This article presents a historical and archival examination of the territorial and political transformation of Manipur through the lens of the Naga-Kuki conflict of the 1990s and its continuing consequences. It traces the colonial-era settlement of Kuki populations in Naga territories, the administrative regulation of those settlements under the Manipur State Darbar, postcolonial refugee relief and demographic change, the construction of linguistic and ethnic categories, the emergence of Kuki armed organisations, and the outbreak of the 1992–1993 Naga-Kuki War. The article analyses Naga strategic restraint during the war as a measure that preserved political space for the Naga movement’s international diplomatic engagement, and documents the post-war institutionalisation of armed Kuki structures through the Suspension of Operations framework. It further examines the post-2023 Meitei-Kuki conflict and the transformation of Manipur’s conflict landscape into a wider multi-ethnic territorial confrontation. It argues that the territorial question in Manipur cannot be understood independently of the longer history of migration, settlement, administrative recognition, demographic transformation, armed political mobilisation, and institutional recognition. While the Naga political question retains its distinct historical and international trajectory, processes of territorial reorganisation and armed mobilisation increasingly produce consequences for Naga, Meitei, and other indigenous communities. The article concludes by proposing a programme of archival, legal, scholarly, and informational infrastructure to preserve the documentary record and ensure that the history of Naga ancestral territory is not forgotten.
Introduction: The Territorial Question Before the War
The territorial claim associated with Kukiland did not emerge from a neutral ethnic map. It developed through successive processes of settlement, administrative classification, political patronage, armed mobilisation, and the reconstruction of ethnic and linguistic boundaries. The 1992 Naga Kuki War was not the beginning of the territorial process but its violent culmination.
The violence that has consumed Manipur in recent years is the culmination of a historical process spanning nearly two centuries, a process in which colonially facilitated settlement, administrative engineering, the development and patronage of armed formations, and the political construction of a unified territorial identity have combined to transform a region of diverse indigenous communities into a battlefield.
This article presents the Naga position as a defence of ancestral territory, customary authority, and historically established political space. Its purpose is to investigate, document and defend the Naga position concerning ancestral territory, customary authority, historical settlement, political continuity and the consequences of colonial and postcolonial intervention. The territorial dispute in Manipur cannot be explained solely by ethnic antagonism. Its deeper history lies in the interaction of successive settlement movements, colonial classification, postcolonial administrative recognition, political patronage, armed mobilisation, and the later conversion of ethnographic and demographic categories into territorial claims.
Colonial Settlement and Demographic Transformation
The presence of Kuki communities in Manipur is not a simple historical constant. The documentary record reveals a complex pattern of migration, settlement, and demographic transformation driven by colonial strategic calculations.
In the early nineteenth century, the Kuki tribes inhabited the hills south of the Manipur valley, while Naga tribes were distributed in the hills to the north. This distribution was not static. James Johnstone, Political Agent in Manipur, recorded that the Kukis were “first heard of as Kukis, in Manipur, between 1830 and 1840,” and that the new immigrants subsequently entered the hill tracts in large numbers, displacing older inhabitants. He further recorded that the Political Agent, Colonel McCulloch, responded by settling them and allotting land according to their numbers and according to locations where their presence would be useful on exposed frontiers (Johnstone 1896, 25–26).
This is a late nineteenth century colonial account, not a modern political statement. The colonial administration actively facilitated and directed this settlement. The United Naga Council (UNC), the apex body of twenty Naga tribes, has stated that the British “planted” the Kukis on the Naga hills between 1830 and 1840 (United Naga Council, as cited in The Hindu 2023; The New Indian Express 2023). The British found the Kukis useful as a “mercenary tribe” and utilised their “total lack of attachment to any land and landscape” to crush the indigenous communities of Manipur. G. Bhadra wrote that the dependence on Kukis to control other tribes, especially against the Nagas in Northeast India, was the “cornerstone” of British policy towards the hill tribes (Bhadra, cited in Shodhganga, as quoted in United Naga Council materials).
Under the policy of British Political Agent Colonel William McCulloch, Maharaja Nara Singh granted frontier lands to incoming Kukis as early as 1844, strategically settling them in Manipur’s exposed Naga borders to fortify the kingdom’s defences (Roberts 1871; Woodthorpe 1873). During the Lushai Expedition of 1871–1872, 649 Mizo captives were liberated and resettled under the Maharaja’s rule. A massive influx of 2,112 refugees, 373 Sukte, 957 Paite, 110 Soomtie (Paite vassals), and 612 Mizos, fled persecution and sought sanctuary beneath Manipur’s protective crown, planting roots in the Thangjing range. These were not autonomous migrants; they were subjects of the crown, settled and administered by the Manipur State (Carey and Tuck 1896; Reid 1942).
The 1881 census lays bare the demographic transformation. According to the first Census of Manipur, the tribal population was composed of 70.24 percent Naga groups (59,904 persons), 9.59 percent Old Kuki groups (8,180 persons), and 20.17 percent New Kuki groups (17,204 persons). The Meitei population was 130,796, constituting 59.16 percent of the total (Gazetteer of Manipur 1886, as cited in KRCTimes 2024). The New Kuki population was more than twice the Old Kuki population within this classification. The historical Kuki population of Manipur was not a single immemorial population; it included later immigrant populations whose settlement was facilitated, regulated and sometimes rehabilitated by the colonial and postcolonial state. Kuki settlement in Naga areas was a colonial era settlement process deliberately facilitated by the colonial political administration and the Manipur State.
This historical record directly contradicts contemporary Kuki Zo political narratives that claim the Kuki Zo Hills were never under the Manipur State Durbar’s control before Independence. The KNO and UPF have argued that under British rule, Kuki Zo lands were designated “excluded areas” under the Government of India Act, 1935 (The Telegraph India 2025; India Today 2025). These assertions are difficult to reconcile with the documented historical record examined here.
The Manipur State Darbar Standing Orders
The documentary chain of the Manipur State Darbar Standing Orders is among the most powerful evidence of the conditional nature of Kuki settlement and the recognition of Naga village authority.
Standing Order No. 11, 18 August 1931
“The Kukis shall not be issued fire arms because of savagery nature against the Nagas.” (Manipur State Darbar 1931)
It nevertheless provided for firearms to be loaned for protection against wild animals.
Standing Order No. 9, 9 September 1933
“Kuki village having 20 household shall pay house tax of Rs. 6 per annum.” (Manipur State Darbar 1933)
Standing Order No. 2, 23 July 1941
“The Kukis shall obtain prior permission from the Chief of the Naga Village for settlement and pay house tax to the Naga Chief.” (Manipur State Darbar 1941; India Today NE 2025)
The same order characterised Kukis residing in Naga areas as “Aliens and Refugees.”
These orders establish a sequence: security regulation in 1931, taxation in 1933, and settlement permission with payment to Naga authorities in 1941. Taken together, these orders indicate that the Manipur State Darbar regulated Kuki settlement in Naga areas through permission, taxation and recognition of Naga village authority. The description of Kukis in Naga areas as “Aliens and Refugees” carries its full weight as part of this administrative record.
The 1950 Kathipri Report and Postcolonial Settlement
A significant post colonial document further documents the migration pattern. A report dated 18 May 1950, from O. Kathipri, SDO Ukhrul, to the Deputy Commissioner of Manipur, documented “unchecked influx along the Manipur Burma border” (Kathipri 1950, as cited in India Today NE).
Kathipri observed individuals, “particularly Kukis, moving from Saiyapaw to Keithenmanbi in Manipur.” He warned that “continued influx particularly aided by Kuki chiefs seeking to enlarge their villages would soon overwhelm the local population, posing serious socio political consequences.”
This report provides a bridge between colonial and postcolonial settlement, demonstrating that the settlement question did not disappear with the end of British rule.
The migration from Myanmar’s Chin State into Manipur intensified after Myanmar’s 1962 military coup. The Government of India, vide Memo No. P3/9/66 of the Finance Ministry of Home Affairs, agreed to grant the Kukis relief fund or refugee fund. Payments were made in three instalments: 22 April 1957, 7 July 1959, and 28 February 1966 (Government of India, Finance Ministry of Home Affairs, Memo P3/9/66, as cited in e pao.net). These relief fund records confirm a state recognised refugee population. Read alongside the colonial settlement record, they show that Kuki presence in Manipur cannot be reduced to a timeless indigenous claim, but must be understood through documented settlement, administrative regulation and later political reclassification.
Colonial Classification, Linguistic Mapping and Territorial Identity
The colonial state did not simply record existing identities. It actively constructed and reified them through ethnographic surveys, census classifications, administrative maps, and linguistic categorisation.
The term “Kuki” came to function as a broad colonial ethnographic category encompassing several communities that were administratively and linguistically diverse. The United Naga Council has argued that the name “Kuki” entered the Manipur record during the period of British intervention, placing its emergence around 1830 1840 (The New Indian Express 2023; Nagaland Tribune 2023).
In the linguistic field, the most important colonial source is George Abraham Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, particularly Volume III, Part III, Tibeto Burman Family: Specimens of the Kuki Chin and Burma Groups, published in Calcutta in 1904. Grierson classified a wide range of languages and speech varieties within the broad Kuki Chin grouping. The classification was explicitly linguistic rather than territorial. A linguistic classification is not a territorial title deed. It does not establish sovereignty, historical ownership, territorial boundaries, political unity, customary authority, or a right to a unified homeland (Grierson 1904). The subsequent conversion of a linguistic family into a political identity and territorial claim represents a modern political construction, not a historical entitlement derived from the survey itself.
The contemporary political use of the broader “Kuki Zo” designation represents a modern political consolidation of communities whose identities, institutions, and historical experiences have not always been identical. The origin narratives of Sinlung and Khul, whatever their cultural significance, are not equivalent to documentary evidence of historical sovereignty or territorial administration. Scholars have noted that Sinlung functions as an “imagined homeland,” mobilised for political purposes to create a sense of shared ancestry among diverse communities that were, in fact, administratively and politically distinct (Kamei 2004).
The Thadou Convention of November 2024 stated that Thadous reject and disown the term “Kuki,” which was “coined by colonial rulers, supposedly known as a conglomerate of several constituent tribes, without which it is non existent and irrelevant” (Thadou Convention 2024). It rejected and condemned all “colonial and post colonial connotations and writings that gave rise to the misidentification of Thadou as Kuki.”
The Kuki Zo political project has explicitly invoked historical claims to justify its territorial demands. The KNO and UPF have argued that the Kuki Zo Hills were never under the Manipur State Durbar’s control before Independence (The Telegraph India 2025; India Today 2025). The UNC has stated that the Kuki Zo people’s “representation to the Union government, Israel’s Prime Minister, European Parliament, UNO, etc., is on false territorial foundation and an attempt to befool those authorities because in the context of Manipur, the name Kuki was first heard sometime between 1830 1840 and therefore, ‘Kuki hills’ … is non existent and Utopian concoction” (Nagaland Tribune 2023). Linguistic classification cannot retrospectively create territorial sovereignty.
The Divided House: Representation and the Kuki Zo Question
The Kukiland project claims to represent a unified people, a “Kuki Zo” ethnic bloc. This claim is contested by substantial portions of the very population it purports to represent.
In November 2024, a Thadou Convention in Guwahati declared the Thadou community a distinct tribe independent of Kuki identity. The Convention’s resolution stated: “Thadou is not Kuki, or underneath Kuki, or part of Kuki, but a separate, independent entity from Kuki” (Thadou Convention 2024; NDTV 2024; Times of India 2024; The Indian Express 2024). The Thadou are the largest single tribe in Manipur. Their rejection of the Kuki label is not marginal dissent; it is a formal resolution of a major Thadou representative body. The response from the Kuki National Front was immediate. It threatened to abduct and kill Thadou leaders who refused the Kuki label (Kuki National Front, as cited in The Northeast Affairs 2024).
The Thadou are not alone. The Zomi Council has rejected the legitimacy of the “Kuki Zo” designation, asserting that “any organisation bearing the name Kuki Zo Council stands rejected and is unwelcome in all Zomi inhabited areas” (Zomi Council 2025; ThePrint 2025; NDTV 2025; India Today NE 2025). The Hmar Inpui, the apex tribal body of the Hmar community, has formally withdrawn from the Kuki Zo Council (Hmar Inpui 2026, as cited in e pao.net). The Anal Naga Tangpi Association called the Kukiland project “a brainless and serious crime” (Anal Naga Tangpi Association 2018, as cited in The Sangai Express 2020).
The Lamkang Naga Kver Kunpun has affirmed the distinct identity of the Lamkang Nagas (Lamkang Naga Kver Kunpun 2019). Similar objections have been expressed by the Monsang, Chothe, and Anal communities (Sirti Upa Ruh, in Morung Express 2016; Anal Naga Tangpi, in e pao.net 2016; Chothe Civil Organisations, in e pao.net 2016).
The Federation of Naga Civil Societies, representing the Tangkhul, Mao, Maram, and Poumai tribes, has likewise rejected the Kukiland project and called for the withdrawal of Kuki armed groups from Naga territories (Federation of Naga Civil Societies 2026). The documented cases reveal a recurring pattern: several representative bodies have rejected the Kuki or Kuki Zo designation, while some armed organisations have responded aggressively to such assertions of separate identity.
The political claim to speak for a unified Kuki territorial population is internally contested, including by communities whose identities are incorporated into contemporary territorial narratives.
To be concluded
(The views expressed are personal. The author is an Independent Researcher on Indo Naga Political Issues, and can be reached at dependent.for.all@gmail.com)
