Mizo Selves: Alienated or Grounded?

Abstract

Retailing and detailing the flashpoints of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Mizoram produces a collage of territorially linked up indigenous and ethnic histories, colonial ruptures and inauguration of multiple modern selves and communities in difference-with-itself without a bounded notion of identity. It challenges the linear Mizo narrative of transition from chieftainship to self-determination to a post-insurgency electoral democracy and institutes a kind of self-critique, a re-figuration of the past and a host of other narrative strategies of reconstruction and deconstruction. The collection of essays edited by Malswamdawngliana and Rohmingwamii is a testimony of revisionary local history that produces a richly diverse, disconnected and yet a serializable narrative of milestones of Mizo lived experiences. Joy Pachuau expands this horizon of ethnic self-understanding by investigating many modes of self-making among the Mizos and thereby creating an auto-critique of ‘incorrigibility’ of any such ‘conjecture and imagination’.