Abstract
Being Mizo has taken its time to reach the public domain since the completion of Joy Pachuau’s D.Phil. thesis on which it is based, but the delay is worthwhile as it brings in it a rare blend of history and anthropology that parleys its subject matter of ethnic identities and belonging among the Mizos into a masterly set of explorations of tribe, Christianity and nation-making of Northeast India and post-colonial societies in general.
Pachuau delineates the historical, territorial, linguistic and geographical markers that have contributed to the making of contemporary Mizo ascriptions, even as she reminds us of the situational fluidity that defines them in everyday practice and contact. The state of Mizoram was established in 1987, with a name denoting land of the Mizos (people of the hills). Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh formed late entrants into the statehood map of Northeast India where prior political campaigns had resulted in the appearance of Nagaland in 1963 and Meghalaya in 1972. The move to Mizoram as a state took it from district status in post-partition Assam across the union territory status acquired in 1972. Within the contours of early 20th century British Assam, the political functioning of the colonial-era Lushai Hills unit helped crystallise the regional dialect formerly known as Duhlian or Lushai into a Mizo language and its speakers, under the hegemonic Sailo chiefs, to political and cultural dominance.
Over subsequent decades of national governance, the operation of the British-era Inner Line Permit regulations visibly differentiated outsider/insider (vai/Mizo) from the latter’s territory. However, at the micro-level of everyday social and cultural life, mixed marriages as well as internal and external migrations brought constant change to the composition of the veng (locality). Pachuau describes how her data from interviews with recognised ‘elders’ and Mizo community writings changed in significance when juxtaposed with field observations of everyday relations, archival researches and social surveys. This blended methodology helped orient her away from the ‘received’ version of ‘cultural core’ and primordial permanence that the former provided to one that locates Mizo ‘ethnogenesis’ as an endlessly fluid space between performance and praxis where she centres local vernacular Christian forms of engagement with self and place.
The book opens with a chapter titled ‘Framing the Margins’ that acts as a prelude with its exploration of contemporary Indian ‘othering’ attitudes to the people of Northeast India, using a survey of residents’ prejudices in a Delhi neighbourhood frequented by many students from the region. It goes on to carve out a statist and social science genealogy of the homogenised ‘tribal’ category that became the institutional and epistemological frame to know and rule the Northeast, the equally homogenised space where the Sixth Schedule applied. While interestingly done, this chapter could have added more coherence to the larger book plan. It would have benefited from a discussion of how Mizos and non-Mizo ‘tribals’ respond to their ascription of a ‘Northeast face’ by homogenising themselves in response to Indian ‘others’. I would also have liked to see more attention here to the gendered politics of cultural nationalism that emerge as a counter to mainstream racism. But this is a small caveat. The book’s overall strength lies in its meticulous historical and anthropological exploration of how the cultural politics of life, death and belief entwine in the locality to produce Mizo being-ness in the midst of an ongoing engagement with modernity and the primordial constructions of time, and the people and space that helped make sense of it.
Pachuau’s meticulous research into Mizoram’s printed historical archives reveals how as colonial rule sought to organise local groups within fixed spatial boundaries, the corollary of such processes was the categorisation of ‘plains’ people as vai (outsiders) —resented, oppressive ‘others’. Often, however, the brunt of this internal ‘othering’ was borne by other colonised subjects such as the Gurkha, often retired soldiers brought by British agency as agrarian personnel into frontier regions such as the Lushai or Naga Hills. She further delineates the beginnings of vernacular cosmopolitanism through the writings of authors such as LKS, K. Bawla, Lianghkaia, Makchunga and Vanchhunga during the 1920s and 1930s, which corresponds well with the time frame of Khasi and Bodo vernacular publicists’ assertion in contiguous regions. She shows how the earlier writers’ resentment of Christianity as a displacing force is subsumed by the 1940s (as in the Naga case) by an institutional and cultural identification, and a desire to appropriate Christianity as a means towards modernity and eventual nationhood.
Recently, a new generation of scholars has turned its attention to long-neglected local archives and oral histories that explore the region’s labouring, material and spatial incorporation into the Second World War theatre. Such burgeoning scholarship will be able to build upon Pachuau’s important foundational text. Her book offers much for historical, cultural and linguistic anthropologists of Northeast India, as well as for scholars of death, religion and Asian borderlands.