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Manipur is a small oval valley of wet-rice fields encircled by nine ranges of forested hills, home to a Meitei-majority plains population and a mosaic of Naga and Kuki-Zo hill communities whose uneasy coexistence has shaped — and, since 2023, convulsed — the state's politics. Once an independent Vaishnavite Hindu kingdom with two millennia of recorded monarchy, Manipur fought and lost a war against the British in 1891, hosted a pivotal World War II battlefield in 1944, and endured a bitterly contested merger into India in 1949 before finally winning full statehood in 1972 — a sequence of grievances that still echoes through the state's insurgencies and its present ethnic crisis.

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Manipur is the only Indian state where all four commercial silk varieties — mulberry, eri, muga and oak tasar — are produced within a single territory, and where a 500-year-old all-women market still anchors the valley economy.

— Manipur Sericulture Department; Ima Keithel oral history, Homegrown / CNN Travel

Snapshot

Manipur is governed as a standard Indian state with a unicameral 60-seat Legislative Assembly (19 seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes, 1 for Scheduled Castes), though since February 2025 it has spent much of its time under central President's Rule due to sustained ethnic unrest, only returning to elected government in February 2026. Geographically and demographically the state is split between the Imphal Valley — about a tenth of the land area but home to the Meitei-majority, Hindu-and-Sanamahi plains population and roughly 57% of residents — and the surrounding hill districts, populated chiefly by Naga and Kuki-Zo Scheduled Tribes practising Christianity. Manipur is known nationally for classical Manipuri dance (Ras Lila), its GI-tagged Chak-hao black rice and handloom textiles, Loktak Lake's unique floating phumdi islands and the world's only floating national park, its position as India's principal land gateway to Myanmar and the wider Act East Policy, and — since May 2023 — for one of the deadliest and most prolonged episodes of communal violence in India's post-independence history.