From Oral Memory to Institutional Recognition: A Historical Study of Bnei Menashe Identity Formation

The Bnei Menashe of Northeast India have attracted sustained scholarly attention, largely framed around debates concerning origins, authenticity, and religious legitimacy. While existing studies have provided valuable ethnographic, theological, and institutional insights, they have often approached Bnei Menashe identity as a claim to be verified rather than as a historical process to be explained. This article advances a different analytical perspective by examining the historical formation of Bnei Menashe identity through the interaction of oral memory, colonial and missionary encounters, religious reformulation, and institutional mediation. Drawing on memory studies, constructivist diaspora theory, and postcolonial analyses of knowledge and recognition, the study traces how dispersed oral narratives concerning migration and ancestry were gradually reconfigured into a coherent identity capable of institutional recognition. It argues that oral memory functioned as a dynamic historical practice, continually reshaped in response to changing epistemic and political conditions, rather than as a static repository of ancestral truth. The article further demonstrates that recognition by religious and state institutions did not simply affirm identity but transformed it, standardizing narratives and practices within regulated frameworks of belonging. By reframing the Bnei Menashe case from questions of authenticity to processes of historical formation, the study contributes to broader debates on diaspora, memory, and the governance of identity in postcolonial and transnational contexts.