Kangla, the Meitei Royal Citadel at Imphal, Was Handed Back to Manipur's Government on 20 November 2004, More Than 113 Years After British Troops Marched Into It on 27 April 1891

On 20 November 2004 the Director General of the Assam Rifles handed the keys of Kangla Fort in Imphal to Manipur’s Chief Minister, O. Ibobi Singh, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh present, according to the catalogue of a photograph in the Archives of Contemporary India at Ashoka University. The Prime Minister told a public meeting in Imphal that the fort was passing under the direct control of the State Government “for the first time after it was conquered by the forces of the British Empire in 1891”, the Press Information Bureau’s text of the speech says. Dawn, carrying an AFP report, put the period of army control at more than a century.

What Kangla was before 1891

Kangla was the seat of the Meitei kings. The Ministry of Tourism dates it to the reign of King Pakhangba in 33 AD, and the Concept Development Plan, a conservation plan commissioned by the Manipur government and published in 2003, calls it the capital of the Ningthouja dynasty for nearly 2,000 years. The plan reads the old text Thirel Layat as describing Kangla as the highest and driest point of the Imphal valley.

The buildings visitors see belong to the nineteenth century. NorthEast Now says Maharaj Narasingh moved the capital to the present fort in 1844 from Langthabal. The author Wangam Somorjit says the Burmese destroyed Kangla Fort in 1819. The plan says it was fully developed by the end of the century, with a royal citadel, offices, temples and residential quarters, and five lines of defence.

Ethel Grimwood, wife of the British Political Agent, lived in Imphal and described the defences in her 1891 book. Five walls surrounded the Maharajah’s enclosure, she wrote. The outer one was low and broken, the inner ones were brick with bastions, and a deep canal ran along three sides of the outer wall, where the yearly boat races were held. The citadel could be held against an attack, she judged, “provided big guns were not brought to bear upon it”. The Maharajah had four mountain guns, a gift from the British government to his father.

At the citadel’s western entrance stood the Kangla Sha, a pair of brick beasts about 18 feet tall, painted white, Somorjit writes. He says Maharaja Chourjit built the first pair in 1804, and that Narasingh rebuilt them in 1844 and dedicated them to Govindajee on 24 July 1844. The statues stood at the entrance to the citadel known as the Uttra, he writes, and NorthEast Now calls the Kangla Uttra Sanglen the ancestral coronation hall of the Manipur kings.

Kangla is also a place of worship. The Ministry of Tourism records the belief that Lord Pakhangba resides beneath it, and it counts 360 revered spots, among them Nungjeng Pukhri and other ponds where Pakhangba is believed to dwell, Nunggoibi, the abode of the goddess of war, Manglen, the resting place of the kings, and Kangla Men Surung, where the coronations took place. Dawn counted 108 sacred places of worship inside the complex. The Prime Minister’s speech called Kangla the holiest place for Manipuris at home and abroad and a centre of pilgrimage.

The war of 1891 reaches the walls

The MyGov post on Patriots’ Day says a British force entered the house of Tikendrajit, the Yubraj (crown prince), and attacked Kangla on 24 March 1891, without a declaration of war. Mrs Grimwood writes that the Yubraj’s house stood near the outer wall of the palace. Five British officers, among them the Political Agent, Frank Grimwood, were killed in the events that followed.

Accounts of how they died differ. MyGov says a crowd attacked them as they left a meeting at the palace and that they were beheaded in front of the Kangla Sha. Somorjit writes that the king had the five tried by a military court and executed in front of the statues. Grant, a British officer whose letters Mrs Grimwood printed, wrote of the “treacherous murder” of the five.

News reached Calcutta on 31 March, and three columns advanced from Kohima, Silchar and Tamu. All three occupied Imphal on 27 April 1891, MyGov records. Grant’s letter, dated 28 April, says his party was the first to enter the palace on its side and that he went round it that evening, calling it “a very poor place”. In the House of Lords on 22 June 1891 the Marquess of Ripon hoped ministers would say they did not favour annexation. The Secretary of State for India, Viscount Cross, said he was against it but would not rule it out before hearing the Viceroy’s views.

What happened to the buildings

The Kangla Sha is the one loss the sources date. Somorjit says British cannon destroyed the pair on 20 June 1891 on the order of General H. Collett, though another paragraph of his own text gives 20 July. Pradip Phanjoubam, editor of the Imphal Review, writes that Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell, who led the Tamu column, blasted them.

The Concept Development Plan says no trace of the Kangla Shas survives on the ground and that they are known from nineteenth-century photographs. It says the king and royal family moved to a new palace south of Kangla, at Konunglampak, and that the British military took over the fort. It lists the Uttra and the Darbar hall as sites, and describes the old palace complex and the residential areas inside the fort as lost. The sources opened for this article do not itemise which buildings came down in 1891 or later, or who took them down, apart from the Kangla Sha.

A garrison for more than a century

The plan says the British military held the fort until the merger of Manipur with India, which it dates to 1948. This site’s Manipur profile gives the merger agreement as 21 September 1949, in force from 15 October 1949. The British left barracks, officers’ residences, a quarter guard and a commandant’s office, and the plan records Kangla’s role as Eastern Command headquarters, with Field Marshal Slim’s house, in the Second World War. The plan’s authors treat these as a layer of the site’s history to be kept and reused. The same war brought the Indian National Army into the state, which our piece on Subhas Chandra Bose follows.

After independence the Assam Rifles were in the fort. Business Standard wrote that the Garhwal Rifles and then the Assam Rifles took over. The plan’s two chapters disagree on the date: one says the Assam Rifles had occupied the fort since 1891, the other that they came after the British military left. Business Standard said the Centre mooted moving them out in the 1980s, and that a Union Home Minister was told in September 2004 that 1,600 of the 1,800 personnel had already gone.

Worshippers needed permission. Dawn says the army had to approve prayers at the sacred places, and Business Standard says devotees applied through the state archaeology office to the Assam Rifles and the Indian Reserve Battalion office inside the fort. The Army handed the Red Fort in Delhi to the Archaeological Survey of India in December 2003, as our Red Fort article records.

The handover of 20 November 2004

The Press Information Bureau release is time-stamped 20 November 2004 and says the Prime Minister “today handed over” the fort. He said the Government of India had acted in response to popular demand. He called Kangla the nucleus of the state and said it symbolised both temporal power and the spiritual and religious traditions of its people. He praised the state government’s plan to make it “a unique archaeological park in the entire north-eastern region”, and noted that the development project included planting indigenous trees and medicinal plants around the fort.

Dawn reported hundreds of people waving the national flag at the ceremony. The Ashoka archive’s record names the Director General of the Assam Rifles as Lt Gen Bhupender Singh, and Dawn spells the name Bhupinder.

Rebuilding under the Kangla Fort Board

The Department of Art and Culture says the Kangla Fort Board was constituted under the Kangla Fort Act to administer the fort. The Chief Minister is its president and the Commissioner for Art and Culture its member secretary. One departmental page gives the Act’s year as 2005 and another as 2004. The state’s horticulture, environment and forest departments look after the grounds.

The department says development follows the Concept Development Plan of Dr Nalini Thakur, Professor and Head of Architectural Conservation at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. It covers restoring historical monuments and sacred sites, reusing the European buildings as a museum and offices, and planting trees and laying out gardens. The plan proposes the Officers’ Club as the Manipur State Museum, the Unit Hospital as a visitor centre and the commanding officer’s office as a natural history museum. It recommends preserving the Govindajee temple and not rebuilding it, and its authors call the recently built western gate a replica, not a reconstruction.

The plan asks whether the Kangla Sha sites should stay empty or get replicas. Replicas were built on the original site in 2007, according to Somorjit and Phanjoubam. NorthEast Now says the Uttra was rebuilt in 2011. The Ministry of Tourism says the Board set up a herbal garden in 2009 and lists a Pakhangba Temple, the inner and outer moats and the Kangla Museum among the fort’s sights.

By June 2021 the state government had removed the props, called kabaak, from inside the mouths of the two replicas. Phanjoubam writes that advisers to the government held that the props were later additions, citing a photograph they date to 1868. He disputes the photograph’s source and argues the originals had them. A board meeting chaired by the Chief Minister in 2019 decided to rebuild Nongpok Thong, the eastern bridge, to replace the statue of Maharaj Narasingh at the western gate and to plant 10,000 saplings, NorthEast Now reported.

Who protects Kangla now

The plan says the fort is notified under the State Monuments Act by Gazette Notification 515 of 1991, covering 236.84 acres including the outer moat and the Kekru Pat. NorthEast Now gives 237.62 acres and says the fort was one square mile before 1891. Manipur State Archaeology, set up in 1978, is the department charged with preserving and excavating the state’s monuments. The Ministry of Tourism lists the fort as open from 7 am to 5 pm.

The Archaeological Survey of India’s published list of centrally protected monuments names one for Manipur, the Temple of Vishnu at Bishnupur, and none at Kangla. UNESCO’s tentative list for India has one Manipur property, the Keibul Lamjao Conservation Area, submitted in 2016, and no entry for Kangla.