Udaya

Manipuri

মণিপুরী

Also Jagoi, Raas Leela, Manipuri Raas.

Dance Manipur

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What it is#

Manipuri is the dance of the Meitei people of Manipur, and it is the quietest of the classical forms: there is no striking of the floor, no bells on the ankles, no sharp accents at all. The feet are placed and not stamped, the body moves in continuous curves, and the whole effect is of something floating. Its classical repertoire is the Raas Leela, the circle dance of Krishna and the gopis, established at the Manipur court in the eighteenth century, and behind that lies the much older Lai Haraoba, the pre Vaishnava ritual dance of the Meitei deities, which is still performed and is not the same thing.

How it is built#

The women’s dance is the jagoi, soft, with the face often veiled in the Raas, wearing the kumil, a stiff barrel shaped skirt embroidered with mirrors that moves as a bell. The men’s is the pung cholom, a drum dance in which the performer plays a pung, a barrel drum, slung at the waist while leaping and turning, and the thang ta, the martial form, feeds it. The Nata Sankirtana, a devotional singing and drumming performance, is recognised by UNESCO and frames the Raas in ritual. The hands are soft and the fingers rarely extended sharply, which marks the form at a glance.

How it is learnt#

The question a family actually has

A child begins at five or six, and in Manipur the Lai Haraoba and the Sankirtana are learnt as part of community life rather than as a class. The soft knee and the continuous curve of the torso take years to make natural, and a dancer trained elsewhere first usually finds the absence of accent the hardest thing. Five to eight years brings a first recital. Pung cholom requires drum training as well as dance and is usually begun around ten. Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy in Imphal is the main institution.

Whose lineage is whose#

Where a claim is contested, by whom

The Vaishnava layer came with the conversion of the Manipur court under Garib Niwaz in the eighteenth century, and Bhagyachandra is credited with devising the Raas Leela and the kumil costume in the same century. Under that lies Lai Haraoba, the Meitei ritual dance for the umang lai, the forest deities, which predates Vaishnavism by a long way and is performed by maibas and maibis, the traditional priests. Whether Manipuri classical dance should be presented as the Raas alone or together with Lai Haraoba is argued in Manipur, and the argument is about more than dance.

Worth knowing#

No bells

Every other Indian classical dance puts bells on the ankles and uses the foot as a percussion instrument. Manipuri does not, and the absence is the aesthetic: the dance is not meant to be heard. In the Raas the dancer is a gopi and the whole mood is devotional absorption rather than display, so a sound made by the dancer would be an intrusion. Audiences used to the crack of tatkar or the ring of ghungroos find the silence disconcerting for about ten minutes and then stop noticing it.

What came before the Raas

Lai Haraoba, the pleasing of the gods, is the festival in which the maibis dance the creation of the world, and it belongs to the Meitei religion that preceded the eighteenth century conversion. It is still held every year in villages across Manipur. The classical form presented on national stages is the Vaishnava Raas; the older layer is usually left out of that presentation, and a revivalist movement in Manipur has spent decades insisting that it is the real tradition. The dance is therefore a live political question as well as an art.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 3 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
Manipur
The home of the form. The Raas is danced at Shree Govindajee in Imphal on the Hiyangei full moon, the pung cholom at every Vaishnava festival of the valley, and the Lai Haraoba at the umang lai groves in the spring.
Assam
The Vaishnava stream connects to the Assamese sattras, and the two northeastern forms are often presented together.
Bengal
Rabindranath Tagore brought Manipuri teachers to Santiniketan in the 1920s, which is how the form reached the national stage.

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