The term Old Kukis has long been applied to the clans which suddenly appeared in Cachar about 1800, the cause of which eruption I have explained when dealing with the history of the Lushais, but Dr. Grierson in the Linguistic Survey has included in this group a number of clans which had long been settled in Manipur territory, and my enquiries all go to prove the correctness of this classification. It appears practically certain that the ancestors of the Old Kukis and the Lushais were related and lived very close together somewhere in the centre of the hills on the banks of the Tyao and Manipur rivers. The Old Kuki clans of Manipur seem to have been the first to move, as records of their appearance there are found in the Manipur chronicle as early as the sixteenth century, and, though the chronology of the chronicle is not beyond suspicion, I think this may be taken as proof that these clans appeared in Manipur a good deal earlier than their relations the Bete and Rhangkhol entered Cachar. What the cause of this move was it is impossible to say. Probably quarrels with their neighbours, coupled with a desire for better land, combined to cause the exodus, and the movement, once started, had to continue till the clans found a haven of rest in Manipur, as their relatives did centuries later in British territory; for they were small, weak communities, at the mercy of the stronger clans, through whose lands they passed. All these Old Kuki clans are organised far more democratically than the Lushais or Thados. Lieut. Stewart in his Notes on Northern Cachar says:--"There is no regular system of government among the Old Kukis and they have no hereditary chiefs as among the New ones. A headman called the 'ghalim' is appointed by themselves over each village, but he is much more a priest than a potentate, and his temporal power is much limited. Internal administration among them always takes a provisional form. When any party considers himself aggrieved, he makes an appeal to the elders, or the most powerful householders in the village, by inviting them to dinner and plying them with victuals and wine." Among the clans which settled early in Manipur, each village has been provided with a number of officials with high-sounding titles and little power, in imitation of the Manipur system. Among those who have settled in British territory the ghalim has been transformed into the "gaonbura"--i.e., head of the village--and has acquired a certain amount of authority, whilst among the Khawtlang and Khawchhak clans, which after various vicissitudes, including a more or less lengthy sojourn among the Lushais, recently entered Manipur territory, the ghalim has become a feeble imitation of a Lushai lal. The Old Kuki Clans of Manipur.