The Poetics of Understanding Mizo Pasts

Mizoram is the hilly, southernmost state of India's North East. The Mizo are a people who in all they do, think or believe, like to celebrate and commemorate, or simply mark their experience in song. With the introduction of writing, many of these survive today in the written form and are considered the earliest Mizo poetry. Colonial interventions compelled rapid cultural, political, and social changes on the people of these hills. While writing is generally associated with civilization and progress, the project of literacy cannot be divorced from the imperialist agenda that brought literacy to oral communities. It also meant that their past was rendered invalid; for lack of any written archival record, they were considered a people with no history. This paper will attempt to explore how songs offer a space for memory and remembering, and allow access to the past that history writing has not.