50 Sepoys, Not an Army: How Kuki Historians Turned a Punitive Raid into the Anglo

On October 17, 1917, J.C. Higgins, President of the Manipur State Durbar, led just 50 sepoys to Mombi village to confront its chief for refusing to provide recruits for the World War I labor corps. When the chief failed to appear or send a representative, Higgins, acting under the authority of Maharaja Churachand Singh, ordered the village burned—a punitive measure in the princely state of Manipur. Yet, last week, the Kuki revisionists celebrate this minor action as the 108th anniversary of the “Anglo-Kuki War,” falsely portraying it as a grand rebellion against British rule, with some audaciously claiming it was a “war of Independence that India forgot.”

This narrative conveniently ignores that Manipur, a princely state in 1917 under King George V’s distant oversight, was not annexed to