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The Bishnupriya Manipuris

  Probably most controversial class of people having no homeland of their own, subsequently loosing their identity, are the Bishnupriyas. It is estimated there are over one lakh Bisnupriya souls in total seattered over Manipur, Assam Tripura and Bangladesh.As per legend, it is said that the Bishnupriyas were originally settled confined only to the area surrounding the Loktak lake of Manipur.The principal localities in Manipur, where the Bishnupriyas are still to be seen are Khangabok, Heirok, Mayang Yumphal, Bishnupriya (or Bishnupur), Khunan, Ningthankhong Ngaykhong, Thamnapoxpi and so on. The people of these places are known as Bishnupriya even now and are similar to Bishnupriyas living outside Manipur in respect of their appearance and complexion. But now they only speak Meitei dialect (neither can they speak Bishnupriya dialect, nor they can understand). It is said they were all settled in above placed under the Khumal Kingdom, However, later a great majority of people field away from Manipur and took refuge in Assam, Tripura, Sylhet, and Cachar during eighteenth and nineteenth century due to repeated Burmese attacks. The language slowly started loosing its ground in Manipur against vast majority of Meiteis and slowly facing its decay in Cachar and Bangladesh against vast majority of Banglalese.This language is still being spoken in jiribam sub-division of Manipur, Cachar district of Assam and in some pockets in Bangladesh and Tripura.

Referring to the people of Manipur E.T. Dalton in his book , Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal states that ‘ By degrees, Meiteis become dominant and that name was applied to entire colony, now they claimed to be Hindu descendents. It is highly probable that these hordes overrun a country that has been previously occupied by the people of Aryan blood known to western India and to the bards." (Page 48-49). This Aryan people were presumed to be the Bishnupriya Manipuris. R.M. Nath also held that- "… the Khala Chais were the first cultured ruling race in possession of the Manipur valley and they were connected more with the neighboring kingdom of Kamrupa than other countries and that why their language is more akin to Kamrupi. It is also very likely that in very early times they were influenced by the Vishnu cult –either from Kamrupa or other parts of India and they named their capital town as Vihnupur(The Background of Assamese culture/ page –86).

It is claimed that the Bishnupriya Manipuris are the Ksatriyas and a fine stalwart race descended from Aryan blood with some admixture of the Mongoloid stock. They derived from the successive waves of Aryan invaders. The Bishnupriya Manipuris are reputed to be a highly conservative race devoted to strict vedic culture and tradition and have still now retained Hinduism without the least deviation to other religions like Islam, Buddhism, Christianity etc. It can boldly said that The Bishnupriya Manipuris are perhaps even now the best observers of Vedic retualism in India. The social dicipline and ideas are even now very rigid as it were the Aryan people of the western India of Vedic and post-Vedic era.
Moreover, there is no Vaisya or Sudra people in this community excepting Ksatriyas and Brahmins. This is the fact why these people do believe that they are the descendents of the Ksatriyas and Brahmins of Hostinapura who came to manipur following Babhrubahana. They have high social orderliness and a rigid structure of the social dicipline. Even in the ending part of 21st century, the Bishnupriya Manipuri people cannot dream for polygomy and intercaste marriage. Such cultured community is rearly found in the world now a days, though the number of people of this community is very negligible because of the strictness of their social order.

Bishnupriya language is certainly not one of the Tibeto Burman languages, but is close to Indo-Aryan group of languages. It was probably developed from the Sanskrit, Souraseni and Maharastri Prakrta and ranks with Hindi, Bengali, Oriya and Assamese. This is clear from the fact that it has retained the dominant characteristies of Soraseni and Maharastri Pronouns and declensional and conjugational endings are the most stable elements of a language; they undergo changes very slowly. A study of pronouns, the conjugational and deciensional endings of Bishnupriya shows that most of these forms are same, as are closely related to those of the languages which are derived from Sanskrit.But According to G A. Grierson what he recorded in ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ Vol.. V, Part 1, "A tribe kniwn as Mayang speaks a Mongrdl fron of Assamese by the same name.They are also known as Bishnupriya Nanipuri. Though there is a co-relation of the dinotative words of the BPM language with those of the Assmese and Meitei languages for regional and periodical reasons, it does not mean that the original language is lost by th einfluence of the surrouning languages nor it reasonable to think that the BPM language is the formative language of the plain people of Assam, Bengal and Manipur as unwisely viewed by certain phoneticians; because the phonological and syntactical mainstream of the BPM language was never hampered and the same is even now with its distinc identity.Moreover, the plain people of Assam, Bengal and Manipur were perheps not culturally, linguistically and politically so united ; nor so concious that they unitedly might have formed a language like The BPM in the Valley of Manipur. So, this theory of some phneticians and historians is very unscientific. Bishnupriyas have two dialects namely, Rajar Gang (Kings village and Madai Gang (Queans village) Unlike the dialects of other tribes, these dialects of Bishnupriyaa are not confined to ditinct geographical areas, rather they exist side by side in the same localities.In Manipur however,these two dialects were cofined to well-defined territories.The Madai Gang dialect was spoken probably in the Khangabok-Heirokk area and the Rajar Gang dialect in the Bishnupur-Ningthankhong area. From the view point of phonetics, Madai Gang is more akin to Assamese and Meitei, whereas R ajar Gang is mokre akin to bengali in respect of vocabulary Madai Gang is more influenced by meiter while Rajr Gang is more akin to Bengali and Assamese. Morphological difference between these two dialects in negligible.