NEXT STOP: MANIPUR
Please alight for:
the ‘Switzerland of India’
a market run entirely by women
the world’s only floating national park
the birthplace of polo
Car 1 is reserved for Shirui lilies –please refrain from picking
Car 2 is offering a crash course in phumdi hopping
Car 3 is strictly for Sangai deer — mind the antlers
The buffet car is now serving eromba, chak-hao kheer and black rice tea.
Welcome to Manipur — মণিপুরলৈ স্বাগতম
MANIPUR
‘Jewelled Land’
From Sanskrit: maṇi (jewel) and pura (city)
Manipur carries the old myth of Vasuki the serpent-god scattering gemstones across the valley, and Manipuri — soft, circular, dreamlike — is one of India’s great classical dance traditions.
Its story begins in the valley-ringed kingdom of Kangleipak. For centuries, Meitei kings ruled this fertile bowl: a civilisation with its own script, court poetry, festivals, indigenous religion (Sanamahism), and a political identity rooted firmly in the valley. The surrounding hills were home to a mosaic of Naga and Kuki-Zo groups, each with their own chieftainships, migrations and origin tales, linked to the valley through kinship, ritual exchange, trade and occasional conflict.
In 1714, King Gharib Nawaz (Pamheiba) adopted Vaishnavite Hinduism, reshaping Meitei identity and giving the kingdom its present name.
After the Anglo-Manipur War of 1891, the British reduced Manipur to a princely state: internally autonomous but under imperial oversight. At Independence it merged with India rather than Burma; the loss of autonomy, however, was sharply felt.
The decades after the merger saw growing grievances — centralised administration, uneven development, and a deepening valley–hill divide. By the 1960s and 70s, political discontent had crystallised into armed movements, some Meitei-led, others rooted in the hills, each with its own demands. Statehood in 1972 did little to resolve the underlying tensions.
Today the valley remains largely Meitei, ringed by Naga and Kuki-Zo regions whose histories and political aspirations continue to shape Manipur’s troubled modern landscape.
IMPHAL— ‘Cluster of Houses’
From Meitei: yum (house) and phal (together).
Imphal is often pronounced yum-phal. This implies a collection of houses or villages surrounding a royal enclosure at a time when most of them would be buried in a jungle of bamboo and plantain trees.
Imphal began as a ring of clustered settlements around the Kangla Fort, seat of Meitei kingship. It was here that the kingdom held out during repeated Burmese incursions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the devastating Seven Years’ Devastation (1819–26), when much of the valley was depopulated.
In 1891 a palace revolution unseated Surachandra Singh and replaced him with Kulachandra Singh, his younger brother, and Tikendrajit Singh, another brother who was Chief of the army and wielded power behind the scenes. The British intervened (Manipur was a British Protectorate) and held Tikendrajit responsible for the coup. When they tried to arrest him the Manipuri soldiers fought back and five British officers were killed (including J W Quinton, the Chief Commissioner of Assam, and Frank Grimwood, the Political Agent). A brief war ensued and following their defeat five Manipuri commanders, including Tikendrajit, were hanged. Bir Tikendrajit Park commemorates the site of their execution.
During the Second World War the Japanese attempted to invade India via Manipur. The Battle of Imphal (March to July 1944) stopped them in their tracks. revitalised capital later became the centre of resistance during the Anglo-Manipur confrontation of 1891 and, half a century later, the site of the pivotal Battle of Imphal (1944), which turned the tide of the Burma campaign in WWII.
Where Do Manipur’s Place Names Come From?
Manipur’s place names spring from Meitei (Manipuri) — a Tibeto-Burman language rich in words for hills, wetlands, forests and rituals — with layers from tribal languages (Naga, Kuki-Chin) and later Hindu-Vaishnava influence. Many names encode the landscape: a fortified hill, a bamboo grove, a lake edge, a marsh where buffalos grazed. Others reflect clan origins, shrines, or legendary events from the Cheitharol Kumbaba (a royal chronicle).
As villages shifted or merged over time, names moved with them, sometimes shortening or collapsing into forms that colonial officers later Romanised. The result is Manipur’s distinctive toponymic blend: concise and descriptive.
ANDRO — ‘Offering’
From Meitei: andu, ‘burnt offering’, ‘charcoal, ‘sacrificial fire’; and changba/chingba, ‘to make/perform.’
This fits the village’s long role as a custodian of Meitei ancestor-fire traditions and its association with ritual specialists. Even under colonial rule Andro retained its status as a ritual centre where clan lore, metallurgy, and seasonal festivals were maintained despite the valley’s push toward Vaishnavism.
Its black pottery — shaped by beating the clay rather than turning a wheel — reflects pre-Hindu craft traditions.
BISHNUPUR ‘City of Vishnu’
From Vishnu and Sanskrit: pur, ‘town’, ‘(fortified) settlement’.
Manipur Valley turned to Vaishnavism in the fifteenth-century. Bishnupur, is named after its Vishnu temple built under the patronage of Ningthouja kings as this new Hindu influence spread through the court.
Pilgrims used to approached the shrine through groves thick with bamboo and jackfruit; today the old brick sanctum still stands at the centre of a town shaped by the ebb and flow of royal patronage, Burmese raids, and later the arrival of the Assam–Bengal frontier administration.
Named after its fifteenth-century Vishnu temple, Bishnupur still centres on its shrine and tank, tucked between low hills and old pilgrimage routes.
CHURACHANDPUR (LAMKA) — ‘Crossroads’
Named after Maharaja Churachand Singh, but known locally as Lamka (‘crossroads’), this frontier town grew where Kuki-Zo, Hmar, Paite and Thadou routes converged.
In the late nineteenth century it became central to Kuki resistance against British expansion, especially during the Kuki Rebellion of 1917–19, when the hills mobilised against forced labour levies.
In the post-Independence decades, Lamka emerged as a hub for churches, insurgent negotiations, refugee movements, and cross-border trade with Myanmar.
KAKCHING — ‘Kakching People’
Kakching’s identity is bound to its community and dialect, a branch of Meitei with its own ancestral deity, Ebudhou Khamlangba. Oral traditions credit him with founding the region’s early iron industry, establishing smelting sites wherever ore and charcoal were available.
Kakching supplied iron to valley kingdoms and later to British frontier posts. Its reputation for civic organisation and cleanliness is longstanding, a legacy of tight-knit lineage institutions and women-led market committees that managed water, sanitation, and trade through periods of upheaval.
KANGLA FORT — ‘Hill Fort’
From Old Meitei: kangla, ‘prominence’, ‘hill’
Kangla Fort, sited 394m above the valley, was the ritual and political centre of Meitei kingship — a palace, citadel and sacred landscape in one—for over a thousand years.
Successive Ningthouja kings expanded it with moats, earthen ramparts, coronation sites and shrines to Kangla Sha, ‘the beast of the Kangla‘—portrayed with a lion’s body and a two-horned dragon’s head.
The fort was repeatedly attacked during Burmese invasions and finally captured by the British in 1891, who then barred Manipuris from entering it for over a century. Returned to the state only in 2004, Kangla has since become a powerful emblem of renewal and historical reclamation.
LOKTAK LAKE — ‘Abandoned Stream’
From Meitei: lok, ‘stream’; and takpa, ‘empty’, ‘deserted’, ‘abandoned’.
Loktak is the largest freshwater lake in Northeast India (500km2 in the monsoon season) and is famous for the phumdis (heterogeneous mass of vegetation, soil and organic matter at various stages of decomposition) floating on it.
These phumdis have supported fishing communities for centuries, enabling unique techniques such as athaphum ring-fishing. Kings relied on Loktak for water transport to the western hill passes, while the British used its margins as staging grounds during the 1891 campaign.
Keibul Lamjao National Park, located on the largest of these (40km2), is the only floating national park in the world. The park is the last natural refuge of the endangered brown-antlered Sangai deer [Rucervus eldii eldii], whose near-extinction in the mid-twentieth century sparked one of independent India’s earliest grassroots conservation movements.
MOREH — ‘Southern Plain’
Kuki-Chin roots: mo(u), ‘south’; and reh(-e), ‘plain’, ‘clearing’
A bustling border town linking Manipur with Tamu in Myanmar, Moreh has always been a frontier town: Meitei to the west, Burmese to the east.
Traders once carried salt, betel, dried fish and brassware across the hills. In colonial times the town was a checkpoint on the Indo-Burma frontier and after Independence it became a major commercial artery for textiles, spices and electronics moving along the old Trans-Asian corridor.
Moreh’s mixed population — Meitei, Kuki, Tamil, Nepali, Burmese — reflects centuries of cross-border movement.
SENAPATI — ‘Military Command’
From Sanskrit: sena, ‘army’; and pati, ‘commander’
The name entered Meitei during the 18th–19th centuries. The site where the modern town now stands was designated the “post of the Senapati” — the military command(er) responsible for the Mao–Maram border route. British officers kept the term as the name of the sub-division, then district HQ, and finally the district.
The name may be modern, but the ridges and valleys are ancient Poumai, Mao and Maram territory. The Mao gateway settlement on the northern border taxed caravans moving between Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland long before colonial surveyors arrived.
British forces used the high ridges as staging grounds to penetrate the Naga Hills, and in the 1940s these same ridgelines became evacuation routes for civilians fleeing the Japanese advance. The region’s stone monoliths — some erected after feast-of-merit ceremonies — preserve a record older than written Manipuri history.
THOUBAL — ‘Flooded rice-plain’
From Meitei: thou/thau, ‘paddy’, ‘rice’; and bal/p(h)al, ‘wetland’, ‘flooded field’, ‘marsh’
The name matches the district’s landscape: fertile floodplains along the Thoubal River ideal for rice cultivation, Attempts to derive it from thou (strength) + bal (force) are folk etymologies.
A riverine district of fertile floodplains, Thoubal has long been a centre of fishing, weaving and women-led markets. Its proximity to the Burmese frontier made it vulnerable during the Seven Years’ Devastation, after which it re-emerged as a granary for the resurgent Meitei kingdom.
Thoubal’s women participated in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Nupi Lan (‘Women’s Wars’), mass uprisings against exploitative colonial policies that began in the markets and spilled into the streets of Imphal — a reminder that Manipuri political movements have often been led by women.
UKHRUL — ‘Summit Village’
Tangkhul Naga: uk, ‘head’, ‘top’, ‘summit’ (high, above); and h(r)ul/khul, ‘village’, ‘settlement’
High above the valley, Ukhrul is the spiritual and cultural centre of the Tangkhul Nagas, whose villages once commanded ridge-top routes linking Manipur with present-day Myanmar.
British expeditions reached Ukhrul in the late nineteenth century, forging punitive paths through hill forts built of stone and bamboo. The region later became a WWII transit zone during the race to Imphal, with relief columns passing through Tangkhul territory. Today Ukhrul is associated with the annual bloom of the Shirui Lily, a rare flower once used to mark territorial boundaries between clans.
Shirui Lily Festival:
Mini Glossary of Manipuri (Meitei) Place-Name Elements
(Note: These are the most common and reliable elements for place names in the Imphal valley and surrounding regions.)
-lei / -lei — flower, bloom
e.g. Khongnang-lei — place of the banyan flowers (symbolic)
-lok — stream, rivulet
e.g. Thangmeiband Lok — near the Thangmeiband stream
-pung — mound, drum-shaped hill
e.g. Pungdongbam — the village by the drum-shaped mound
-ching — hill
e.g. Chingmeirong — village beneath the hill
-khong / -kong — bridge
e.g. Sanakhong — golden bridge (often metaphorical)
-phai / -pai — open field, plain
e.g. Phaileng — the wide open field
-wang / -wong — slope, declivity
e.g. Wangoi — place on a gentle slope
-mapal — gate, entrance, front
e.g. Sagolband Mapal — the outer part of Sagolband
-nung / -nong — stone, rock
e.g. Nungba (nearby region) — stony place
-laipham / -laikon — sacred precinct, shrine-ground
e.g. Laipham Khunou — new village beside the deity’s ground
-pat — lake, reservoir
e.g. Loktak Pat — the Loktak Lake
-khun / -khunou / -khullen — village / new village / old village
e.g. Khurai Khunou — lower/new part of Khurai
e.g. Khullen — original settlement
-thong — crossing, pass, door
e.g. Ithai Thong — crossing/place of Ithai
For more on Indian place names and history - see Place Names Wallah
For a journey through tribal India & Sri Lanka see - Headhunting with Marguerite