The Road That Made Manipur: A Case for Heritage Status for Tongjei-Maril » Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
There is a road in Manipur that most people drive without a second thought, on their way to Silchar or Jiribam. Locally it is remembered as Tongjei-Maril (Ngaprum Changjel)— the “cane-hole road” — and in colonial records as the Old Cachar Road. It deserves to be remembered for a great deal more than the potholes
There is a road in Manipur that most people drive without a second thought, on their way to Silchar or Jiribam. Locally it is remembered as Tongjei-Maril (Ngaprum Changjel)— the “cane-hole road” — and in colonial records as the Old Cachar Road. It deserves to be remembered for a great deal more than the potholes it is currently known for. Few roads anywhere in South Asia can claim to have shaped a kingdom’s borders, carried its people into exile and back, transported the religious revolution that redefined its culture, and served as a lifeline in a world war fought on its own soil. It is long past time this road was formally protected as a Heritage Road. For centuries, Tongjei-Maril was Manipur’s only door to the west. Hemmed in by hills on every other side, the kingdom depended on this single track through Bishnupur and across the Jiri river for everything: diplomatic missions to Cachar, Tripura, Jaintia, and Cooch Behar; trade caravans; and, when the British East India Company began drawing frontier lines in the early nineteenth century, the very boundary agreements that fixed Manipur’s western edge under Raja Gambhir Singh. This was never merely a trade route. It was where Manipur’s sovereignty was negotiated, generation after generation. It was also the route of a religious revolution. Around 1717, the Vaishnava preceptor Shantidas travelled this same road from Sylhet into Kangla and initiated King Pamheiba — who took the name Garib Niwaz — into Vaishnavism. Within a generation, the Meitei state had started worship for Krishna devotion, Bengali script had entered Manipuri religious life, and a cultural transformation was underway that still shapes Manipuri dance, art, and social life today. Decades later, in 1762, Garib Niwaz’s grandson, King Bhagyachandra, fled Burmese invaders along this same road into exile in Cachar, then travelled on to Nabadwip, birthplace of the saint Chaitanya, where he was formally initiated into Gaudiya Vaishnavism before returning to reclaim his throne. He later built the Govindaji temple that still stands in a Nabadwip locality Bengalis call “Manipuri village. ” By custom, Manipur is still entrusted with the ceremonial repainting of Nabadwip’s presiding deity — a living link, unbroken for nearly three centuries, that began on this road. The road’s most consequential chapter, however, is written in loss. Between 1819 and 1826 — the Chahi Taret Khuntakpa, or Seven Years’ Devastation — Burmese occupation drove thousands of Manipuris to flee west along this very track. Many never returned. Today, 163 Meetei villages survive in Assam’s Barak valley alone, alongside a Manipuri Muslim population in Cachar estimated at 80,000, the largest outside Manipur itself. Further along the same road and its branches, Manipuri settlements took root in Tripura through three centuries of royal intermarriage beginning in 1609, in Sylhet town where exiled princes built a palace at Mirzajangal, and as far as Tejgaon in Dhaka. A single road, in other words, did not just connect Manipur to the world — it scattered Manipur across four modern political territories, and in each one, descendants of that exodus still speak Manipuri, still dance the Rasleela, still remember Kangla. Then came its most dramatic transformation. In 1942, with Burma overrun by Japanese forces and refugees pouring into Manipur, 150 British officers and men of the 82nd Anti-Tank Regiment — known as “Chapforce” — widened the old bridle path into a motorable road in a matter of months. It became a critical supply line during the Battle of Imphal, fought in and around Bishnupur in 1944, one of the decisive engagements of the Second World War in Asia. Many of the men who built it later died fighting for the Tiddim road and now lie in the Imphal War Cemetery — a human cost behind the modern road that is rarely mentioned when the highway numbers come up in assembly debates. Today, the state government is right to be upgrading this corridor to national highway status, and connectivity projects like the Jiribam–Tupul–Imphal rail line are welcome. But an upgraded highway and a protected heritage route are not the same thing, and Manipur risks losing the second in the rush to build the first. A formal Heritage Road designation would not obstruct modern development; it would simply ensure that surviving stretches of the original alignment, its river crossings, and its associated sites in Bishnupur and along the Jiri valley are documented, marked, and preserved before they disappear under asphalt and forgetting. Such a designation would also do something no highway signage can: it would formally acknowledge the sister sites this road created — in Cachar, Tripura, Sylhet, Dhaka, and Nabadwip — as part of a single, shared heritage. Manipur’s history did not happen only within its present borders. Some of it happened, and is still being lived, along this road and at its far ends. A Heritage Road designation would be a fitting way to say so — and to make sure that the next generation driving to Silchar knows exactly what road they are on. The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of State External Affairs and Education, Government of India.