In 1606, a thousand defeated soldiers knelt before a Manipuri king expecting the usual fate of the conquered — the sword, the yoke, or the road into slavery. They were Muslims from Sylhet, hired by a rebel prince to help topple King Khagemba of Manipur, and they had lost. What Khagemba did instead has shaped a corner of Indian history ever since: he gave them land, and later, when Burmese soldiers came raiding the Kabaw Valley, he gave them a name. They fought for the very kingdom that had defeated them, and won. A delighted Khagemba called them Pangal — “the strong ones.” The title has outlived the battle, the king, and the kingdom itself.
It could easily have ended there, a footnote about a mercenary garrison absorbed and forgotten. Instead, Khagemba did something rarer still: he let his captives marry his own people. No Muslim women had travelled with the soldiers, so the king permitted marriage with Meitei women — an arrangement that produced not a garrison but a lineage. Their commander, Muhammad Sani, received twelve acres of prime river land, two Meitei wives, and a seat in the royal court itself as Qazi-ul-Qazat, chief judge of the new Muslim community, while also holding military rank in the king’s service. Their children took Meitei surnames, spoke Meitei as a mother tongue, and were folded into the Lallup — the same rotational service that bound ordinary Meitei subjects to the crown. A captive garrison became a caste of citizens within a single generation.
Even where they settled carried meaning. Sani’s people were placed at the confluence of the Imphal and Iril rivers — not exile on some forgotten frontier, but the most fertile, best-watered land the valley had to offer, exactly the kind of soil that made wet-rice cultivation, weaving, dyeing, and salt-making possible. Four centuries on, Pangal villages from Kwakta in Manipur to Malaya on the Tripura–Bangladesh border still cluster along rivers, wetlands, and the slow bends of meandering channels, as if the instinct for good water never left the community that first learned it on the banks of the Imphal.
Manipur was not unique in absorbing its enemies this way; it merely ran the same script that neighbouring Burma ran on Manipur itself two centuries later. When Burmese armies dragged Meitei captives away during the brutal Seven Years’ Devastation of 1819–26, the Konbaung court did something eerily familiar: it folded the ablest captives into royal cavalry and artillery units, made Manipuri Brahmins its court astrologers, and encouraged intermarriage until a whole community — the Kathe — quietly became Burmese. The logic that turned Muslim prisoners into Manipuri judges in 1606 was the same logic that turned Manipuri prisoners into Burmese officers in 1820: in this part of the world, useful captives were rarely killed. They were married in.
The line runs, remarkably, all the way to 1944. When Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army crossed into Manipur from Burma, among its soldiers was a Pangal named Naki Mohammad, sent ahead alone as a trusted scout to prepare the town of Moirang for the raising of the Free India flag. A descendant of seventeenth-century war captives was, by then, simply a Manipuri sent to vouch for his own people — the clearest proof available that the strength Khagemba once named had, three centuries later, never left.
The community did not stay put. When Burma’s armies emptied the Manipur valley in 1819, Meiteis and Pangals fled together, in the same columns, toward the Barak Valley of Assam and across into Sylhet. Pangal villages still stand today in Cachar’s Lakhipur and Sonai belts, and further still in Bangladesh’s Moulvibazar district, where the community is known as Khai Bangal — in a strange turn of history, returning almost to the very region their ancestors had been recruited from in 1606. In the border village of Malaya, on the Tripura side of the Dhalai river, elders say their forebears chose that spot deliberately, preferring the more tolerant Tipperah kingdom to the oppressive zamindari system across the water. Before Partition, families crossed that river freely for weddings and festivals; today the same families describe having relatives “on the other side” of a fence they can no longer cross without paperwork. The border cut the road. It did not cut the memory.
What is most striking about the Pangals, four centuries in, is how little they have let go. Women still wear the phanek and khudei of Meitei tradition, adapted to Islamic modesty rather than replaced by it. Marriages are still fixed by the Meitei calendar. The community speaks Meiteilon as its mother tongue — one of only two peoples in Manipur to do so — and has produced its own literary voices inside that tradition rather than outside it: the poet Khutheibam Abdur Rahman wrote Islamic devotional works in the Meitei language and became, in 2003, the first Pangal to win the state’s highest literary honour, the Sahitya Bhushan. When Manipuris in exile organised their first cultural body in the Barak Valley in 1934, Pangals were founding members alongside Meiteis and Bishnupriyas — not a tolerated minority, but a co-author of the very idea of a Manipuri community beyond Manipur’s borders.
And yet none of this has been easy, and no one pretends it has. In Malaya, the village school still teaches only in Bengali, with no Meiteilon on offer at all; a community elder’s own wish is for English, not the mother tongue, to replace it. Farming no longer sustains the young, and the village now sends more of its sons to the Gulf than any other Pangal settlement in Tripura. Even within Manipur, the community has spent the last decade petitioning, so far without success, for Scheduled Tribe status of its own — a request framed not as a break from Manipur but as a plea to be counted, fully and formally, as indigenous to it. During the ethnic violence that has gripped Manipur since 2023, Pangal drivers have kept supply routes running between the valley and the hills even as their own villages came under fire, and their leaders have said, plainly, that the state still does not treat them as a stakeholder in its own peace.
Which is, perhaps, the real story here — not a single act of royal mercy in 1606, but four centuries of a community choosing, over and over, against considerable pressure to do otherwise, to remain both things at once: fully Muslim, and fully Manipuri. Khagemba gave them a name for what they did on a battlefield. What they have done with it since — in a courtroom, in a rice field, in a schoolyard on a closed border, in a poem written in a script not their ancestors’ own — is a longer and, in its way, a more remarkable kind of strength.
The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of State External Affairs and Education, Government of India.
