Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Notes on contributors -- Introduction -- PART I Framework, administration, and democratisation -- 1 Cast of colonialism: constructing the peculiar North East India -- 2 Colonial administration, knowledge and intervention: colonial project of ethnicisation in Manipur -- 3 Revisiting the Kuki Rebellion and Nupi Lan -- 4 Colonialism and movement for democracy in Manipur -- PART II Literature, popular culture, and religion -- 5 Religious revivalism and colonial rule: origin of the Sanamahi Movement -- 6 Politics, society and literature in modern Manipur -- 7 Desire, disgrace and colonialism: a reading of Bor Saheb Ongbi Sanatombi -- 8 Jesters of popular genres as agents of resistance through reflexivity -- PART III Imperial strategies and distinct political histories -- 9 Situating Manipur in the geopolitics of imperial powers -- 10 Consolidation of British 'indirect rule' in Manipur -- 11 Interrogating into the political status of Manipur -- 12 Christian missionaries and colonialism in the hills of Manipur -- PART IV Post-Empire Manipur, organisational politics, and frontier -- 13 Organisational politics in 20th-century Manipur: trajectories and footprints -- 14 Polemics of the Manipur Merger Agreement, 1949 -- 15 Centrality of body politics in Thokachanba's script and cultural revivalism in Manipur -- 16 Recasting space: politics of frontier-making -- Glossary -- Index