It is high time that we—however briefly—attempt to understand the rich, complex history of Manipur. “Stories about Manipur in the Indian media were almost always about violence,” wrote the Burmese diplomat Thant Myint-U in 2012. Eleven years on, it seems that nothing has changed. In this article, I instead want to look to Manipur’s past, specifically its brief, dazzling imperial moment, when it humbled the mightiest state in Southeast Asia. Migrations in the mountains While it is all too common to perceive Manipur as a distant frontier of the Ganga-Brahmaputra river valley, the region’s primary geographical concern for much of…