1 - Coming into View

Summary

In the Lushai Hills, colonialism provided the infrastructure for the circulation of violence and disease that helped drive upland populations towards its own institutions. An overlooked age of warfare underwrote the destitution, poverty, dislocation, and sickness that invading colonial agents misrecognized as primitivism but that was, in fact, the results of their own cataclysmic disturbances. A focus on profound violence and disruption - rather than the celebration of continuity, cross-cultural interaction, and cultural resilience that often characterizes Indigenous-centred studies of colonial encounter - demonstrates that highlanders had to adapt and reinvent themselves within a particular colonial situation and its imposed constraints: brutality, heartache, disease, forced labour, sexual violence, hunger, and loss. At the same time, Mizos developed creative responses to, and confidently articulated critiques of, their invaders - forces that often found themselves dependent on upland know-how, hospitality, and labour. Far from passive victims, Mizos resisted colonialism and sought out ways to moderate its most profound effects. They adopted new trade goods not only to make their lives easier but also (as with the adoption of colourful synthetic materials for headdresses and jewellery) to make everyday life more beautiful amid the bleakness of fear, dispossession, and conflict.