Long before a theodolite was ever set up on a Manipur hilltop, land in the kingdom was measured by something far simpler: a person’s own arms.
Villagers used a bamboo stick cut to the span of a mature person’s outstretched arms — fingertip to fingertip — known as the Lamjei, to measure out paddy fields and house plots. It was a practical, human-scaled unit, much like the “fathom” once used by sailors elsewhere in the world. But it was never going to satisfy an empire that wanted precise, reproducible numbers on a map.
Enter the British
Manipur became a British protectorate in 1826, after the First Anglo-Burmese War, and the East India Company wanted to know exactly what ground it was now answerable for. Officers Francis John Grant and Robert Boileau Pemberton carried out the earliest colonial reconnaissance in the early 1830s. Pemberton’s 1835 Report on the Eastern Frontier of British India — which also fixed the Manipur–Burma boundary later called Pemberton’s Line — remains a foundational source, though it was still descriptive rather than a scientifically triangulated map.
William McCulloch, Political Agent for 23 years from 1844, added further detail with his 1859 Account of the Valley of Munnipore, giving the Government of India its clearest working picture yet of the kingdom’s interior.
The triangulation era
Real precision arrived through the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, the extraordinary nineteenth-century project that measured the subcontinent using chains of triangles fixed from a single measured baseline. As that network pushed toward the north-east frontier, it eventually produced a dedicated chain through Manipur itself: the Manipur Longitudinal Series.
Survey of India records show this series was completed in the 1898–99 season by two officers observing simultaneously — Captain H. A. D. Fraser and Lieutenant H. H. Turner — and linked eastward to the Mandalay Meridional Series, tying Manipur into the wider Burma triangulation network. Colonel Sidney Gerald Burrard, who went on to become Surveyor-General of India, later compiled and directed several volumes of the Records of the Survey of India covering this north-eastern frontier work — the archival trail through which much of this history survives in libraries today.
Local tradition names Mount Iso — known as Mount Esii/”Esso” to the Mao community, and Manipur’s highest peak at 2,994 metres, as one station on this chain, with the line then running toward the Ukhrul side to the east. It’s a plausible claim: a cliff-faced summit of that height and prominence is exactly what nineteenth-century surveyors looked for. But it hasn’t yet been checked against the original station lists in the Survey of India’s General Reports, so for now it belongs to local memory rather than confirmed record.
The result of all this triangulation work was the first properly surveyed map of the whole kingdom — Survey of India topographic sheets appearing by 1891, the same year Manipur was formally annexed as a princely state after the Anglo-Manipur War. Mapping and conquest, once again, arrived together.
From military survey to land settlement
Once absorbed into British administration, survey work in Manipur shifted from military-geographic mapping to something more mundane but more consequential for ordinary people: cadastral survey, the village-by-village recording of who owned what land. This was formalised after independence through the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act, 1960, under which the valley districts were systematically surveyed, settled, and periodically resurveyed — the statutory backbone of Manipur’s land records system to this day.
Manipur still half-mapped
That is where the story turns uncomfortable. Roughly 90 percent of Manipur’s land area is hilly landscape, and the cadastral survey machine that mapped the valley in painstaking detail has, in practice, stopped at its edge. The hill areas fall under Scheduled Areas protected by Article 371C of the Constitution, safeguarding tribal and customary land rights — but this has also meant that no comprehensive land records exist for most hill villages even today. A recent state proposal of around ₹330 lakh for hill resurvey was turned down by the Expenditure Finance Committee.
Meanwhile, the valley has moved into the digital age: land records are now searchable online through the Loucha Pathap portal, and property registration is shifting to the National Generic Document Registration System.
So Manipur today carries two survey histories at once — a nineteenth-century triangulation project finished with remarkable speed and precision, and a twentieth-century cadastral project still, more than a century later, only half complete. The bamboo stick gave way to the chain in the valley long ago. In the hills, in a real sense, it hasn’t fully happened yet.
The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of State External Affairs and Education, Government of India.
