ABSTRACT
In June 2013 I was searching the laneways of Yaiskul Hiruhanba Leikai, an established Meitei neighbourhood inhabited by descendants of the royal family and the Meitei aristocracy located just south of the central area around Kangla Fort, for ‘the house with a big mandop’. It was more difficult than I expected. The houses in the neighbourhood were either behind outer cement walls or on the other side of pukhris, household or community ponds. Yaiskul is pleasant to walk around. There are few cars, there is little rubbish on the ground, kids are running around in the laneways playing ball games and firing slingshots into trees, and it’s green. Screens of tall bamboo line the edge of family compounds adjoining cement walls, and fruit trees dangle from household compounds into the narrow dirt laneways, some with a phanek, the Meitei sarong, tied around the trunk to promote fertility. Beneath one bamboo grove there were a cluster of bicycles, the standard Hero model in various stages of rust, and a few white cars parked across the width of laneway. A path led down to the mandop, a pavilion with open walls on three sides (sometimes four) and a ceiling used for rituals, theatre, music recitals, playing sports like kang, and for feeding guests during festivals and family and clan events. Mandop are found in the compounds of Brahmin families in Manipur, and remain one of the most telling visual clues as to the caste and faith of a family, and the ethnic composition of a neighbourhood (Singh, 1963). Mandops are reminders of the conversion of the Meitei population, at least part of it, to Vaishnavite Hinduism in the 18th century, during which certain communities, such as the Chapka and Loi were considered outcaste, the majority of the population were considered Kshatriya, and Brahmin priests were imported from Bengal and eventually integrated into the Meitei ethnic milieu (Singh, 2001). The indigenous Sanamahi faith never really disappeared (Parratt, 1980), and indeed since the 1990s has undergone a major revival. In the face of the Sanamahi revival, in the aftermath of communist insurgencies in the 1980s and 1990s, the continued influence of ethno-nationalist movements that reject imported faith from India, and with increased Christian conversion and settlement of Christians from the hill areas in Imphal, the social significance of Brahmins in on the wane (Parratt and Parratt, 1997: xiii). However, on this afternoon one would not known it.
