Pakhangba

Also Known As: Meitei ꯄꯥꯈꯪꯕ; also Ipudthou or Iputhou Pakhangba, “grandfather Pakhangba”; Apanba in the ritual songs
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Meitei Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He can hold either a human shape or the body of a great serpent, and the pattern his coiling body makes is itself treated as sacred and protective.
Role in Mythos: He holds the throne of the world and is the ancestor from whom the Ningthouja kings of Manipur drew their right to rule.
Relation to Humans: Meitei tradition treats a large snake crossing a path as the god himself passing through, and people address it with the honorific reserved for him rather than the ordinary word for a snake. His kings sat above a chamber where he was believed to lie coiled, so that the endurance of the man on the throne measured the length of his reign.

The throne at Kangla was not built for comfort, and that was the point. Beneath the seat, in a chamber cut into the floor, a snake was said to lie coiled, and the snake was the king’s own ancestor. A new ruler took the seat in a posture the body was not made to hold and simply endured it. The longer he could bear the ache in his hips and the heat believed to be rising from below, the longer and richer his reign would be. Manipuri kingship began with a man sitting very still on top of a god.

The god was Pakhangba, and his name is an argument. It means something close to the one who has realised his father, and the story behind it is the founding scene of Meitei religion. The sky father told his two sons that whichever of them could circle the universe seven times and return to him first would be given the throne of the world. Sanamahi, the elder and by every account the stronger, set off at once. Pakhangba stayed where he was. His mother, the earth goddess Leimarel Sidabi, pointed out something his brother had not thought to ask: that to walk around his father was to walk around everything his father contained. So he circled the throne seven times and was sitting on it when Sanamahi came back exhausted from the edge of creation.

He won by not going anywhere. The tradition has never pretended otherwise, and it has never really settled the grievance either. Sanamahi kept the southwest corner of every Meitei house and remains the god of the household, fed daily in a way Pakhangba is not; Pakhangba took the kingdom. Two brothers, two jurisdictions, and a quarrel that Meitei ritual restages rather than resolves. The old song called Keiyen puts them as a tiger and a cock, the elder brother stalking through wet scrub after the younger, who is running with his seven goddesses and calling out as he goes.

What he looks like depends on which century is doing the looking. The oldest and most persistent form is a heavy-bodied serpent, a python rather than anything slender, carrying on its head the branched antlers of the sangai. That pairing is not decorative. Serpents are the totem of the Ningthouja clan, who will not eat fish or plants that resemble a snake; the brow-antlered deer belongs to the Luwang. The god with a python’s body and a deer’s antlers is two peoples agreeing to have one ancestor. The same logic runs through Meitei building and boat-making, where the swept prow of a royal hiyang hiren is dressed with antlers while its long flanks are worked to read as the body of the serpent, and where the ornament crowning a house front is named for the branching of a horn. After the reign of Khagemba a tighter form took hold, the god closed into a ring with his tail in his mouth, and it is this coiled shape that ended up on the white and red flags of the kingdom and on the arms of its kings.

Those coils have a name and a literature of their own. The paphal are the patterns his body is said to have made as it moved, and an old manuscript tradition records more than three hundred and sixty of them, each tied to a clan, a place, a river, a hill or a particular function. They are drawn, not written about. Meitei practice treats them as genuinely potent rather than illustrative, which is why the sight of one in a manuscript still carries a charge that the printed word for it does not.

The ordinary encounter is quieter. A python crosses a courtyard in the valley on a hot afternoon, dragging its length over packed earth with a dry rasp, and nobody reaches for a stick. Meitei has two words for a snake: lin for the small venomous kinds, lairen for the big ones and for anything mythically large. What comes across the yard is lairen, and it is addressed with the honorifics owed to the god, or simply as the god. People who have met one will tell you their lives changed afterwards.

The cult absorbs almost anything it touches. Kings were deified into it as a matter of course, so that Naothingkhong and Khagemba are both worshipped as forms of Pakhangba, and the name attaches to a long list of further figures, including a Tangkhul deity taken into the Meitei pantheon with his wife. One legend gives him seven wives who bear the seven Meitei clans; others name consorts from the Kabui, Thangal, Chothe and Kom peoples. A god who wins by understanding his father turns out to be very good at making other people’s ancestors into relatives.

He is also fused, permanently and probably irreversibly, with a man. The royal chronicle of Manipur begins its king list with Nongda Lairen Pakhangba, crowned with his queen Laishna in a year usually given as 33 CE, who set about pulling the valley’s rival principalities into a single realm under the Ningthouja. Whether the king took the god’s name or the god grew out of the king is not a question the sources answer, and scholars who agree on the coronation year disagree flatly about when his reign ended, some giving him twenty-one years and the chronicle itself more than a century. Later kings simply used the title.

His powers follow from all this rather than sitting on top of it: he shifts between man and serpent, he confers legitimacy, and his pattern protects the ground it is drawn on. His limits follow just as directly. His authority was tied to a dynasty and a citadel, so when Vaishnava Hinduism reshaped Meitei religion from the eighteenth century, and when the kingdom itself fell, his public standing went with them, and new tales grew over the old identity thickly enough that the early ethnographers noticed the seams. He is not a god of general devotion; he is owed to a lineage, a clan totem, a stone at Kangla. And there are Meiteis today who expect him back, believing that Pakhangba will return to reunite the hills and the valley, politically and religiously, and end a conflict that has outlasted every throne he was ever seated on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pakhangba?

Pakhangba is a primordial deity of the Meitei people of Manipur in northeastern India, worshipped in Sanamahism, the indigenous Meitei religion. He is usually shown as a serpent or dragon and holds the throne of the world. The Ningthouja dynasty, which ruled Manipur, traced its ancestry directly to him.

How did Pakhangba win the throne?

His father promised the throne of the universe to whichever son could circle the universe seven times and return first. His elder brother Sanamahi set out immediately, but Pakhangba’s mother Leimarel Sidabi told him that circling their father’s throne was the same as circling everything, so he walked around the throne seven times and was already seated when Sanamahi returned. His name reflects this and means roughly the one who has realised his father.

What does Pakhangba look like?

He is depicted as a thick serpent or python with the antlers of the sangai, the brow-antlered deer of Manipur, on his head. The combination joins two totems, since the serpent belongs to the Ningthouja clan and the deer to the Luwang. In later art, especially after the reign of Khagemba, he is drawn coiled into a closed ring with his tail in his mouth, and this is the form used on the royal flags of Manipur.

What is paphal?

Paphal are the sacred patterns said to have been formed by Pakhangba’s body as he moved in serpent form. An old Meitei manuscript tradition records more than three hundred and sixty distinct paphal designs, each associated with a particular clan, place, river, hill or function. They are treated as genuinely powerful rather than merely decorative, and the heraldry of the Manipur kingdom derives from them.

Is Pakhangba the same as King Nongda Lairen Pakhangba?

The deity and the king are closely fused in Meitei tradition and are often difficult to separate. Nongda Lairen Pakhangba appears in the royal chronicle of Manipur as the first Ningthouja ruler, crowned in a year usually given as 33 CE, and later kings also took the title Pakhangba. Whether the king was named for the god or the god developed from the king is not settled by the sources.