Early State Formations in Northeast India CONTENTS Foreward vii Preface ix 1. Theories of Early State Formations 1 2. Assam 26 3. Manipur 50 4. Tripura 73 The narrative of ‘early state formations’ is a globally emerging multidimentional research field that delves into the critical cotours of social formations by knitting together the myriad of micro issues resulting from the case studies for collective theorical understaning. Friedrick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and State, (1872) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1907) are among the early theorizations on the origin of state, while The Early State (1978) edited by Henri J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik propelled the state formation studies on a global scale. Engels underlined the rise of private property as the defining point of the beginning of state formation and Morgan noted that the ancient social organizations were mostly founded on the Gentes, Phratries and Tribes and that the gentile organization, as distinct from the political society, was the oldest and the most widely prevalent institution of humankind. Claessen and Skalnik enumerated the minimum requirements like territory, size of population, social stratification, citizenship, centralization, autonomy, productivity and ideology to become a state. The global experience of the selective case studies made by Claessen and Skalnik revealed that the legitimization of authority was basically linked to ideology of the state