Place · Meitei cultural village · India
Andro
The Meitei cultural landscape at Andro in Imphal East district, Manipur, 27 kilometres from Imphal — a living Meitei village where craft, ritual and community institutions remain unusually legible as independent documents. The village is famous for its traditional earthen pottery (made without the wheel, by hand-coiling and bonfire-firing), the Mutua Museum of Meitei culture (established 1989 by R.K. Achoubasana), and the Yu (traditional rice-beer) distilling tradition preserved against modern commercial alcohol. The seven Salais (clans) of the Meitei community are represented in Andro's spatial organisation, with each clan having its own ritual space. The village is one of the few surviving Meitei settlements that retain the pre-Hindu Sanamahism tradition in its original form, before the 18-century Vaishnavite conversion.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Meitei cultural traditions
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.800, 94.000
Connections (1)
- Site adjacencyMoirang
Moirang and Andro are both Meitei villages where pre-Vaishnava practice survives — the Lai Haraoba cycle at one, the maintained fire, pottery and sacred grove at the other. Manipur's eighteenth-century Vaishnava reform under Garib Niwaz went as far as burning older texts, and these two places are where what it did not reach can still be seen.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Andro”. Colonial forest and settlement reports; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods.
Open Andro in the repository →