Khamba Thoibi
খাম্বা থোইবী
Also Moirang Kangleirol, Khamba Thoibi Sheireng.
Epic Meiteilon, which is Manipuri Old oral material of the Moirang country; the great written version is Hijam Anganghal Singh’s poem, published in 1940
What it is
Khamba Thoibi is the epic of the Meiteis of the Manipur valley, and it is the story of a poor orphan and a daughter of a great house who want to marry and are prevented. Khamba is a boy of the Khuman clan brought up in poverty by his elder sister Khamnu; Thoibi is of the ruling family of Moirang; Nongban, a nobleman who wants her himself, spends the length of the poem trying to destroy him. It belongs to the Moirang Kangleirol, the cycle of romances told of Moirang under its deity Thangjing, in which the god brings pairs of lovers into the world again and again, and Khamba and Thoibi are the last and the fullest of them. It ends with both of them dead, and they are worshipped afterwards.
Its shape
There is no single fixed text and never was one. The epic was carried by the pena singers, who sing the Moirang material to the pena, the Meitei one stringed fiddle, and by the ritual repertoire of the Moirang Lai Haraoba, so its length is the length of a particular telling and a telling can run for nights. The written monument is Hijam Anganghal Singh’s Khamba Thoibi Sheireng of 1940, a poem in Meiteilon whose length is usually given as about thirty nine thousand lines, which makes it one of the longest poems composed in any modern Indian language. Prose retellings, school texts and stage versions run to a few hundred pages and carry the same episodes in the same order.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
The epic’s own argument is about rank. Khamba has nothing, every test he is set is a test of whether a man with nothing may marry into a great house, and the man who ruins him is the one with the name and the land. Moirang’s institutions mostly take the nobleman’s side, and the valley has always said that this is the part of the story that is true to life. The second argument is about what the epic is evidence of. It is pre Vaishnava Meitei material and not Sanskritic: Thangjing and the Moirang deities are in it and Krishna is not, the court took up Vaishnavism only in the eighteenth century, and the story is older than that by a long way. The Sanamahi movement reads it as proof of a Meitei literature that owes the Sanskrit tradition nothing, and the date is not in dispute. What is argued in Manipur is how much weight that fact should carry now.
Episodes worth knowing
The taking of the wild bull
A wild bull, the kao, was loose in the Moirang country and nobody would go near it, and Khamba went out and took it. The episode, the Kao Phaba, is the most often shown of the whole epic, in painting, on the stage and in the dance. It is also the plot in small: the task nobody wants is given to the boy with no family behind him, he does it in front of everybody, and it does not settle the question of whether he may marry her.
What Nongban does about him
Nongban is a nobleman of Moirang who wants Thoibi, and most of the epic is what he does about Khamba: the accusations, the tests arranged so that the boy will fail or die in them, the sending of Thoibi away for a time, and at the end the contrivance that neither lover survives. The poem does not make him a demon or a fool. He has rank and he uses it, and the men who should have stopped him do not, which is the engine of the whole story.
The dance that comes out of it
The Khamba Thoibi Jagoi is a duet for one man and one woman, danced as an offering to Thangjing at the Moirang Lai Haraoba and now also on the concert stage. It is not the Raas. There is no potloi, the subject is not Radha and Krishna, and the body of movement is the older Lai Haraoba one rather than the eighteenth century Vaishnava repertoire that the word Manipuri usually means outside the state. A dancer may learn both, and audiences outside Manipur mostly see only the second.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- The pena singers
- The oral carriers. The Moirang material is sung to the pena, the one stringed Meitei fiddle, and the singer narrates as much as he sings.
- Hijam Anganghal Singh, Khamba Thoibi Sheireng, 1940
- The long Meiteilon poem that fixed the epic in writing, and what a literate Manipuri reader now means by the text.
- The Moirang Lai Haraoba
- The ritual setting, where the Khamba Thoibi Jagoi is danced as an offering to Thangjing, which keeps the story inside worship rather than inside literature.
- The Manipuri stage
- Theatre companies and dance drama troupes have carried the story to audiences outside the valley through the twentieth century.
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
- Manipur
- The national epic of the Meiteis: taught in school, sung by the pena players, danced at the Moirang Lai Haraoba, and the ground of the Moirang Kangleirol, which belongs to this valley and to nowhere else.
- Assam
- The Meitei settlements of the Barak valley, Cachar above all, carried the Moirang material with them, and the songs and the dance are kept there.
Connected to
Deities
Arts