writings on writing

These next few posts are summaries of some of the earliest extant texts on the modern state of Mizoram. Rummage through contemporary (read: academic) works on the same geo-political area attempting to erect some historical perspective to their narratives and you’ll see these titles crop up constantly. There seems to be the instinctive accordance of privilege to written/texted narratives as stable histories—histories that seem to unlock how peoples are constituted and made to tick. Yet these very texts are culturally located within wider geo-political templates of particular time periods. Hopefully, these summaries will instantiate more critical responses on why we prize such texts. The selection is not entirely fastidious and there will definitely be others that should have been covered. Give me some time…or better still, link me to your own take on your own list.

The first on my list is one of the earliest works by one who we favorably remember as "Thangliena" (var. Thangliana)

T. H. Lewin, Wild Races of the South-Eastern India. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1870.

Written in the style of the emerging ethnographical accounts that bridged the gap between the metropolitan center and the frontiers of the Empire, Wild Races sets out to introduce to its readers (Europeans/British) the “races of people of whom but little is known, and whose habits and customs have never been described. (1)” The accounts are drawn from daily entries “simply noted down” as Lewin heard “tales, traditions, or striking customs that fell under my observation in the course of my wanderings among them. (3)” As to why he compiled his notes in order to highlight these erstwhile “unknown” peoples, Lewin’s reasons may be summarized in what he later refers to as a true “Liberal,” whose cardinal dogma is the belief in the perfectibility of the human race (Fly on the Wheel 144; Wild Races 3, 4). In style, the three hundred and fifty pages of Wild Races follow what David Spurr theorized as “rhetorical modes” of colonial writing about other people as objects of knowledge.

Of the three sections of the book, part one surveys the land and the description is peppered with topographical details including climate, soil conditions, produce, rivers, cultivation, and so on. Section two starts as an exercise in sorting, classifying, and describing the ethnographical observations into neat and accessible categories. The hill tribes are categorized as “Khyoungtha” or dwellers on the river banks who are predominantly of Buddhist persuasion, and “Toungtha” or dwellers of the hills who are, “more purely savages than the Khyoungtha (72).” The section continues to describe the Khyougtha: their social habits, religion, dress, origins, and so on. In section three of the book, the Toungtha category is further subdivided as subject tribes under British administration (the Tipperah and Kumi tribes), tribes paying no revenue but subject to British influence (the Bungee and Pankho tribes), and entirely independent tribes (the Looshai and Shendu tribes). The description of the Toungtha that follows employs the categories employed in the description of the Khyoungtha, and are often employed to contrast the two. In contrast, the Toungtha are best captured in their independence and savagery, tropes that are employed and constantly reinforced in the descriptive exercise to provide a reasonable cause for the introduction of British mediated “civilization.” The closing quarter of the section accounts the unsuccessful expedition into Shendu territory and Lewin’s near death encounter.

In the concluding section of the book, Lewin assesses the stakes in further contact and cultural transactions with these "wild" races. “Civilization” seems to be a catch phrase he employs in this assessment. However, he is also informed by Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, A History (1837) whose dictum—ubi homines sunt, modi sunt (347)—seems to inflect Lewin’s assessment. Imposed civilization as was practiced in other parts of the Empire would not improve but only exterminate these wild races (344). Favoring a more conscious but nevertheless paternalistic tack, Lewin suggests that further interactions be geared towards administration of the hill tracts for the, “well-being and happiness of the people dwelling therein,” adding that “Civilization is the result and not the cause of civilization. (351)” Part of Lewin’s vision is that the people will gradually civilize themselves. One leaves the pages with what the socio-political implications might be in naming a phenomenon as "civilization" and the power relations instigating the urge to civilize.