Modern Mizoram

History, Culture, Poetics

P. Thirumal, Laldinpuii, C. Lalrozami

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429826368
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

Mizoram is situated at a unique cusp in North East India, in terms of both physical and social contexts. It shares its borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, while cultural influences range from the indigenous to the Western. This book offers an alternative understanding of the modern history of Mizoram through an analysis of its cultural practices through language, music, poetry and festivals. It explores the roots of modern cultural works not just in Christianity, but also in precolonial Mizo traditional practices. The authors closely examine text, performance and sculptural images, including the first handwritten newspaper Mizo Chanchin Laisuih (1898) and the Puma Zai festival (1907–11) from the early colonial period along with a contemporary sculptural image. They argue that cultural works open up to new forms of interpretations and responses over time. The book indicates that the Mizo creative sensibility enmeshed in theological, capitalistic-material and political/ideological regimes informs its modern enclosures, be it region, religion or nation.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, media, history, politics, sociology and social anthropology, area studies, North East India studies and South Asian studies.

1
On the discursive and material context of the first handwritten Lushai newspaper Mizo Chanchin Laishuih¹

The first Lushai handwritten newspaper, Chanchin Laishuih (1898), braids both – documentary and the mythical – into one strand. It plays out both the problem solving and the play-like situation in its use of the language, content and form of the genre. Lushais were neither readers nor consumers of newspapers at that juncture. This artefact did not lead to a form of co-creative reading or listening. Nevertheless, the tension between the ear and the eye had just unfolded – the eye was foregrounded as the purveyor of enlightenment and progress. This newspaper, in some ways, consecrates the world as a picture and made visible what was generally accepted to be unrepresentable – the concealed world of the Lushais. Very soon, the eye becomes the fount around the making of the territorial, linguistic and religious community. However, the unusual receptivity of the newspaper to the emancipatory project occurs without overtly interrupting the way of being of the Lushais.

While the newspaper urges the reader to objectify the world in a presumably non-contextual manner, reverence for what is incalculable or what is the traditional Lushais’ contextual meaning is hinted at without explicitly stating it, be it in the realm of agriculture, health and well-being, hunting or moral orientation. The newspaper exercises restraint towards the White man’s thesis that the world is fully knowable. The production of this originary text is entangled in rendering the fabled tiger in a cognitively undigested manner, standing witness to the ongoing (non) transformatory project. In the newspaper, being Lushai is not immediately translated into a knowable subject, nor is the external world immediately seen as a representable object.

With the introduction of the text (MCL), the cohabitation of a diverse semiological and a semantic understanding did not resolve itself. It may be read as a conversation between a universe of signs having more authorial power and representing the colonial authority vis-à-vis the declining symbolic and moral authority of the denizens of the hills. It is only through the act of reading that the closed text opens up to display its own intentionality separate from the authors’. The newspaper based on notions of transparency and objectivity yields a hermeneutical dividend and transforms itself from being a representational sign to becoming a symbolic vehicle.

The arrival of the garbled text, MCL, in the form of a newspaper, signals the inception of ‘secular modernity’ among the peripatetic Mizos. The simultaneous entry of both handwriting and typewriting marks the time before and the time after in terms of the use of technology rather than literacy and modern production technologies associated with the dissemination of literacies. The appearance of graphic signs supposedly standing for vocal utterances, the dexterity needed for the deft movement of fingers, and the contraption known as the typewriter with its ink, paper and ribbon producing a machinic sonority made the experience gnostic and modern at the same time. In some ways, the handwritten MCL authorizes a time in which another time participates without the need to force an equivalence. The newspaper represents the gap between the language that is spoken by the speech community, and the written language freshly acquired by a few literate individuals, mostly White officials and native informants, necessitating a hermeneutical inquiry. This interpretative exercise, while teasing out and checking the multi-valencies of the newly acquired colonial signs, has to seize the historical and intersubjective entanglements of the shared experience of the text simultaneously, while the text is suggestive and partially self-conscious. MCL as a newspaper describes and orders events, whereas the Lushai language refuses to be reduced to mere sign or representation. The allusion to ‘ai’, the sacrificial ceremony performed while hunting, may be read as a form of affirmative practice supposedly challenging the trope of the newspaper as a tool of mass enlightenment. True, many parts of MCL have a modern pedagogic thrust, but the text has also incorporated aspects of the Mizo communal past leading to the fusing of distinct horizons. This fusing of a prosaic present with a lyrical past explains the univocity of MCL in particular, and early Mizo colonial society in general.

British colonial intervention in the North East

British India’s Yandaboo Treaty with Burma in 1826 triggered off a series of unprecedented and almost irreversible changes in what is now known and experienced as the North East region.² In the first place, the region acquired a new self-description and form of address; it led to the making of the ‘Frontier’ region.³ Recent scholarship on the historiography of the region registers the Frontier as possessing an extractive and strategic value.⁴ Following this Treaty, the ‘otherwise’ spatially and politically fluid Lushai region was divided between Burma on one hand and Manipur on the other hand, though neither state had a formal presence in the region causing concern for the British administration.⁵

Secondly, the Frontier was not merely recognized as an opposite of mainland but it was further reconfigured as consisting of plains and hills.⁶ The Bengal East Frontier Regulation of 1873 allowed the colonial state to demarcate the region into two zones separating and dismembering the Brahmaputra plains from the Hills.⁷ The primal identities of the hill folks were to be protected lest they get contaminated through representative institutions and forms of governance. The colonial government reasoned that they be left to rule on their own and only their martial excesses against their neighbours be contained through an indirect police state supported fiscally by local resources.⁸ This coincided with their knowledge that the subsistence economy practiced by the hills people did not produce any surplus, and therefore the need for expensive direct administration was practically resolved in this manner. The inhabitants of the hill tracts were to manage their own local administration with their traditional institutions that were rapidly coming under strain because of somewhat contractual ideas of land, labour and property being enforced through the state and mediated through the missionaries.⁹ In the latter half of the nineteenth century, with Assam entering a new phase of realizing an imagined economy of tea, coal and oil, the plains region was embellished with the garb of mainland British India’s administrative apparatus in order to secure the interests of an emerging extractive political economy of the region.¹⁰

Thirdly, the Frontier appears to acquire a certain distance from the interiority of the mainland and various disguises of the absences or presences are played out.¹¹ Present-day, Assam represents the plains whereas the other North East states including Lushai District re-designated as Mizoram after Independence represented the habitation of the wild races.¹²

Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Assam becomes a planter’s raj and the soft boundaries between the hills and plains that exists prior to colonialism becomes hard, as also the complex relationship between the plains and the hills reduced through policies obtained new colonial discursive logic.¹³ Lushais initially resisted through skirmishes, occasional murders and kidnappings but they were finally annexed through the Second Lushai Expedition as late as 1890.¹⁴

Situating Mizo Chanchin Laishuih in its communicational context

There are two parts to this intervention. The first part wrestles with the received arguments relating to understanding the newspaper as a historical product against the background of Mizo Chanchin Laishuih (MCL) and the latter section deals with an inter-textual reading of the third issue of MCL.

The Mizo Chanchin Laishuih is considered to be the first handwritten Mizo language newspaper in the colonial Lushai Hills district or anywhere else in the world. Four issues of this newspaper appeared over two years. The newspapers were duplicated on carbon copy and circulated. Interestingly, this newspaper arrived four years after the Lushai language acquired a script.¹⁵ The Duhlian∕Duhlien dialect was selected from among the twelve dialects that were used in the Lushai Hills region. The dominant Sailoo clan spoke this dialect. This story deals with the second issue of MCL, four pages long and dated 24 August 1898.

This issue is available in the Government Archive situated in the capital city, Aizawl. It contains six apparently diverse stories out of which five may be read as belonging to the genre of news; the last bit assumes the form of a moral anecdote. The text was written on one side of four separate sheets. Its content includes facts, stories, myths and performance of rituals. It presents a snapshot of practices relating to hunting, agriculture, health and healing, in seven to eight clusters of villages where chiefs¹⁶ like Thongliana, Tlangbula, Rokungi, Thanruma, Khawvelthanga, Lalchunga and Lianawna indirectly ruled or governed.¹⁷ In the present map of Mizoram some of these places are as far as 200 kilometres from each other. It may have taken several weeks to travel between the most distant villages.

Three prominent names appear in the text. They are Bor Sap (Shakespeare or the White Prince of the Hills), the most powerful colonial administrator of the Lushai Hills;¹⁸ Khamliana, a Sailo chief on the decline who later rose to become the first literate and the most effective spokesman for the Lushais; Suaka, a commoner from the less visible Chawngthu Vanchiau clan, remarkably enterprising and a person who held several positions in the colonial bureaucracy, and taught the Mizo language to Lorrain, the missionary responsible for producing the script for the Lushai language. It appears that these three men participated in the writing of MCL.

The manuscript culture in mainland India existed for more than two millennia for classical languages and roughly one millennium for the other regional languages.¹⁹ It preceded colonialism. Even this fact of the hoary tradition of manuscript culture is not necessarily applicable to MCL where the Duhlian language has been committed to writing for the first time. The fact that MCL is a manuscript newspaper and the manuscript newspaper is a new category within the corpus of media history requires attention. Obviously, colonialism introduced both manuscript and print culture in the erstwhile Lushai Hills district.

The standardization of the handwriting through print leads to homogenization in a profound sense. It facilitates (following Heidegger) the destroying of the integrity of the word because the hand has a much closer affinity to speech than the machine. With the machine, the word becomes corrupted in the form of reducing itself to a metaphor for transport or commerce. Heidegger provides interesting theoretical insights on drawing a distinction between handwriting and typewriting. Heidegger argues that the human hand is the most distinguished achievement of human evolution. He sees an organic connection between hand, thought and language. In that context, he believes manual handwriting to be more authentic than the machine-induced typewriting. In that sense, he further iterated that in manual writing or handwriting, men do not resemble each other but in print they do.²⁰ In the case of the Duhlian dialect being put to writing, the typewriter comes along with handwriting. In the case of the Lushai script, the corporeal hand that facilitates writing and consequently embodied thinking does not precede the machine. Lorrain, the missionary responsible for the invention of the Lushai script used a typewriter at the very time that handwriting was being produced. Therefore, manuscript culture and machine-produced types for the Duhlian dialect happened simultaneously. It may help to propose that the evolution of the Duhlian type/character initiated the originary process of the formation of the Mizo type or identity. In other words, in handwriting too, men began resembling each other and MCL embodies such a process.²¹

The newspaper is a sign and a product of the bourgeois form of state and society. In places where newspapers exist without a corresponding form of state and society, there it is merely a sign for that bourgeois promise. It is in this sense that students of media history receive the history of newspapers as synonymous with the history of the technology of print. MCL is a manuscript newspaper that is inserted into a pre-agrarian, kin-ordered clan society.

It’s commonsensical to expect that this newspaper, with its stories of topical interest, has to be read in light of the circumstances obtained at that time for the simple reason that it was aimed to serve the reader-consumers of the day and time. The missionaries started a school in the area in 1895. The first dictionary in the Lushai language was published in 1898. There were very few literate men and women at that time in Lushai and there were no consumers because their mode of production in the form of jhooming (shifting cultivation) and hunting did not allow for a surplus to be produced and turned into merchandise, aiding the formation of a market economy.

The news from different villages must have been gathered through the offices of Circle Interpreters. There were thirteen such officers in Aijal and seven in Lunglei. In the colonial records, the present-day Aizawl is rendered as Aijal. They were reporting to the Lushai Clerk at Aijal; Suaka was a Loosei (spelt in this manner in colonial administrative manuals) Clerk posted in Aijal for many years. It was Shakespeare who had initiated these administrative divisions.²² The newspaper was distributed through the colonial government networks, and it can be assumed that it was primarily for educational and bureaucratic purposes. In the absence of a visible colonial state and a surplus economy, the newspaper enacted the authority of the state and argued for innovations in agriculture, health, childrearing and so on.

Historically, both writing and its genre ‘newspaper’ are based on a mode of production and the form of the state. Even as MCL argues for and represents a changing mode of production, it also speaks of rituals and other timeless practices. The Lushai language attains a cultural status of inscription by committing itself to writing, a process that Sheldon Pollock²³ has termed as ‘literization’. The process of literization involves a conscious ch...