What does Humpty Dumpty have to do with a school in Manipur’s Noney?

A teacher in a Rongmei Naga village in Noney district in Manipur once read his class a story about a boy named Ramu, who goes to the market. This line appears in most school textbooks across the country.

Except there’s no market here in this village, and never has been. Ask any child in that classroom their favourite fruit, and they’ll say apple instantly, without thinking of any of the fruits growing wild outside their homes, the fruit they actually eat, but apple, something most of them have barely tasted.

“That’s where the fragmentation starts,” Kabithui Rongmei tells me. He runs an alternative school called Khangchu in Noney, Manipur, with his co-founder Ananya Mukherjee. “We start to celebrate things that are not within their reach, and dismiss what is.”

“It happens again with Humpty Dumpty, sitting on a brick wall in a picture book — there are no brick walls in this village. It happens with Diwali, which children are taught to explain despite never having seen it celebrated, sometimes by teachers who haven’t either. I don’t think this is a small glitch,” he says. He calls it the crisis itself, not a footnote to it.

This isn’t a story about the Northeast being remote, or hard to reach, or beautiful despite its troubles — the three things most articles about this region seem obligated to say. It’s a story about a curriculum built for one India being handed, unedited, to children living in a different one.

A Naga Tradition Rebuilt for a New Education Crisis

The name Khangchu itself comes from an older idea. Naga communities have long had their own version of a communal upbringing system — a morung, as it’s known in some tribes. For the Rongmei, that model is called Khangchu. Kabithui isn’t building something new so much as reviving something old, and reshaping it for the present.

It isn’t fully residential. Younger children go home to their parents every day — Kabithui is firm that they shouldn’t be separated this young.

But a smaller group, around 20 children, stay in a dormitory on a rotating basis — usually for two to three months at a stretch, brought in when a child is falling behind, or their home situation isn’t stable enough to support learning. 

Once they catch up, they rotate back out. It’s less a boarding school than a temporary safety net.

What they built together started small: afternoons with roughly twenty children, unpaid, unfunded, testing an idea.

The children in that early group already had a government school to go to that was staffed on paper but often not in practice, with substitute teachers locally hired and paid for through a fee families themselves collected. 

It was their families who chose to pull them out of that system and place them, instead, with two people running an untested afternoon program out of their own pockets. “None of this would have been possible,” Kabithui says, “if we did not have children in the classroom, and they decided to take their children out of a system and take the risk with us.”

When residents saw the children improving, they were the ones who asked for a full-time school. “It was the community who told us again — let’s make this into a full-time thing,” Kabithui says. 

When the money to build a proper structure finally came — about five lakh rupees, raised in Delhi during a stretch when the internet back home had been cut — it was around 120 villagers who built it, pausing their own work for days, gathering whatever materials they could find themselves.

“The lack of access to a system that wasn’t going to work for our children,” Kabithui says, “became the opportunity to build something else.”

Who Decides What Counts as ‘Important Knowledge’?

He’s clear that Khangchu isn’t formally affiliated with any board or government body. It runs out of two government school buildings, which they use and renovate themselves, and children are still officially enrolled in the government school — that’s actually why they’ve stuck to that arrangement, since it means the kids can still get certificates and progress reports later. 

He describes it as an informal partnership with the local school management committee and village authority, not anything official. He mentions they’ve had rounds of talks with the state education minister and education officer about a formal public-private partnership, but nothing has materialised — he blames the conflict-era paperwork delays for that.

“Even as researchers and educators, we tend to think indigenous knowledge means folktales — a very archived idea,” he says. “But no. It’s the knowledge about their land, their people, their forest — what fish live in the river. That is indigenous knowledge. It’s good to know about the fish in the Brahmaputra too. But the priority is to know what’s right next to me.”

“The knowledge that’s essential for them to survive is considered secondary,” he says, “and the knowledge that’s extra — that they may never even use — becomes the priority.” That, he says, isn’t a fact about knowledge. It’s a fact about whoever decided what counts as knowledge in the first place.

There’s a class at Khangchu you won’t find in any government syllabus — Community Immersion. It’s exactly what it sounds like: children learning about their own folklore, their clans, their people. It sounds simple, almost obvious, but Kabithui says they’re still figuring out the best way to even teach it — how do you explain “identity” to a seven-year-old in a way that actually lands? 

There’s no ready-made textbook for this. Ananya and her team are building it from nothing, piece by piece, alongside everything else.

When a Donation for a School Looks Like a Threat in Manipur

Running Khangchu means facing challenges that have nothing to do with teaching. Just reaching Imphal, the nearest city, means passing a militant checkpost in the next village. 

Two days before one of our conversations, there’d been killings on that same road, and the whole route shut down that day.

When Kabithui and Ananya travelled to Delhi to raise funds for Khangchu’s building, an internet shutdown back home made it nearly impossible to stay in touch with the community they were raising money for. 

Talks with the state’s education department about a formal partnership have dragged on for the same reason — “even a little bit of paperwork,” he says, “takes almost a year.” 

Plans to bring in outside professionals — doctors, architects, people who could show children what different careers actually look like — have stalled too, because fewer people want to travel into the hills right now.

Bank staff can’t always travel in to verify the organisation, so every large deposit triggers a call asking what it’s for. Funders have asked the same thing outright. 

“A lot of them find us suspicious,” Kabithui says. “I am going to give you money, but are you going to use it to fuel the conflict? They’re worried about their money being used to buy guns.” In an active conflict zone, even a donation for a school gets treated as a potential threat.

Kabithui is careful to add that the conflict most people have heard of — between Meitei and Kuki communities — is not the only one shaping life here. 

Tensions between other communities predate it and continue alongside it, largely unreported. “These conflicts are happening in parallel,” he says. “It’s always important to keep telling these stories.”

None of this is abstract for the children. There have been shootings in the village itself several times in the last two or three years, and kids bring the news straight to their teachers — is it true, is more coming? Kabithui says he’s rarely their first source. Most already know. Answering them, at this point, is just part of the job.

Please Stop Exoticising the Hills

There’s a particular kind of photograph Kabithui has come to dread — a teacher under a tree, a child crossing a river to reach an exam hall — the kind that turns hardship into inspiration. 

One earlier article did exactly that, he says — turning years of careful, deliberate work into a single image of children learning in the jungle. When he asked for changes before it went out, he was told the edits were locked. “They wanted their story, not our story,” he says. 

He uses a sharper word for what that kind of coverage does: exoticising. It’s why Khangchu now runs anyone who wants to visit — journalists, filmmakers, volunteers — through a slower process first, conversations meant to check that their values line up before they’re allowed near the children. 

Not to control the story, he insists, but to earn enough trust that nobody has to worry about being turned into scenery later.

The Same System, Failing Everyone Differently

It would be easy to read all this as proof of how broken things are in one remote, conflict-hit corner of the country. That reading is convenient too, because it lets the rest of India look away. ” Kabithui pushes back on that too.

“This system isn’t working for people in Guwahati either,” he says. “Or in Delhi.”

Take away the specifics like Ramu or the brick wall, the complaint underneath is one heard everywhere in Indian education: children taught to memorise instead of understand, learning that has little to do with the life waiting outside the classroom. That’s not unique to Manipur.

Elsewhere, the gap between the classroom and real life is narrow enough to overlook. In a village with no market, no brick walls, no Diwali, that same gap becomes impossible to ignore.

He isn’t making this argument only about the present, either. He’s spoken about it as a question of time: if nothing changes, he says, in another fifty years India will still be looking at a system that never worked, and will have to rebuild it from scratch anyway. The only real choice is whether that rebuilding happens now, deliberately, or decades from now, out of necessity.

That, in the end, is what a place like Khangchu really has to offer the rest of the country. Not a faraway story about a faraway problem, but a magnified, undeniable version of a problem Indian education has been living with for a long time, and has simply gotten better at not noticing.

A note on this piece: Ananya Mukherjee, Khangchu’s co-founder and the person who designs most of its curriculum, was not available to be interviewed directly for this article. Her presence throughout is drawn from what Kabithui shared about her and their work together.