, which are closely linked to their institutions of governance, are examined. In most traditional tribal institutions at the grassroot there is either a direct participation of all adult male or a representative system in which each clan or sub-clan is represented in the village council. Thus one finds pre-modern roots of direct and representative democracy in the traditional polity of indigenous communities in the North East. The article identifies " consensus " as the heart of tribal democracy, and argues for the strengthening of indigenous democracy for deepening democracy in India. However, more democratic reforms of the traditional institutions are needed to particularly include women and the " others ". The findings contribute to the growing literature on the pre-modern roots of modern democracy.

The Indian state of Meghalaya, since its creation in 1972, had been raven by ethnic conflicts between the indigenous tribes and settler non-tribal communities. The domination of business establishments, labour force and other employment opportunities by settlers who are mainly economic migrants from Bangladesh, Nepal and other parts of India resulted in anxiousness among the native locals, resulting in three ethnic riots between indigenous tribals and settler non-tribal communities. By the turn of the twentieth century the state witnessed a relative change in the nature of relations between the ethnic communities. While the relations between the indigenous tribals and settler communities have relatively improved, ethnic tensions shifted to the indigenous tribes. This article uses the perceived threat hypothesis and a combination of rational choice theory and interpretivism to explain empirically observed realities in Meghalaya. Emphasis is placed on the post-1992 period, focusing on the emerging ethnic relations between the indigenous tribes of Meghalaya.

The post-Cold War period witnessed a spurt in ethnicity and ethnic nationalism. This often leads to ethnic mobilisation and movements, and even to the extent of extremism. The Northeastern states of India were no exception to this wave. The region witnessed increasing ethnicisation of ethnies and the resulting rise of problems between the ethnic groups. The extreme forms of such ethnicisation were ethnic conflicts such as the infamous Kuki-Naga conflict of the 1990s, the Hmar-Dimasa conflict, Bodo-Santhal conflict etc. of the new millennium. Ethnic minorities in Meghalaya too, at different times, faced problems in their relationships. This paper primarily deals with the problems faced by ethnic Kukis in Meghalaya by the turn of the twentieth century.

This paper examines the longstanding issue that the Kukis and other communities in Sadar Hills area of Manipur have been waging struggle with respect to their demand to upgrade the Sadar Hills area of Senapati district as a full fledged district. The paper takes the position that full fledged status for Sadar Hills is indeed the rights of Sadar Hills people considering the many decades of administrative inconveniences, developmental bottlenecks and backwardness faced by them and keeping in mind the Government of India’s legal enactment, Manipur (Hill Areas) District Council Act, 1971, granting six Autonomous District Councils, including Sadar Hills, in the hill areas of Manipur which were to be subsequently upgraded as districts. The paper starts with a brief historical background of Sadar Hills and the movement for district status, followed by attempts to examine the various arguments revolving around the issue of district status for Sadar Hills. It also argues that reorganisation of districts based on ethnic lines will have more stability among the ethnically competing groups with a liberal, inclusive and tolerant state government.

At the imperial margin of British India, the Assam Rifles and Burma Military Police fought a resistance war by the Kukis between 1917 and 1919 for the colonial government. In this ‘largest series of military operations conducted’ in the Northeast frontier, different strategies were adopted in two stages by the military forces at a stretch of three years to suppress the uprising. The initial policy of selective elimination of the rebel Kuki chiefs did not work out, as the Kukis did not confront the British in a battleground but chose guerilla warfare and the masses were behind their leaders. To counter guerilla warfare, different unconventional tactics were deployed by the regular army against an irregular force in which the punitive measures were brutal. This chapter will show that the uprising was brutally suppressed after a well-thought-out scheme to break the morale of the Kukis, and in doing so they would never rise again.

This paper examines the recurrent ‘politics of indigeneity’ in Manipur with the emerging notions of space and territoriality, and the increasing demand for ‘political space’ by marginal groups. The perpetual xenophobic anxiety and perceived threat of ‘homogenisation’, which aroused the drive for ‘ethnic revivalism’ in recent years, have been dominating the state’s day-to-day ethno-political life. Treating ‘tribes as indigenous people’ and the synonymous usage of ‘indigenous people as original inhabitant’, the ethno-politics of territory translates into the ‘politics of indigeneity’. The emergent ‘indigenous tribe’ politics is not only a strategy to claim further rights and entitlements from the state, but also questions the ‘indigeneity’ of certain marginal ‘others’ in the state and their rights.

This research project focuses on the resurgence of Kuki-Chin ethnic nationalism in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. The tribe known as Kuki in Manipur is known as Chin in Myanmar—they live on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. Their land was annexed by the British in the 19th century and, during decolonization, divided between the new countries of India and Myanmar. The Kukis have a history of anticolonial resistance, and they have launched postcolonial ethnic nationalist movements to claim an autonomous state. In 2009, the Indian and Myanmar governments started investing in a hydropower project named Tamanthi in the borderland districts of Myanmar. There were protests against that project, because construction would have not only caused large-scale displacement but also led to the erasure of the sacred geography of the Kuki-Chin, and these protests led to the cancelation of the project. The specific research case of the movement against Tamanthi in Myanmar discussed here demonstrates a context in which the Kuki-Chin identity was politicized and forged, which not only stalled the project but led to the resurgence of ethno-nationalist demands on both sides of the border. Through this case study, we analyze the dilemmas, ambivalence, and processes of doing research in borderland communities, and demonstrate that these communities cannot be studied through the standard methodologically nationalist and realist paradigm, that is, a cross-country comparison of cases. To appreciate how and why ethno-nationalism and secessionism emerges whenever there is a state intervention for “development,” we need an “ethno-historical,” constructivist, and “emic” understanding of the making of these borderland communities and the liminal spaces they inhabit.

Gangpijang kho hi 1961 kum in ana kisat nin, atamjo Naga hon India douna a gal ahinsat kipat uva chuleh amaho tamna Manipur sahlang gamkai a cheng Kuki ho asuhtheng nom jeh uva ahin nodoh ahilouleh ahung jamdoh ho grouping centre anahi. Hiche ahung kichondoh kho ho chu ahileh tua Ukhrul district lhumlam gamkai a ana um Khokon, Wasangphung, Leisanphung le Changsang khomite anahi. Gangpijang kho hi kapen namun ahina ban nah 1987 kum kim chan kana um in ahi. Hiche kum khat sunga ana peng ho chu ahileh tu a KWS Bangalore a pastor Rev. Silas Jangminlen, aum talou Lenneo, Tilthang ho anahi in ahi. Gangpijang a anacheng ho chu atamjo ana chennao Ukhrul gam a konna kho ijhat ham kisukhom ahijeh uvin kho dang bang louva phungtin kilongdel a chenkhomna chu anahi. Hiche kho ahung kisat lo najeh jong hi tukhang a khangthah hon ahet uva, kihambolna le nam ngailutna aneibe na diuva poimotah khat ahi katinom me.

This chapter looks into the economic measures taken by the British to crush the morale of the Kukis and bring the uprising under control, as well as the resilient indigenous economy of the Kukis during the Anglo-Kuki War. Through the scant references from tour diaries of colonial British political officers, despatch of operations against the Kuki tribes, and correspondences between different military officers involved in the war, I explore the subsistence economy of the Kukis during the war. Evidence from official military accounts and ethnographic studies around that time is helpful and used as an analogy for the economic practices of the Kukis during the war. The chapter explores the reasons for the failure of the resistance struggle despite such resilient subsistence practices.

This brief article critically reviews various recent essays and publications on the Kuki–Naga conflict of the 1990s. The conflict has resulted in uprooting hundreds of villages, with the loss of more than a thousand lives, destruction of valuable properties and internal displacement. While British colonial policies of governance in Northeast India and the rise of ethnic nationalism among Kukis and Nagas in the post-independence period have been identified as major root causes of the Kuki–Naga conflict, the literature remains inconclusive and this article argues that today competing claims and perceived threats regarding land and territory appear to be the major cause of continuing tensions.

In 2008 an insurgent group in India’s Northeastern region direct-to-video release a documentary film Mirror of the Kuki Nation. Operating mainly in the Kamuching area in Saikul subdivision of the state of Manipur, the Kuki Liberation Army (KLA) signed a tripartite agreement with the Government of India and the Government of Manipur that year for the Suspension of Operations and to begin peace talks for a negotiated settlement of their demands, along with two dozen other Kuki insurgent groups operating in the state. The film is about the experiences of the marginalised Kukis in the state of Manipur. It portrays the darkest phase of Kuki history – attrition, suffering and the sanguinity in the armed movement.

Since the early 1970s, Manipur has been witnessing occasional strikes and bandhs demanding upgradation of the Sadar Hills area of Senapati district into a full-fledged revenue district. Despite being fully aware of the necessity of its upgradation based on administrative convenience, successive Manipur governments have been repeatedly ignoring the wishes of the people. It is high time that the state government, instead of overlooking the issue, deals promptly with ingenuity and positive outcome. SADAR is an abbreviation of Selected Area Development Administrative Region as found in the land records of Manipur. Likewise there are a number of SADARs in many states of India particularly Uttar Pradesh which were established by the British during their colonial rule in India.

On behalf of MAYIM HAYIM RESEARCH INSTITUTE and the Lost Tribes of Israel in America and the Western Hemisphere, I am writing this letter to serve as a legal witness to validate the statements made herein concerning the Lost Tribe Israelite identity of certain of our brother Chikim tribes in Southern Asia.

This is a partial translation of Kuki Shūzō's『偶然性の問題』"Gūzensei-no mondai" (1935).
To maintain the difference between "gūzensei" (偶然性) and "gūzen" (偶然), I have translated the former as "contingency" and the latter as "contingents" (except for Chapter 2 Section 5). Whether or not this distinction has any significance needs further investigations and I also believe that there will be more cases in which it would be better to use different terms than contingency and/or contingents for conveying the meaning of 偶然 and 偶然性 in different contexts.
This translation is a work in progress and if you have any suggestions, criticisms, questions, etc., please feel free to contact the translator.

The Look East policy has emerged as one of the prominent foreign policy initiative India has undertaken in the post-Cold War period. It was launched in the year 1991 by the then Narasimha Rao Government with the aim of developing multifaceted relation with countries of Southeast Asia. Such aims include renewing political contacts, increasing economic integration, and forging security cooperation with several countries of Southeast Asia as a means to strengthen political understanding, and enhancing India’s political role in the dynamic Asia-Pacific region in general and Southeast Asia in particular. As a result the Look East policy is responsible in making India an inalienable part of the Asia-Pacific’s strategic discourse. It is rather a late recognition of the strategic and economic importance of the region to India’s national interests. After 17 years the Look East policy has yielded many benefits and supported India’s economic transformation and growth, including closer strategic contacts between India and Southeast Asian countries, an impressive increase in the quantum of bilateral trade with other developing countries in Asia and increased people-to-people interaction. India’s trade with countries bordering the Northeastern region witnessed a dramatic expansion, with the share going up more than five times. However, this increase in the volume of trade with India’s eastern neighbours has had little or no impact on the Northeast. As a result, in the second phase, the Look East Policy has been given a new dimension wherein India is now looking towards partnership with the ASEAN countries integrally linked to economic and security interests of the Northeastern region.

Thingnam Kishan Singh edited book Look East Policy & India’s North East: Polemics and Perspectives published by Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi is a collection of articles published in the first four issues of a quarterly journal Alternative frames which was rechristened as Alternative Perspective.

Kuki links contingency to the phenomenon of existence. A phi-losophy that forces itself to see contingency behind necessity also dis-covers nothingness behind reality. A philosophy of contingency does not simply see “what there is” but forces itself to be surprised at what it can trace back to nothing other than to contingency.

As soon as the Congress resumes the state government it makes a clear statement that roads and electricity would be their first priority in this tenure. To slowly wipe out the prominent description about Manipur in the existing literatures and media reports as a state of “perpetual cycle of insurgency, community conflicts, drug trafficking, abductions and killings”, the present government needs to work sincerely and show its commitment towards achieving the proactive goals of resolving conflicts, combating corruptions and emphasising good governance.