Pangals Erotic

A Pangal is a Meitei by language and kinship and a Muslim by faith, and the community has spent four centuries showing that the two fit together. Pangals speak Meitei as their mother tongue. They share the valley, the rice fields and the lineage-based family names of their Hindu and Sanamahi neighbors, and they keep a Muslim religious life of their own. The word itself simply means "Muslim" in Meitei. It is usually traced to Bangal, a nod to the Bengal plains where the first settlers came from.

Their home ground is the Imphal Valley in Manipur, in India's far northeast, where towns such as Lilong and Kwakta have long had large Pangal populations. Most histories agree on one founding date: 1606, when King Khagemba beat back a force that had come up from the west to back his estranged brother. The Muslim soldiers taken captive were allowed to settle. They married Meitei women and were given places in the kingdom's lineage system. Others joined them over the following centuries, and the result was a people fully Meitei in speech and custom.

Islam here is Sunni, and it sets the rhythm of the week and the year: Friday prayers, the Ramadan fast, the two Eids, Qur'anic study in Arabic. Outside the mosque, life is thoroughly Manipuri. The language at home, much of the cooking, the markets and the state's politics are shared ground. Families still carry sagei names, the patrilineal family units that organize Meitei society.

Two ruptures shaped the modern community. The first was the Burmese occupation of 1819 to 1826, remembered in Manipur as the Seven Years Devastation. It pushed Manipuris of every faith westward, which is why Meitei-speaking Muslims still live in the Barak Valley of Assam and the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. The second came in May 1993, when violence between Meitei and Pangal communities in the valley left scores of Pangals dead, a memory that still weighs on relations between neighbors. Today Pangals are a sizable minority in Manipur, and the state government recognizes them as Indigenous. Their history is a standing reply to anyone who assumes that being Meitei and being Muslim are at odds.