Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity
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TRN0010.1177/0265378818810271TransformationDingluaia 810271research-article2018 Article Transformation 2018, Vol. 35(4) 240 –250 Maps, Mission, Memory and © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: Mizo Identity sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0265378818810271DOI: 10.1177/0265378818810271 journals.sagepub.com/home/trn Lal Dingluaia Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK Abstract This article will examine the role of imperial maps, Christian mission, shared memories and collective consciousness in the formation of Mizo identity. Arguing that imperial maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, were meant to suit specific purposes and were laden with deeper agendas, this article will maintain that other aspiring maps also depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descriptions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed have actual impacts upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspirations of the Mizo Christians who embraced Christianity during the colonial period, and how they are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical and historical dimensions of their mental maps. Keywords Dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, Hindu nationalism and Mizo identity, maps and colonialism, mission and Biblical interpretation, shared memories and collective consciousness Introduction As expanding empires in the heyday of colonialism were largely consolidated through maps, the eventual disintegration of the British empire in the mid-20th century spawned aspiring and com- peting maps. Meant to suit specific purposes and laden with deeper agendas, these maps depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descrip- tions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed have actual impacts upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspira- tions of the Mizo Christians, who are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical dimension of their mental maps. Contours of Mizo Identity and Their Mental Maps The Mizo people, before they assumed their Mizo identity, were branded by the British who annexed their land in the 1890s as the Lushais. The Lushais had been reckoned to confine Corresponding author: Lal Dingluaia, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. Email: [email protected] Dingluaia 241 themselves mainly in the Lushai Hills, the place allocated them by colonial discourse,1 but their stories and memories extended far beyond those Hills. Those memories that transcended and trans- gressed their Hills helped them in constructing their more inclusive Mizo identity and a mental map which extended far beyond the limits of their Hills. So, Mizo is a generic name for various clans who, by and large, adopted the Duhlian dialect spoken by the Lusei clan. Formerly known as the Chins/Kookies/Lushais by the British,2 the Mizo settled in and around Mizoram (literally ‘land of the Mizo’), which is in the north-eastern part of India bordering Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan). From being a part of Assam as Mizo District after the inde- pendence of India, Mizoram became a full-fledged state of India in 1987. Due to different types of boundaries that separated them for decades, the relationship between the various Mizo clans is one of an ‘other/brother’.3 But their shared memories and collective con- sciousness,4 as well as their stark difference from the plain people of the surrounding areas, give them a sense of kinship and belonging. One crucial myth, etched in the collective consciousness of the Mizo people in different Hills, is that they had originated from a place called Chhinlung. Chhinlung chhuak (literally ‘out of Chhinlung’, a mythical place from where their ancestors sup- posedly emerged) refers to the common matrix/womb that the Zo people believe they share despite some slight variations in their dialects, customs and practices. Another vital piece of their memo- ries is that of the Rih lake of Burma/Myanmar. The pre-Christian Mizo believed that the spirits of the dead passed through this lake before reaching their eternal abode. Folklores, stories and songs perpetuate the legend of the Rih lake and the name still holds a charm for these people. So central is the lake in their narrative that it prompted the ironic saying: ‘the largest lake in Mizoram is Rih lake but it is situated in Burma’. Another tradition which breached their immediate vicinity was the ‘soul’ encased in sakhua – often decoded as their primitive ‘religion’. Basically, the pre-Christian Mizo had a vague concept of Chung Pathian, a benevolent supreme ‘God on high’ that rarely interfered in their daily lives. But there is a more ritualistic aspect in their ‘religion’ as embodied in sakhua. Sakhua was perpetu- ally reinvented, probably after mightier foes annihilated their community leaders when they settled somewhere around Khampat in Burma/Myanmar. The surviving members who scattered across the hills, to get blessings and protection from sickness, started invoking a deity or sa with the rituals confined to respective families. The notion of sa and another cognate word kung implies the main trunk of a tree which supports the branches or a primordial root which upholds one’s being. Changing ‘affiliation’ from one’s particular sa was akin to cutting off one’s identity to assume another, and it was denoted by the word saphun – phun implying the uprooting and replanting of a tree. To appease the sa, the priests who led the rituals closed their incantations by saying, ‘May the one whom our grandparents venerated heed us’. Zairema, who has extensively studied Mizo reli- gion, infers that this closing formula was made by the ‘unassertive’ priests to make sure that they did not fail to address the one their ancestors had taken as deity. As time passed and families evolved into clans, specific ancestral names and the places/hills/villages where they had previously settled were added to the formula.5 Most of the places these memories invoked lie outside the present political boundaries of Mizoram. But like the memories of the land of Egypt invoked in the Jewish Passover meal (Ex.12- 14; Num. 9:1-5), remembering the name of different places in their ‘rituals’ and stories forged a deep sense of kinship for the Mizo. These memories/consciousness that embraced a shared notion of origin and destiny gave meaning to their life from which sprung forth their sense of values and identity. The geographical space embedded in those memories, from being ‘merely an area of space’, evolved into a ‘space with meaning: a territory’.6 The ‘shared memories’ became territorial markers that served as ‘the classificatory distinction of a “we” in contrast to a “them”’,7 which was unleashed in the ‘aspirational maps’ of ‘Greater Mizoram’. 242 Transformation 35(4) Depiction of the Mizo and Their Territory in Various Maps Besides these ‘given’ or primordial aspects which make territoriality instinctive, there is a ‘con- structivist’ factor that determines the Mizo identity and territoriality. Before the ‘institutional phe- nomenon of borders’ determined the limits of their sovereignty ‘through unequal power relations’,8 their territory was ‘just areas where the people were ethnically related but constantly at war with each other, sometimes from village to village’.9 After they encountered colonial power/s that relied on maps to define ownership and influence, a more coherent, though often fractured, identity was constructed. As these maps predate and initiated a specific sense of Mizo identity and territory, we shall first look at how they depicted and negated the Mizo and their territory. The British India Maps. These maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, are the archetype of later maps. Economically motivated, they were meant to protect British interest and divide the people according to administrative convenience. These maps can fall under two periods: the periods before and after the Chin-Lushai Expedition of 1889–1890. Before the Chin-Lushai Expedition, on imperial maps depicting ‘claims to territory and demar- cating growing spheres of influence’,10 the Mizo territory was usually represented as an unknown/ empty space, a frontier to the expanding British India. But with the thriving tea market in Britain in the early 19th century, an embargo on Chinese tea imports, and the discovery of indigenous tea in India11 resulted in the eastward expansion of the British Empire beyond the demarcated Cachar District of Assam into the hill countries. Though the British had no direct economic interest in the hills area,12 they felt the need to establish clear boundaries that would serve as a line of control to protect their interests in the plains area from recurring raids by the hill people. 13 So, the British administrators proposed ‘a boundary which the Lushais should respect’.14 Around 1864 when the messengers of Mizo chief Vanpuiliana ‘expressed great dread at the advance of tea gardens’ into their territory, Captain Stewart, the Deputy Commissioner of Cachar District, tried to diffuse the situation ‘by showing how advantageous to the Hill Tribes the vicinity of a garden would prove’.15 On 16 January 1871, JW Edgar, special Deputy Commissioner of Cachar District, came to the village of chief Suakpuilala, a prominent Mizo chief with the hope of settling ‘a boundary from the borders of Manipur to Hill Tipperah, where ordinary British civil jurisdiction should cease’.16 This proposal, which later became the basis of the ‘Southern Cachar District Boundary’, intruded deep into the Mizo territory. It angered the Mizo chiefs and they set out ‘to attack the tea gardens, each chief assigned to attack certain specified garden’.