Meitei

Clans and Kinship

Every Meitei belongs by birth to the salai of the father. Hodson (1908, pp. 73-76) found the Meitei exogamous by salai and marrying within the people as a whole, with further bars between particular clans: the Angom did not marry the Khabananba (Kha Nganba), Moirang or Luang (Luwang); the Luang did not take wives from the Kumul (Khuman), to whom they were held to be related; and the Moirang did not marry the Khabananba or one or two Chenglei families. A man might not marry a woman of his mother's clan, for one generation. Each salai is made up of many yumnaks, family lines whose names are used as surnames; modern accounts also call them sagei. Each clan honoured its own tribal deity, its eponymous ancestor, and its head (piba) led the clan's rites; the heads of the Angom, Kumul and Luang bore the title Ningthou, king, and the Raja was head of the royal clan and of the whole people (pp. 99-100, 110).

The seven salai in Hodson's order (1908, p. 73), under the names used today; his spellings, the tribal deities he names (p. 100) and the yumnak counts of the lists made for the 1901 census, which he printed as Appendix I, are in the notes. Those lists also head each salai with a Hindu gotra; two of the gotra names are not legible in the scan used. Recent Meitei compilations count many more yumnaks than the 1901 lists. Hodson also recorded a tradition that there were once ten clans.

In the Official Lists

The Meitei are not in Manipur's list of Scheduled Tribes (checked against the compiled list of notified Scheduled Tribes, 2026). Some Meitei organisations have asked for the Meitei to be added to Manipur's Scheduled Tribe list; as of 2026 they are not in it. Their place in the central and state OBC lists for Manipur was not checked for this page.

Checked on 2026-11-06 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Meitei (Hodson's Meithei) is the people's own name. Hodson (1908, p. 73) noted that it belonged to the combination of the seven clans rather than to any one of them, though older writers had used it for the royal clan alone. He quoted McCulloch (1859): tradition brought the Moirang from the south, the Kumul (Khuman) from the east and the Meithei and Luang from the north-west, and the Kumul and then the Moirang had each for a time been the strongest, until the Meithei brought them all under one rule. The Meitei chronicle, the Cheitharol Kumbaba, records the spread of the Meitei across Kangleipak, the old name of Manipur, and their joining of the other clans into one confederacy. The Burmese called the country Kathe.

History

In Hodson's account the clans once held separate parts of the valley, and the Moirang, by Loktak lake, kept much of their own government even after their defeat in a battle he dates to 1431 (pp. 59, 73). Vaishnava Hinduism became the religion of the state at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the reign of Pamheiba, known as Garib Nawaz (Garib Niwaz), who also completed the organisation of the six pannas through which men served the state; at about the same time the Meitei script gave way to one based on the Bengali script. Manipur was a princely state under British paramountcy from 1891, merged with India on 15 October 1949 and became a state on 21 January 1972. Manipuri was added to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 1992, and the Meitei Mayek script is in use again.

Faith and Worship

Hodson described the older religion as the worship of ancestors and of deities such as Sanamahi (his Sena Mehi), Laimaren, Panthoibi and Yumthai Lai, of whom every householder was in effect the priest, with each clan honouring its own ancestor-deity and communities their local deities, the Umang Lai. Its rites were led by priests and priestesses, the maiba and maibi, and by the clan heads. Vaishnavism became the religion of the court in the early eighteenth century, with Govindaji as the deity of the royal house. Most Meitei today are Vaishnava Hindus; others follow the revived traditional religion, Sanamahism, and there are Meitei Christians. The Muslims of the valley, whom Hodson called Pang-gans, are a community of their own, the Meitei Pangal.

Deities named in the sources: Sanamahi, Pakhangba, Panthoibi

Customs

Marriage is outside the salai and, for a man, outside his mother's salai for one generation. Lai Haraoba, 'making merry with the gods', is the festival of the old deities: Hodson, quoting McCulloch, describes married women and girls led by priestesses, with men and boys in the dress of former times, dancing and singing before the deity. At Cheiraoba, which Hodson writes Chirouba, at the close of the month Lamda in mid-April, houses are cleaned, new clothes are worn and old earthen cooking pots broken, and the man who gives his name to the year is chosen. The love story of Khamba and Thoibi of Moirang is sung to the pena, a one-stringed fiddle, and Hodson found it 'supremely popular'.

Festivals

Stories and Legends

Notable Personalities