Kulachandra Singh was a Meitei monarch and the Maharaja of

Manipur kingdom The Manipur Kingdom was an ancient independent kingdom at the India–Burma frontier that was in subsidiary alliance with British India from 1824, and became a princely state in 1891. It bordered Assam Province in the west and Britis ...

. He was a son of Maharaja Chandrakriti.Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 17, p. 186.
/ref>

Exile to the Cellular Jail

At the end of the

Anglo-Manipur War The Anglo-Manipur War was an armed conflict between the British Empire and the Kingdom of Manipur. The war lasted between 31 March and 27 April 1891 and ended in a British victory. Background In the First Anglo-Burmese War, the British helped ...

in the year 1891, which resulted in the British victory, Kulachandra Singh and other 22 Manipuri freedom fighters were exiled to the then British penal colony in the

Andaman and Nicobar Islands The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a union territory of India consisting of 572 islands, of which 37 are inhabited, at the junction of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The territory is about north of Aceh in Indonesia and separated ...

. At the time of their exile, the

Cellular Jail The Cellular Jail, also known as Kālā Pānī (), was a British colonial prison in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The prison was used by the colonial government of India for the purpose of exiling criminals and political prisoners. Many ...

( Kalapani) was about to be built in the island. So, Kulachandra Singh and the other 22 men were imprisoned on the

Mount Manipur , native_name_lang = mni , translation = ''Manipur Mountain'' , pronunciation = /ma-nī-pūr chīng-jāo/ , authority = Government of India , location = Andaman and Nicobar Islands , count ...

( Mount Harriet), in the present day

South Andaman South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman an ...

district.

Commemoration

Re-christening of a mountain peak and a national park

Paying tribute to Kulachandra Singh's sacrifice for his motherland

Manipur Manipur () ( mni, Kangleipak) is a States and territories of India, state in Northeast India, with the city of Imphal as its capital. It is bounded by the Indian states of Nagaland to the north, Mizoram to the south and Assam to the west. It ...

and spending the rest of his life in the

Andaman islands The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago in the northeastern Indian Ocean about southwest off the coasts of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Together with the Nicobar Islands to their south, the Andamans serve as a maritime boundary between th ...

, the

Union Government of India The Government of India ( ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...

officially renamed the Mount Harriet into

and the Mount Harriet National Park into Mount Manipur National Park. During October 2021,

Amit Shah Amit Anil Chandra Shah (born 22 October 1964) is an Indian politician currently serving as the Minister of Home Affairs since 2019 and the first Minister of Co-operation of India since 2021. He served as the President of the Bharatiya Jana ...

, a Union Home Minister of the

Republic of India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, initially announced the re-christening of the mountain and the national park.

Mount Manipur Memorial

Mount Manipur Memorial is a

memorial A memorial is an object or place which serves as a focus for the memory or the commemoration of something, usually an influential, deceased person or a historical, tragic event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects or works of ...

site, that commemorates and pays tributes to Meitei King Kulachandra Singh and the other exiled freedom fighters. The site is being built in the

( Mount Harriet) by the

Government of Manipur The Government of Manipur ( mni, Manipur Leingak; /mə.ni.pur lə́i.ŋak/), also known as the State Government of Manipur, or locally as State Government, is the supreme governing authority of the Indian state of Manipur and its 16 districts. ...

, through an agreement with the authorities of the

, assisted by the

References

Bir Tikendrajit – The Hero of Manipur
in Press Information Bureau, Government of India website.

External links