How Paona Brajabashi defended Manipur at Khongjom in 1891

Major Paona Brajabashi (Paonam Nawol Singh, 1833–1891) — a senior Manipuri army commander, nearly sixty at Khongjom, remembered less for winning than for how he refused to surrender. Yuvraj Tikendrajit Singh (1856–1891) — the Senapati and crown prince whose 1890 coup and defiance of British demands sparked the war; brave, headstrong, and the man the British most wanted. Thangal General — the elderly, trusted senior minister and military figure of the Manipur court, hanged alongside Tikendrajit. Maharaja Kulachandra Singh — installed by the coup, he led the kingdom during the war and was later tried and transported for life. Chief Commissioner J.W. Quinton — the senior British official whose killing at Kangla turned a local dispute into an imperial war. Major-General Henry Collett — the British commander who directed the converging columns that took Imphal. Lieutenant Charles Grant — the young officer whose small force held Thoubal against far larger Manipuri numbers, buying time for the invasion. Between them stood two very unequal armies: a proud but under-armed Himalayan kingdom, and the military machine of the British Raj.

The invasion was a coordinated squeeze. Three British columns advanced under Major-General Henry Collett: the Silchar column from the west, the Kohima column from the north, launched around 20 April, and the Tamu column from Burma in the east. The Kohima and Tamu forces converged on the Imphal valley, and it was the Tamu-side advance that ran into Paona Brajabashi at Khongjom on 23 April 1891. Sources describe a British assault force of roughly 350 infantry, about 44 cavalry and two field guns pressing forward against a Manipuri position of around 500 defenders. The imbalance was less in numbers than in firepower: the British had modern breech-loading rifles and artillery, while the Manipuris were thin on modern arms. Paona held the hillock through repeated attacks and fierce hand-to-hand fighting. British losses were light — about two killed and eleven wounded — but the Manipuris lost heavily, more than a hundred and twenty-eight men, among them Paona himself and fellow officers such as Heirang Kongja and Chinglensana. Khongjom was the last pitched battle of the war. Four days later, on 27 April 1891, the united columns entered a deserted Imphal and hoisted the Union Jack over Kangla Palace, ending organised Manipuri resistance.

Victory brought a hard reckoning for Manipur. Once Imphal fell, the British hunted down the men they held responsible for Quinton's death. A special court began proceedings in May 1891, and on 13 August 1891 Yuvraj Tikendrajit and the aged Thangal General were publicly hanged before a crowd at Pheidapung, the polo ground in Imphal, for waging war against the Empire. Maharaja Kulachandra and around twenty-one nobles were stripped of their property and transported for life to distant penal settlements. Manipur lost its independence and was placed under a British political agent, with a boy prince installed under close British control — a subjection that would last until India's own freedom in 1947. Behind these headline punishments lay quieter grief: the more than a hundred and twenty-eight men who died at Khongjom left families across the valley, and Paona's death made him a household name of mourning and pride. The refusal that tradition records — that he would rather die than betray his king and country — turned a lost battle into something larger. For ordinary Manipuris, 1891 was not a distant imperial episode but the year their kingdom's freedom ended, and the names of its fallen soldiers became sacred.

In 1891 Khongjom was a defeat that sealed Manipur's subjection. Today it is a shrine to courage. Each year on 23 April, Manipur observes Khongjom Day as a state occasion, when leaders and citizens gather at the Khongjom War Memorial Complex in Thoubal district — built on the battlefield itself, crowned by a tall statue of Paona Brajabashi — to lay wreaths for the fallen. What keeps the memory alive is not only stone but song. An eyewitness to Paona's stand is said to have been so moved that he began to sing of it, and that lament grew into the ballad tradition of Khongjom Parva, a performance form of narration, drum and cymbal that is now woven into Manipuri culture and still draws audiences. Where colonial records once filed Khongjom under a punitive expedition to avenge a murdered Chief Commissioner, Manipur reads it as a chapter of India's long resistance to imperial rule, and the fallen as martyrs rather than rebels. The hillock that the British stormed in a morning has become, more than a century on, one of the strongest anchors of Manipuri identity and pride — proof of how a small people remembers a stand that the wider country long overlooked.

Khongjom matters because it corrects two easy mistakes about India's past. The first is geographic: the story of resistance to British rule is too often told only through the plains and the big cities, leaving out the northeast almost entirely. Paona Brajabashi and the Anglo-Manipur War are a reminder that a small Himalayan kingdom fought its own hard war in 1891, decades before the mass movements that fill the textbooks, and paid for it with its freedom. The second mistake is to measure history only by who won. Paona lost his battle and his life, and Manipur lost the war — yet the stand endures precisely because of how it ended, not whether it succeeded. The lesson he left is about the choice a person makes when the odds are hopeless: tradition remembers him choosing death over the comfort of switching sides, and that choice is why an ageing major is a national symbol while the imperial officers who beat him are footnotes. Honouring Khongjom does not require inflating the numbers or pretending the kingdom could have won. It asks something simpler and truer — that the courage of India's smaller peoples be counted in the national memory, and that a soldier who would not betray his land be remembered on his own terms.