Brothers of cave: Nagas, Kukis and a war that keeps coming home
There's a story told in the hills of Manipur. Not one story, really — many versions of it, passed down by different tribes, in different
There's a story told in the hills of Manipur. Not one story, really — many versions of it, passed down by different tribes, in different tongues, each a little different from the last. But the bones of it are always the same. It goes like this. Once, there were three brothers. Sons of the same father. One of them climbed high and settled on the mountaintops — and his children became the hill people we now call the Nagas. Another settled the slopes and the forests below — and his children we call the Kukis. And the youngest went down into the valley, into the rice and the rivers, and became the Meiteis. Read Full Story This is folklore, not a family tree. No one is claiming these three people literally share one grandfather. What we have are stories — recorded over a century ago by British officers like William McCulloch and TC Hodson, who sat with village elders and wrote down what they heard. And what they heard, again and again, was a tradition of kinship. Of brotherhood. Of people who remembered, dimly, being one before they were many. Hold that story in your head: the brothers, and the cave. Because right now, in 2026, in the hills of Manipur, two of those brothers are burning each other's villages. THE LONG WALK The Nagas and the Kukis are both Tibeto-Burman-speaking people — which means their languages, and the long human story behind them, link back to one of the great migrations of Asia. Scholars trace it, broadly, to the uplands of southwestern China and the eastern edge of the Himalaya, with peoples drifting south and west over many centuries, down through what is now Myanmar, settling at last in these blue-green hills. Their languages are cousins, filed by linguists within the sprawling Tibeto-Burman family — though most experts say the Naga tongues are not one language but a scattering of many, spread across several subgroups. "Naga" was never a single people. It's an umbrella over dozens of tribes — Tangkhul, Mao, Rongmei, Liangmai, Zeliang, and more — each with its own language, its own land, its own memory. But the two people arrived at different times. And that timing is the first crack in the story. The Nagas are old in these hills. Many of their traditions point to a place called Makhel, where, the legend says, the tribes parted ways and scattered across the ranges, marking the spot with a giant standing stone. Deep-rooted people. Possessive of their land in the way that only those who have buried twenty generations in the same soil can be. The Kukis came in waves too — but several historians describe the largest of these as coming later, major migrations into Manipur through the 18th and 19th centuries, as Kuki clans were pushed out of the Chin Hills of Myanmar by stronger groups to the south. And here's a detail that matters: by credible historical accounts, the Meitei kings of the valley didn't just tolerate this — they used it. They settled the famously warlike Kuki clans on the exposed frontiers, deliberately, as a living wall against Burmese invaders to the east and raiders to the north. The colonial ethnographer J Shakespear recorded exactly this. Think about what that means. A person was invited in, partly, to be a barrier. A buffer. That word is going to echo. The Kukis, the Chins of Myanmar, the Mizos — many of them share an older name for themselves: Zo. The people of the hills. The name that was theirs before anyone else got around to naming them.
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