Manipuri names several related traditions from Manipur, in northeast India, not a single style. They belong to ritual, to temple and household devotion, and increasingly to the concert stage. Music runs through all of them, and the drum is often in the dancer’s own hands.
Lai Haraoba
The oldest layer is usually identified as Lai Haraoba, a festival for Meitei deities whose worship predates Vaishnavism in Manipur. The name is usually translated as “the merrymaking of the gods.” Its dances are led by maibis, priestesses, and maibas, priests, who invoke the deities and enact the creation of the world, with singing accompanied by the pena, a stringed instrument. Saroj N. Arambam Parratt and John Parratt documented the festival’s texts, songs and dances in The Pleasing of the Gods (1997). It is regarded as the basis of later Manipuri dance.
Sankirtana and the drum dances
Sankirtana is congregational singing, drumming and dancing that tells of Krishna. It is performed in temple halls and household courtyards to mark births, marriages, funerals and festivals, and can last through the night. UNESCO inscribed it as intangible cultural heritage in 2013, describing a typical group of two drummers and about ten singer-dancers. The pung is Manipur’s principal classical drum, and its players dance as they play. In pung cholom the drummers add acrobatic movement without dropping the rhythm, and in kartal cholom men dance with large cymbals.
The Ras Lila and two modes
The Ras Lila, which enacts Krishna’s dance with Radha and the gopis, is traced to the eighteenth-century king Bhagyachandra (Rajarshi Bhagyachandra). There are several forms, among them Maharas, Basantaras, Kunjaras and Nityaras, most tied to particular seasons. Dancers wear no ankle bells, and facial expression is typically restrained, with the whole body carrying the expression.
Manipuri distinguishes tandava, forceful movement, from lasya, delicate movement. The men’s drum and cymbal dances are clear examples of tandava, and the gopis’ dancing in the Ras is lasya. Writers often gloss the two as masculine and feminine, but Sankirtana contains both, and Krishna’s role in the Ras carries tandava vigor.
Toward the stage
Rabindranath Tagore brought Manipuri into the teaching at Santiniketan from around 1919. Later, Guru Bipin Singh and the Jhaveri sisters were central in carrying the dances from temple to proscenium. Stage programs usually present edited excerpts from these traditions.
Listen to the pung as closely as you watch the dancers, since much of the rhythm comes from the performers themselves.
For short introductions to Manipuri and other forms, see Meet the Art Forms.
Image: Pung cholom, 2013. Photo: Ramesh Lalwani, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
