Kuki Erotic

Kuki is a name that came from outside. Bengali speakers and then British administrators used it for the clans living along the ranges between the Brahmaputra valley and the Chindwin, and it stuck to people who had their own names for themselves: Thadou, Haokip, Kipgen, Hmar, Paite, Vaiphei, Gangte, Zou, Simte, Kom. Many now prefer Zo or Zomi. The argument over which name to use is not etiquette, it is politics with land and seats attached. What holds the group together is a cluster of closely related Kuki-Chin languages inside the Tibeto-Burman family, a village built around a hereditary chief and his council of elders, and clan genealogies that most people can still recite well past their grandparents.

Home is steep forested hill country: the Manipur hills above all, plus parts of Mizoram, Assam, Nagaland and Tripura, the Chin Hills and Sagaing in Myanmar, and pockets of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Farming meant jhum, cutting and burning a slope, working it a few seasons, then moving on. Two village institutions are worth knowing. The Som was a dormitory where unmarried men slept and were drilled in how to conduct themselves. The Lawm was a work group that moved through everyone's fields in turn and doubled as the place the young learned songs, courtship and argument. Rank was something a man bought with generosity: a large enough grain surplus paid for the Chang Ai feast, enough game for the Sa Ai, and each earned him the right to wear a particular shawl. The Saipikhup was not available to a man who had not done the work. The textiles were a record of what someone had accomplished.

Christianity arrived late and then went almost everywhere. Presbyterian and Baptist missions reached the hills around the turn of the twentieth century, and within two generations nearly everyone belonged to one or the other. Pathen, the old name for the high god, transferred to the Christian one without much friction, and the church now does a good deal of the organizing that clan and chief once handled alone. The hardest political memory is the Anglo-Kuki War of 1917 to 1919, when chiefs across the Manipur hills refused to send men to the British labor corps in France and fought for two years before a punitive expedition broke the resistance and jailed the chiefs. Later ruptures were closer to home: the Kuki and Naga killings of the 1990s, and since 2023 a violent separation from the Meitei of the Manipur valley that emptied mixed towns and left tens of thousands in relief camps. Chavang Kut, the harvest festival on the first of November, is a state holiday and now carries a great deal of that weight.