Tangkhul

Clans and Kinship

Hodson (1911, pp. 71-74, 78-79) describes the clan as made up of families of kin in the male line, holding its own part of the village and strictly exogamous, and believed to descend from a common ancestor whose name it often bears. A village has at least two clans. The clan is the unit of marriage, of the rites for a death and, in the past, of blood feud, and the heads of the clans had religious duties. Most villages had an officer with the Manipuri title khullakpa, the head of his clan, and nearly every Tangkhul village also had a luplakpa, head of another clan, whose office was earlier called khulpu, 'ancestor of the village'. When a son married, his parents gave up most of their property and the best part of the house to him, a custom that also governed village offices. The young men's house (morung) was no longer common among the Tangkhul in Hodson's day.

Hodson (1911) gives no list of Tangkhul clans; clan names differ from village to village. He found the Manipuri clan names Ningthaja, Kumul and Luang used for clans in every Tangkhul village, Khaba in two, and Angom, Anganba, Atum and Kasu at Nungbi. These are the Manipuri titles of the clans, not their Tangkhul names, so they are not listed as Tangkhul clans here.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Manipur

  An entry of its own in Manipur's list.

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

Hodson (1911, pp. 8-11) grouped Tangkhul traditions of origin into three. One brings them from the Manipur valley, which they left because of the heat and mosquitoes; on the ridge between Hundung and Ukhrul their fire went out, and a deity taught them to strike fire from a stone, which is still honoured. A second makes the village of Hundung the centre of their spread, founded by brothers from Maikel Tunggam, the traditional home also of the peoples of the Mao group. A third tells of new villages founded by people from older villages that had grown too large. All of them, Hodson notes, lack any claim to be the first people of the land. He doubted an older report of an origin from a cave, which he heard only among the Maring. The peak Hodson calls Sirohifurar dominates the view from nearly every Tangkhul village and has a place in their beliefs about the dead.

History

The Manipur chronicles mention the Tangkhul as early as 1435, and Hodson concluded that they had been settled in their present hills from an early date. Their country runs from the Iril river in the west to the frontier with Burma in the east; the Somra group of villages beyond the frontier is of Tangkhul origin. In Hodson's time Ukhrul (his Ukrul) was a large village with a commanding place among the villages around it, and six villages, Ukhrul, Toloi, Naimu, Sandang, Toinem and Phadang, were known for weaving cloth and tended to marry their daughters within their own group. T. C. Hodson's The Naga Tribes of Manipur (1911) is the standard early account. Most Tangkhul today are Christian.

Faith and Worship

In the older religion, as Hodson recorded it, Kamyou, the eldest son of the Creator of all things, was called on in trouble and sickness; armed with a big stick, he judged evildoers, since sickness was held to follow wrongdoing (pp. 138-139). The dead go to a heaven by a path over the crest of Sirohifurar, and the living provide a buffalo for the burial feast so that its ghost may open the gates (p. 160). Most Tangkhul today are Christian.

Customs

Marriage is outside the clan, and Hodson found that a Tangkhul would marry only a woman whose speech showed her to be of his own tribe, though a chain of marriages linked the southern villages to the northern. He also recorded that no Tangkhul kept or ate goats (p. 81). Tangkhul festivals connected with the crops included a mock tug of war with a rope between the girls and the boys, and in some rain-bringing rites women walked in the procession in equal numbers with the men (p. 84).

Stories and Legends