Manipuri is the classical dance of the Meitei community of Manipur in northeast India, formally shaped in the late 18th century under the patronage of Maharaja Bhagya Chandra (Ningthou Ching-Thang Khomba). His Ras Lila composition was first performed at the Govindajee Temple at Canchipur on the Kartik Purnima full moon of 1779 and laid the basis for the modern Manipuri repertoire. The dance is built on a soft, fluid body grammar without the heavy stamped footwork of the southern forms, sung in Meitei and Bengali, and grounded in the Gaudiya Vaishnav devotion to Radha-Krishna. Sangeet Natak Akademi recognises Manipuri as one of the eight classical dance forms of India.
From Meitei ritual to Vaishnav Ras Lila
The dance traditions of the Meitei community substantially predate Vaishnavism’s arrival. The older layer included lai haraoba, a ritual dance honouring local deities (umang lai) performed across the Imphal valley villages with a slow, lyrical body grammar. When Maharaja Bhagya Chandra (reign 1759–1761 and 1763–1798) embraced Gaudiya Vaishnavism after a vision of Krishna and exile in Assam, he commissioned a Krishna-centred dance form on this older foundation. The Govindajee Temple at Canchipur near Imphal was built specifically to house the murti and to stage the new Ras Lila.
The 1779 Kartik Purnima first performance featured the king’s daughter Sija Lairoibi as Radha and is recorded in the royal chronicle Cheitharol Kumbaba. Bhagya Chandra subsequently composed two further Ras Lilas (the Maha Ras, the Kunja Ras), and his successor Maharaja Madhu Chandra added the Vasanta Ras and the Nitya Ras. The five Ras Lilas are still performed seasonally at the Govindajee Temple complex.
The five Ras Lilas and when they are performed
- Maha Ras: performed on Kartik Purnima (October–November), depicting the autumn moonlit rasa of Krishna with Radha and the gopis.
- Kunja Ras: performed in spring, depicting Radha and Krishna in a forest grove (kunja).
- Vasanta Ras: performed on Holi Purnima, the spring rasa.
- Nitya Ras: the eternal rasa, performed at any auspicious time.
- Diba Ras: the daytime rasa, a later addition, performed during daylight.
Each Ras Lila runs three to six hours and is danced by trained female performers (including young pre-pubescent girls for the gopi roles) inside the temple precincts in a circular performance space (mandapa). The audience sits on the floor around the central performance area; the dancers move in a circular orbit around Krishna and Radha at the centre.
Nat Sankirtana and the UNESCO recognition
The companion ritual form, Manipuri Sankirtana (nat sankirtana), was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2013. Nat Sankirtana combines devotional singing, the pung (Manipuri barrel drum), kartal (cymbals) and dance, performed by male singer-dancers (palas) at temple festivals, weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies. Maharaja Bhagya Chandra founded the Pala Loishang of Nat Sankirtana as an official institution to regulate and train palas. The pung-dance, where the drummer dances while playing, is a signature performance element associated with this tradition.
The body grammar: no stamp, no aramandi
Manipuri’s vocabulary is distinct from every other classical Indian dance form on one specific count: there is no heavy stamped footwork. The dancer’s feet meet the ground in a gliding, soft contact (the chari), with no audible stamp. Bells are not worn on the ankles. The torso moves in a continuous serpentine line; the gestures are rounded; the eye contact is downcast rather than dramatic. The overall effect is the visual opposite of Kathakali’s heavy stamping and Bharatanatyam’s geometric stamp.
The female Ras Lila costume is the kumil, a barrel-shaped stiff skirt covered in mirror-work and embroidery, with a translucent veil over the head and face. The skirt has a fixed wide silhouette, often three to four feet in diameter, and the dancer moves inside this volume. The male Krishna dancer wears a yellow dhoti with a peacock-feather crown.
The pung cholom and the kartal cholom
The two best-known male dance items in the Manipuri repertoire are choloms.
- Pung Cholom: the dancer plays the pung (a hand-played barrel drum, around 60 cm long) while executing high leaps, spins and acrobatic figures, all timed precisely to the rhythmic cycle being played on the drum itself.
- Kartal Cholom: performed with kartals (small brass cymbals), the dancer strikes the cymbals while leaping and spinning, again with the cymbal beats locking into a complex tala.
Both choloms are part of the sankirtana corpus but have moved onto the concert stage as standalone items, often opening or closing a Manipuri programme.
The 20th century revival and the Jhaveri sisters
Rabindranath Tagore introduced Manipuri to a wider audience by bringing Guru Naba Kumar from Manipur to Santiniketan in 1919 and later in 1926, establishing a Manipuri department. The Jhaveri sisters (Nayana, Suverna, Ranjana and Darshana) of Mumbai trained under Guru Bipin Singh from the 1940s and became the form’s most prominent stage exponents from the 1950s through the 1990s, taking it to international audiences. Guru Bipin Singh (1918–2000) was the foremost 20th century guru and received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1986.
For what it’s worth, on Manipuri’s understatement
For what it’s worth, Manipuri rewards a different kind of attention than the southern classical forms. There are no extended technical climaxes in the Ras Lila; the dance unfolds at a uniform devotional pace with subtle variations of weight and gesture. An audience expecting the percussive resolution of a Bharatanatyam varnam or the speed of a Kathak chakkar sequence may find the form low-energy on first viewing. Sit closer to the stage than you would for any other classical form; the eye-work and the small hand gestures carry most of the meaning, and they are lost at distance.
Where to see live Manipuri
- Govindajee Temple complex, Imphal: the seasonal Ras Lila performances at Kartik Purnima and Holi Purnima are open to visitors.
- Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy, Imphal: the principal training institution, established 1954, now under the Sangeet Natak Akademi.
- The annual Sangai Festival in Imphal (November): stages Manipuri alongside other Manipuri performing arts.
- Manipur State Kala Akademi events: regular monthly performances in Imphal.
Common questions
Why do the Manipuri dancers not wear ankle bells?
The aesthetic of Manipuri rests on quiet, lifted footwork. The body is to appear weightless, floating just above the floor surface; the audible thump of ghungroos would break that effect. The percussion is provided entirely by the pung and kartal ensemble, not by the dancer’s feet. This is a sustained choice across the entire repertoire and not a stylistic exception.
Is Manipuri only performed by Meiteis?
Historically yes, the temple and ritual practice is Meitei. The stage form has been taught and performed by non-Meiteis since Tagore’s Santiniketan introduction in 1919, and the Jhaveri sisters’ lineage (Mumbai-based, Gujarati family) has been one of the most prominent. Inside Manipur the religious-ritual practice remains within Meitei Vaishnav families and temple structures.
How is the Ras Lila different from the Raslila of Vrindavan?
Vrindavan Raslila is a folk-devotional theatre form with sung verse and acted dialogue, performed across north Indian Vaishnav centres. The Manipuri Ras Lila is a structured classical dance with codified gestures, costume, choreography and tala, performed only at fixed temple sites by trained dancers initiated for the role. The narrative source (the Bhagavata Purana Rasa Panchadhyayi) is the same, but the performance grammar is entirely Manipuri.
A limitation worth noting
The article treats the Bhagya Chandra 1779 origin as the founding date because that is the framework Manipuri institutions teach. The older Meitei dance vocabulary (lai haraoba, thang ta) feeds substantially into Manipuri body grammar; the Vaishnav overlay sits on top of a much older substrate. Scholars working in Meitei studies argue the pre-Vaishnav layer deserves more weight than 20th century institutional framings have given it.
For further reading, the Manipuri dance entry on Wikipedia covers the textual history, and the UNESCO Intangible Heritage page on Sankirtana of Manipur documents the ritual sankirtana corpus.
