refracting "Tarmita's" vision

The second edition of “writings on writing” focuses on Col. Shakespear's (also called "Tarmita") wellknown work because it registers as an authoritative source text for kan pi pute len lai. Rev. Zairema credits the book as being the first, “chanchin kimchang…Kristian rin danin a pawlh viau hma thu a ni a, a ngaihnawm bik hle (Pi Pute Biak Hi. 2009, 2).” Amidst contemporary negotiations on what it means to be Mizo—blogsites, media, and academia providing some of the most heated debates—one often notices the invocation of kan pi pute hunlai both as an emotional anchor and/or rhetorical speaking point for what a Mizo “essence” might be. Despite increasing awareness of identity and cultural essence being highly negotiated and contested categories, Shakespear’s work continues to register as an important source material among others. So even as its reading is recommended, a reading against the grain would be more helpful to make sense of the constructions and contemporary implications of the linguistic baggage we inherited.

Lt. Colonel J. Shakespear, The Lushei Kuki Clans. London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1912.

Published after his transfer from the Lushai Hills, Col. Shakespear’s Lushei Kuki Clans provides one of the earliest writings about the inhabitants of the Chittagong Hill Tracts with sustained attention to parsing the cultural and linguistic intricacies of a formerly “unknown” people. The minute details and the intent of the book echo the emerging attempts in anthropological constructions of mythobars as was most famously outlined in J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). While noting affinities and also variations between Lushei and Kuki clans-the subjects of his monograph, he notes wider similarities with other Hill Tribes, for instance, in Major Playfair’s account of the Garos and Sir Charles Lyall’s account of the Mikir (xiv, xv). Colonial expansion was gradually opening up strange and inaccessible frontier worlds, and new forms of knowledge were being collected and meticulously recorded by colonial agents such as Shakespear. Discursive connections were strung across distant and often disparate landscapes in this effort to rein in these frontier parts. Seen through this geo-political lens, Lushei Kuki Clans thus lends itself to the problematic inscription of a people-their ways of life and thought-as objects of knowledge and rhetorical validations for colonial intervention.

The book is divided into two main sections. Section one is devoted to the Lushei clans and is richly embellished with details ranging from general observations on domestic life and structure to detailed descriptions of their cultural components including their religion, folklore, and encoding the various clan members. Section two details what Shakespear calls the “non-Lushei clans,” peoples he encountered when he transferred further north to Manipur. He expends much ink in tracing the genealogical histories of the various clans via clan etymologies, folklore, and cultural practices. The last chapter and the appendix present an interesting triglot to account for the linguistic morphology and genealogical connections between the various Lushei and non-Lushei clans. Additional information provided include a glossary, maps, and photographs (unlike lithographs employed in earlier publications).

While many commentators note the silence of the observed, Shakespear acknowledges the voice of his subjects (e.g. 13, 62, 66, 58). However, despite Shakespear’s acknowledgment, these native voices emerge only on terms dictated by the speaking western subject. For instance, “An old lushai once asked me why I was troubling myself about family and branch names, on my explaining that hoped to make a complete list of them he muttered, ‘Can you count the grains in that basket of rice?’ and turned from me to the zu-pot. (42)” The native voice ridicules the elaborate surveys and censuses undertaken by the white administrators as if to talk back at the new forms of knowledge being collated and constructed about it's self. Note how the ridicule is rendered innocuous by immediately relegating the speaking voice to the zu-pot (rice beer), zu being a trope that reinforces the discursive construction of lethargic and enervated natives. The issue of the speaking voice underscores the problem of observing, writing, as they are situated in power-knowledge frames of a colonial dispensation.