Peopling in the Empire's Borderland: A Note on Kuki History and Ancestry in Northeast India

This paper examines the history and ancestry of the Tibeto-Burman Family (TBF) in general and the “Kuki-Chin Group” of the TBF in particular. It argues against the dominant colonial civilizational narrative that ridiculed the whole tribal peoples in Northeast India as “peoples without history”. Based on the written accounts (both religious and secular) of the valley states and societies surrounding their mountain redoubts, supplemented by objective linguistic, genetic, and archaeological sources, studies in recent years have successfully reconstructed the history of the tribes since the ancient period. The latest genetic studies show that the ancestry of TBF in the region dates back to the second millennium BCE. Studies on ancient literature show that Kukis are the “Tilabharas” of Mahabharata, the “Tiladai” of Ptolemy’s Geography, and the “Thalutae” of Pliny’s History. Buddhist sources knew them as “Ko-ki” which had become, in the Bengal world since ancient times, the generic nomenclature for the hills tribes of the southern Himalayas. One copper-plate inscription from ancient Tripura (Bengal) is a testament to the “Kuki” ancestry on the eastern frontier of Bengal. Their presence in the rolling mountains between Bengal and Burma plains in the medieval world is also testified by the Rajmala and Cheitharol Kumbaba, the royal chronicles of Tripura and Manipur respectively, the Burmese inscriptions, and the Tang Chinese chronicle. Their megalithic remains, which are of a living tradition amongst them until recent times, are a living testimony of their ancestry in the southern Himalayas.