Abstract
Roluahpuia. 2023. Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. xix + 260 pp. Glossary, references, index. ₹995 (hardback—ISBN: 139781009346078).
Mizo nationalism and the emergence of the Mizo National Front (MNF) movement in the 1960s through the mid-1980s represent the historically complex relationships the communities of the north-eastern region share with the Indian state. The movement, laced with contradictions and negotiations, reflected the political aspirations of the Mizo people and their struggle for a separate homeland. Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India by Roluahpuia addresses these concerns by examining the vernacularisation of Mizo nationalism, which has played out as a people-centric process of dynamic sociopolitical consciousness. In doing so, it interrogates the historical and sociopolitical bases of Mizo nationalism and the factors that prompted the Mizo ethno-nationalist movement from contextually localised perspectives.
The book focuses on the everyday realities of the ordinary people whose experiences have shaped and reshaped the idea of ethnicity and the imaginations of Mizo nationalism. The author draws these out through intensive engagement with multiple stakeholders, such as ordinary villagers, victims of violence, former Mizo revolutionists and community leaders, among others, to examine the complex processes of Mizo nationalism. The author’s extensive grasp of relevant secondary sources, backed with crucial ethnographic insights and orality from the ground, convincingly discusses the entangled questions of Mizo nationalism and related issues across all seven chapters. This book is able to develop a socio-anthropological understanding of localised sociocultural and material conditions and political realities that went into the making of Mizo identity and Mizo nationalism at large.
Revisiting the discourse around tribes and ethnicity in India, the book pushes the reader to treat tribal communities, such as the Mizos, as equal stakeholders, and to recognise their aspirations for political autonomy and rights over resources. This is comprehensively discussed in chapter 2, which highlights the issues of tribal communities in post- colonial India. It questions the ill-attitude of the Indian state towards tribes; the state’s political strategies and development policies have primarily been exclusionary in nature, and focused on integration and assimilation rather than equitable inclusion. The author argues that addressing these issues is a basic and necessary step to safeguard the sociocultural and economic interests and political identity of marginalised communities, given the historical context under which they were included in the Indian Union. This opens the door for re-envisioning the larger discourse on tribes and ethnicity in Northeast India and beyond. The Mizo nationalism and the MNF movement only reiterate this.
Chapters 3 and 4 historically and comprehensively contextualise Mizo politics. They capture the nuances of the Mizo people’s political consciousness, which eventually led to a series of political developments. These sociopolitical trajectories of Mizo nationalism have been widely explored by mainstream discourses, focusing on identity politics and insurgency movements. However, this book conceptualises the notion of nationalism as a socially embedded process that is more complex than any isolated political narrative. It critically examines the unfolding of nationalism as a process of dynamic social facts and embedded political consciousness that led to the political assertion of Mizo ethnic identity and intensification of Mizo nationalist sentiments.
The pursuit of the Mizo Union (MU) and the nationalist movement of the MNF exemplified both the changing intra-community dynamics and larger sociopolitical aspirations of the people. It has generated new possibilities for voices of resistance against external forces and oppressions within the community. The author explicitly asserts that the Mizos have always been politically active and extremely dynamic in pursuing their political aspirations. This was evident in the overthrow of the chieftainship system, a campaign led by the MU, preceding the rise of the MNF movement. Against this backdrop, the book holistically captures the nature of these processes to present how and under what circumstances the vernacularisation of Mizo nationalism took shape. It illuminates how the politics of materialising vernacular language conveys nationalist ideas among ordinary Mizos. The book further points out how these vernacularised ideas were, in turn, capitalised as an irrepressible oral language to counter the Indian state’s violent approach to suppressing the Mizo nationalist movement.
The conventional reading of Mizo politics and the rise of Mizo nationalism explains how the colonial legacy of the hill–valley divide, fuelled by discontent with the Indian state’s inadequate management of the 1958 famine, accelerated the secessionist mindset, ultimately leading to the emergence of the MNF movement. This book, however, goes beyond this conventional understanding. The author argues that Mizo nationalism is deeply rooted in vernacular consciousness, idioms and language of ram leh hnam (the territory and nation), which cultivated the idea of Mizo nationalism among the common Mizos long before the rise of the MNF movement. The making of Mizoness and Mizo nationalism, thus, needs to be understood in relation to how the ordinary Mizo people played a significant role in determining the course of the nationalist movement.
The author opines that while ordinary people are the foundation of Mizo nationalism, historically embedded vernacular consciousness and a community feeling of hnam (clan, tribe or nation) brought them together on the same page (p. 1); they shaped the common political aspirations of Mizos from diverse backgrounds. The book sheds light on how the subsequent vernacularisation of Mizo nationalism—the ideas, messages and resistance voices—was expressed, circulated and catalysed the Mizo people through oral traditions of folklore and songs. Hnam hla—the national songs; party hla—the political songs and rambuai hla—the songs of troubled times, for instance, became the powerful vernacularised mediums through which Mizo people organised themselves to fight against the oppressions at different points in time, facilitating their resistance to colonial powers, abolition of the feudal chieftainship system and challenging the rule of the Indian state at the peak of the MNF movement.
Roluahpuia’s take on the MNF movement and the consequent Mizo Accord is a crucial scholarly intervention to understand the politics of peace in Mizoram and the north-eastern region of India. Chapters 5 and 6 examine these subjects of peace politics in Mizoram. Contextually speaking, the north-eastern region has witnessed a number of such peace accords between the Indian state and various civil and armed group organisations in post-colonial India. The Shillong Accord of 1975 with the Naga nationalist groups is an example. However, the region has yet to see any concrete outcomes of such political initiatives. Militarisation in the forms of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, counter-insurgency operations and political violence still persist. Here, the author contends that the Mizo Accord, as a peace model of settlement (a political arrangement primarily determined by the state mechanisms rather than popular support), has miserably failed to account for the voices and suffering of the people afflicted by the years of militarised violence and exploitation. Thus, it is an unfinished political adventure that needs to be explored in the context of the evolving nature of the Mizo sociopolitical aspiration and imagination. The author here maintains that the Mizos’ integration into the Union of India is still a contentious issue that remains an undercurrent in Mizo politics.
This book is a comprehensive study of ethnicity, nationalism and tribal politics that continue to inform the sociopolitical fabric of contemporary Mizo society and of the north-eastern region in general. This work is a critical piece of scholarship for researchers and an insightful resource for policymakers. It alerts readers to the complex subjects of ethno-nationalism and consequent political developments from a locally grounded perspective. The author pushes us to reimagine the entangled questions of nation-state, ethnicity and nationalism as connected dots, and not as isolated islands. Further, it unravels the people-led politics and the role of oral traditions in the construction of vernacular Mizo nationalism. As such, this book is an extremely crucial academic intervention by Roluahpuia.