EVERYONE'S AN ARTIST:
An Introduction to the Meitei Culture of Manipur

CONTEMPORARY INDIAN THEATRE:
AN OVERVIEW

RATAN THIYAM:
ELUSIVE DISSENT

EVERYONE’S AN ARTIST

By L. Somi Roy, The Asia Society

PART 1 | PART 2

When a Meitei infant begins to flex its tiny fingers, as all infants do, doting adults gather around and exclaim, with their own dance gestures—
ta’ding! ta’ding!—how it has begun to dance. Every Meitei, as the million and a half valley inhabitants of Manipur are called, learns to become an artist at an early age. Child Krishnas in silk of sunflower yellow, crowned with peacock feathers and bamboo flute in hand, take part in Sanjenba, the annual children’s ballet-opera. Some, as young as two, merely stand in costume, as older children sing and dance around them.

Children go through rigorous, formal training in dance at an early age, and performances take place at neighborhood Hindu temples, local groves of animist shrines, or the village green. In the Meitei culture of Manipur, the line between the performer and the spectator is permeable and easily crossed and the distinction between classical and folk forms is unclear at best.

Meitei culture is also unusually rich, exhibiting in a microcosm, a range of art forms found in larger cultures. Meiteis have their own language and cosmology and produces a range of artistic expressions—traditional, modern and popular—in dance, music, theater, literature, film, video and television. Little known even in India, much less to the outside world, Meitei culture in Manipur exhibits the strong tribal roots of the surrounding Nagas and Mizo tribes, as well as the blend of Indian and Southeast Asian cultural influences one would reasonably expect from this state of India on the border of Myanmar.

What is most distinctive about Meitei culture is that it is about itself. Much like Bali in Indonesia, its highest cultural achievements are created, consumed and judged largely within itself. While financial patronage from Bombay and New Delhi may be important, the highest aesthetic appraisal of, say Manipuri dance, lies with Meitei ojas (teachers) and an informed public. Imphal is not only its official capital but also a cultural capital of a distinct culture, to the extent that, not content with what Hollywood and Bombay has to offer, it produces its own popular and pulp detective novels, soap operas, and Meitei versions of Bollywood films.

This distinct nature of Meitei culture goes beyond regional variations in India. For one thing, Manipur, like the rest of the region between Bangladesh and Myanmar known as Northeast India, is inhabited by people who are ethno-linguistically Tibeto-Burman. As a feudal kingdom, known also as Meckley or Mekhala, the Meitei kingdom of Manipur had been relatively isolated and inaccessible for most of its 2000 years. It lay along a minor trade route from India to Mandalay and on to Kunming. It was only in 1949, after the departure of the British, that Manipur was absorbed into the Indian Union, without having been part of any Indian empires that existed before the British period. When the Meiteis converted to the bhakti sect of Vaishnavite Hinduism in the 18th century, it did not replace but began to co-exist with the animist, ancestor-worshipping religion of the Meiteis.

Manipuri Dance, though Manipuri Dances would be more accurate, is the best-known art form of the Meiteis in Manipur. Recognized as one of the four classical dances of India during the construction of the idea of modern India, it is derived from four major sources: Jagoi, Thang-ta, Lai Haraoba and Sankirtan. Jagoi is folk community dance, whether celebrating the harvest or spring. Thang-ta, literally sword and spear, is one of five Meitei martial art forms. The Lai Haraoba, when women shamans dance the universe into being, is the most important and defining performance rituals of the Meiteis. It celebrates the cosmology, creation and history of the shamanistic, ancestor-worshipping animism of pre-Hindu Manipur. Sankirtan, the flower of Manipuri Dance, with its most celebrated form, the Ras Lila, is the music and dance of that emerged after the arrival of Vaishnavism. Meitei dance and music also finds contemporary expressions in new compositions in the established traditions as well as new forms using these vocabularies in abstract modern ballets.