MANIPURI DANCE has been in existence since long before the beginning of any written history of the people of Manipur. In fact, Manipuri dance is the vehicle of pre-literate tribal memory for the Meiteis, who inhabit the valley of Manipur, a small state in the northeastern corner of India. Their oldest myths make mention of dance, and the continued existence of the same dances featured in the old stories serves to reinforce the validity of the mythology, in terms of tracing the origins of the dance tradition.

According to the Australian anthropologist Louise Lightfoot, the Meitei word for dance, "jagoi", actually means "chak-koi",or "the going round (koi) of the ages (chak)."1 That is to say, dance among the Meiteis is synonymous with history. To take only one example, the most popular dance among young people in Manipur is called "Thabal-chongba", or "moonlight-jumping."

During the full-moon nights of spring, the Meitei New Year season, young men from various neighborhoods and villages go from house to house, calling the young women ("lei-shabees") out to dance. The young people form a chain, holding hands boy-girl, boy-girl, and dance vigorously for hours at a time, shouting "Kre-kre-kre! Mou! Mou!" The dance refers to a fight between the two sons of the Creator, known in Manipur as Atingkok.

Each of his sons wanted to be appointed ruler of the earth. They were constantly maneuvering and playing tricks on one another to win their father's favor. One time, the younger son, Pakhangba, had taken the form of a rooster. His elder brother, Sanamahi, took the form of a tiger and tried to devour Pakhangba.

But their mother, Ima Leimaren, sent the Lai Nuras, seven angels, to protect Pakhangba. The angels formed a chain and kept dancing between the combatants, preventing the tiger from reaching his prey. Thus the Meitheis sing "Kre-kre-kre" (the crowing of the rooster) and "Mou! Mou!" (the growling of the tiger) while dancing in a chain through the moonlit nights.

DANCE in Manipur also serves to transfer specific information from generation to generation. The shamans of the Meiteis, called "Maibis", depict the entire way of life through dance.

The farming, fishing, weaving, and house-building skills, which originally set them apart from the hunter-gatherer tribes of the hills, all appear in step-by-step order in the dance rituals of the Maibis. The Maibis also describe the creation of the cosmos and of human beings in dance.

In fact, the Maibis have many functions: they are midwives, herbalists, clairvoyants, and spiritual leaders. But it is as dancers that they are most well known; their dancing is at once a fulfillment of a religious duty to the community and an expression of the Maibi's inner dedication.

WHILE not requiring a high degree of physical virtuosity, the Maibis' repertoire encompasses a wide variety of dances, demanding great concentration and stamina. These dances are exhibited once a year, during a ten-day period of ritual worship performed entirely by the Maibis themselves or by villagers under the direction of the Maibis.

Each individual village, composed of a core family and its sub-groups, conducts its own yearly ritual, and a village has one or more Maibis organizing the ceremony. These Maibis dance, sometimes alone, often in groups at the head of a long line of villagers.

These parade-like dances resemble the pow-wow dances of Native Americans, in their essential purpose (delineating the perimeter of the sacred ritual area), as well as in the sense that all the villagers, regardless of age or sex, eventually join the line. In this way, children learn the dances easily by following their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older siblings. This is one reason that the Manipuri people are often referred to as a nation of dancers.

THE MAIBI dances consist of three classes of movement. The first is spinning movement, which eventually sends the dancer into a state of trance, conducive to spiritual possession and prophecy. The dancer then kneels, is covered by a veil, and speaks in the ancient form of the Meithei language, hardly understood by the villagers but recognized as the voice of the patron spirit of their forefathers.

The second type of movement is expressional, in which the dancer, using stylized hand movements and body postures, relates certain proto-historical events such as the creation of the world. The third class of movement is demonstrative, in which the Maibis act out processes such as house building and fishing.

All of these dances are said to date from the "Hayee Chak", roughly 2,000 B.C.[2] Whether the dances performed today are in any way similar to the dances of the first settlers of the valley is a matter of pure speculation. But the fact that the Manipuri people trace the roots of their culture as far back as 4,000 years in a continuous dance tradition is little short of miraculous.

IN THE early decades of the eighteenth century A.D., the royal family that ruled the valley of Manipur was converted from the age-old system of ancestor worship guided by the Maibis. They were visited by Brahmin priests from nearby Bengal, who taught them the tenets of Hinduism.

Over a period of several generations, the rulers of Manipur adopted Hinduism, built temples or shrines to various Hindu deities such as Vishnu and Hanuman, and encouraged the people to worship at these shrines. Eventually, Hinduism was declared the state religion of Manipur. Accustomed as they were to expressing their religious faith through dance ritual, the Manipuri people were inclined to approach Hinduism in the same way.

Bengali missionaries introduced the art of kirtan-singing, in which groups of men or women congregate to sing religious lyrics, while playing drums and cymbals. The Manipuri people adopted and developed this style with alacrity, using their own traditional technique of voice production and movement patterns. While singing, they step and turn gracefully in unison, and their hands trace flowing patterns, causing the long tassels attached to their cymbals to swing in dramatic arcs.

INTERESTINGLY, the Meiteis never abandoned their old beliefs. Although one of the first Hindu kings, Garibniwaz, ordered all pre-Hindu written texts burned, and the Bengali proselytizers induced the Meitei pandits to abandon their own alphabet and use the Bengali alphabet instead, somehow the ancient legends and myths survived.

So great was the Meiteis' dependence on the Maibi tradition that the yearly fertility festivals, known as "Lai Haraoba" or "spirits' pleasure", have been performed continuously right up to the present day. It is quite normal for a Manipuri to attend the Hindu temple in the morning and a Lai Haraoba festival in the evening, although members of the royal family did not commonly participate in Lai Haraoba after their conversion to Hinduism.

To be continued ...