KUKI, a name given to a group of tribes inhabiting both sides of the mountains, dividing Assam and Bengal from Burma, south of the Namtaleik river. These tribes are comparatively recent immigrants into the area they now occupy, and appear to have come down the Chindwin valley from the north, sending offshoots into the hills to the west which have fused with the Naga tribes, leaving more or less evident traces on their culture. The main body having reached the sea turned north again up the hills. In the course of migration, and by the practice of slave-hunting, alien blood has been incorporated and the earliest Kuki immigrants, known in Manipur and Cachar as "Old Kukis," are so mixed with Naga stock that some tribes seem as much Naga as Kuki. In the case of the Thado Kuki who followed them, the Lushei, who drove the Thado north from the district called Lushai hills, the Lakher, and the various tribes of the Chin hills in Burma—Haka, Siyin, Sokte, etc.—there is, in spite of diver gences, so strong a similarity in general type and culture that they can be fairly treated as forming a single group, ruled by chiefs on a quasi-feudal system, exogamous, patrilineal, attaching great importance to genealogy and descent. Heirlooms and antiques are valued inordinately. They are wasteful cultivators but good artificers ; they are still actually migratory or but recently settled. Clans claim descent from a common ancestor, polygyny is allowed and the levirate practised, marriage is by purchase, and subject to involved post-mortem claims against the woman's descendants for the benefits conferred by her bearing of children into her husband's clan. Chiefs wield wide authority; their subjects are
bound to them by service tenures, and a man accepting a chief's protection assumes a vassalage which he cannot put off at will. Communal houses for bachelors are found sporadically. All dis ease is ascribed to spirits and can be driven off by appropriate disinfectants or ceremonies, but a beneficent Creator is believed in, to whose abode souls go after death, having to pass a malig nant demon on the way. The dead are frequently buried, but by some tribes exposed on platforms and cremation has been known. Heads of enemies and of animals are sought for to put on the graves of relatives, that the souls of the former may accompany the latter to the next world. The heads of important persons used to be disposed of separately in ledges of cliffs. Ordeals are undergone by plunging under water. As weapons, guns have superseded the simple bow and arrows, sometimes poisoned, and the shield. The spear seems never to have been popular. The Kuki is generally an indefatigable hunter and snarer of game, warlike, bloodthirsty and destructive. His languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman family and his folklore savours of the Arabian Nights.
See Cary and Tuck, Chin Hills Gazetteer (1896) ; J. Shakespear, Lushei-Kuki Clans (1912). (J. H. H.)