Mizoram

Water is the most essential resource for life and ensuring its quality is of utmost importance. Testing, assessing, analyzing and monitoring the status and standards of our water resources is vital and necessary. Lunglei is the largest town in the state of Mizoram in North East India. This hilly town is the capital of Lunglei district administration and it is the centre for political, educational and commercial activities for the district. As the world is facing grave threats from climate change and pollution, and keeping the ever growing population in mind, the need for quality potable water for daily needs are increasing and consumption of clean and healthy potable water is vital. The insufficient research on the nature and status of water resources in Mizoram and Lunglei district in particular has resulted in the lack of proper utilization of water resources and their quality. The present study deals with the present day status of potable water qualities consumed from three different localities in the south central parts of Lunglei town using different physico-chemical parameters.

Even though Teresa Rehman has been called "a female combat journalist", her book, "Bulletproof: A Journalist's Notebook on Reporting Conflict", is more than just combat or conflict. It may even serve as a guide book for journalists working under difficult and hostile conditions.
This review was first published in print in National Herald On Sunday, dated 01-March-2020.
URL to the epaper: http://epaper.nationalheraldindia.com//imageview_1734_15222501_4_71_01-03-2020_i_1_sf.html
Online edition: https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/reviews-recommendations/bulletproof-more-than-a-memoir-of-an-exceptional-career?fbclid=IwAR0ByWCVN-SMW4QCGiKESc3ETraqa1xXSbOsGyEbL1t4viqUYWXlrBmBUaw

While women have made many advances, their inferior status to men continues to be a global phenomenon. At a time of unprecedented economic growth, India is experiencing a dramatic intensification of violence against women and the majority of girls are still not getting equal educational opportunity. In one of the most important steps for the empowerment of women, the Indian government gave constitutional status to village-level councils or Panchayati Raj institutions and reserved 33% of the seats in Panchayats for women. In addition, women were organized into Self-help Groups to mark the beginning of a major process of empowering women, although not much attention was paid to women's formal education. Our aim was to explore the impact of these measures on women's empowerment in the states of West Bengal and Mizoram. In general, we found that affirmative action does ensure that larger numbers of women enter politics but it does not ensure that the women participate in politics and function as elected representatives, because of lack of education. Empowerment needs to be seen as a holistic outcome of processes of critical education that enables women to lead autonomous lives and the freedom to act. Both affirmative action and education are necessary to empower women who have suffered discrimination and lack of power always.

‘Duncan McDuie-Ra has not only written a thoroughly readable and well-researched ethnography on Northeast migrants in Delhi, in more general terms he has also produced an important contribution to what could be labelled ‘big city ethnographies’. Cities such as Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore not only feature prominently in a particular narrative on economic growth that infuses how the cities present themselves and how their inhabitants reflect on them, but they are coloured by the kind of diversity that is the result of large-scale internal migration. Understanding what all these people—not just north-easterners—are doing in the city in terms of work and lifestyle, and how they experience being in the city on the one hand and how they are part of the urban landscape in physical and mental terms on the other, is something that will hopefully be the focus of many other works of ethnography in the future. I have no doubt these will benefit greatly from McDuie-Ra’s insightful and carefully researched work.’ Dr. Michiel Baas. South Asia  37 (2), pp. 359-361.

The only pictorial book on insurgency in India.  Very few regions in the world have given birth to as many insurgent outfits as India's Northeast - a strategic frontier zone comprising eight states and sandwiched between China, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh.  For the first time, Lens & The Guerrilla captures more than fifty of these groups in a wide range of photographs from the vintage to the present.

The ‘Northeast’ is a category constructed by the Indian state for the purposes
of controlling, governing and applying extraordinary legal provisions to its
rebellious eastern frontier. It homogenizes and depoliticizes the peoples and
territories claimed by the Indian state and subjects them to a perpetual process
of state-making characterized by violence and (mal)development. Yet the
peoples subject to the category – both the idea and the institutions that are
enabled by it – use it. They speak it, respond to it and identify with it. In part,
this is acquiescence to the national and local state that shapes everyday life
for people in the region; layers of public and private institutions that use the
category to describe everything from small business finance initiatives to trade
fairs. The category is also used throughout India by the media, in committees
formed to address ‘Northeast issues’, and ‘on the streets’, as it were, to refer
to people from the region and to misidentify others assumed to be from the
region (and vice-versa). Thus being a ‘North easterner’ or ‘from the Northeast’
ascribes a set of attributes to groups and individuals, whether they like it or
not. On the other hand, the category Northeast can also be an affirmation of
solidarity by people from the region. Not by all people, and not all the time,
but certainly the category is used enough by those subject to it to warrant some
consideration of its value for those seeking to claim it as a positive affirmation
of who they are and where they fit, or don’t, in the national picture.

Special provision of Mizoram under the Consitution of India Article 371G.  which gives special consideration on religious or social practices of the Mizos, Mizo customary law and procedure, administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions  according to Mizo customary law and ownership and transfer of land

Margaret Ch. Zama’s Contemporary Short Stories from Mizoram, a collection of short stories translated from Mizo to English, presents us a conspicuous literary potpourri of Mizo life. This edited volume of short stories, published by the Sahitya Akademi, encompasses on many domains starting from pre-colonial Mizo life, head hunting, the collision of the human world with the world of spirit, Mizo heritage, introduction of Christianity to call girls, abortion, corruption of the government, geopolitics, insurgency etc. The anthology comprises of fifteen short stories and three folk tales. Each individual story is distinct in style and stands on its own merit which can appeal to the varied interests of the readers. The editor has selected the noted writers like Mafaa Hauhnar, C. Lalnunchanga, Vanneihtluanga, Zirsangkima, Lalrammawia Ngente, who with their keen observation and subtle analytical skill probe into the various facets of Mizo life very tactfully while contributing distinctly for the development of Mizo literature and language. In the introduction Zama reflects on the significant influence of oral tradition on the contemporary society and in making of the stories. ‘The first glimmer of literacy’, as the editor observes, ‘began with the efforts of two English missionaries, J.H Lorrain and F.W. Savidge who introduced the Roman Script in 1894.’ Along with the Roman script, Mizo life also saw a sea change with the introduction of Christianity. We get many references to these ‘stitches’ in this collection. Due to the thematic variations, the writers imbibe different styles like linear and unlinear narratives, episodic description, intertextual references, first person narratives etc to be truthful to their peoples and traditions.

This introduction to the special issue begins by discussing the provisions of the
Act itself and the context in which it was legislated in the decade after Indian
independence. The sections that follow discuss the dimensions of exceptionalism
enforced by the AFSPA at the international, national, and local levels. At the
international level, the Act is primarily seen as a violation of basic human rights –
and international human rights organisations have pressured the Indian Government to repeal the Act, to which there has been little response beyond reiterating the
necessity of the Act to maintain the security of India. At the national level,
discussions of the Act are far more complex and multidimensional. The question of
how such an extraordinary law can exist for five decades in the world’s largest
democracy demands analysis of the ways the Northeast is constructed at the national
level and the ways the AFSPA has built upon these constructions and also
reproduces them, reinforcing the state of exception. At the local level the AFSPA is
part of everyday life. While generalising about the local context in the Northeast is
difficult, in much of the region the AFSPA generates a constant fear that seeps into
social relations on even the most basic level; visiting a relative, being introduced to a
stranger, visiting the market, travelling to college, or joining an association. Finally,
each of the four papers featured in the special issue will be introduced.

While women have made many advances, their inferior status to men continues to be a global phenomenon. At a time of unprecedented economic growth, India is experiencing a dramatic intensification of violence against women and the majority of girls are still not getting equal educational opportunity. In one of the most important steps for the empowerment of women, the Indian government gave constitutional status to village-level councils or Panchayati Raj institutions and reserved 33% of the seats in Panchayats for women. In addition, women were organized into Self-help Groups to mark the beginning of a major process of empowering women, although not much attention was paid to women's formal education. Our aim was to explore the impact of these measures on women's empowerment in the states of West Bengal and Mizoram. In general, we found that affirmative action does ensure that larger numbers of women enter politics but it does not ensure that the women participate in politics and function as elected representatives, because of lack of education. Empowerment needs to be seen as a holistic outcome of processes of critical education that enables women to lead autonomous lives and the freedom to act. Both affirmative action and education are necessary to empower women who have suffered discrimination and lack of power always.

On Oct 31st, 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi applauded a four-year-old girl from the state of Mizoram for singing a contemporary version of the national song Maa Tujhe Salaam from A.R. Rahman’s album “Vande Mataram''. The music video uploaded on YouTube caught the attention of the audiences as it crossed 6.9 million views 4 months after its release (as of February 2021). Taking this context as the point of reference, the paper will contribute to existing scholarships on Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra. At the same time, the same approach enables the possibility of critically analyzing the contemporary meaning of solidarity in media studies. Rather than looking at the music video exclusively as an ideological product in itself, or what it seeks to signify and what it signified, the paper seeks to problematize the relation between simulacra and solidarity, or the simulation of solidarity in the age where media encapsulates everyday life. It attempts to derive possibilities of simulating
the absence of solidarity as presence, which hides the oppressive experience and the socio- cultural, historical, and political struggles of the subalterns in India. The simulacra precede the original, leaving it impossible to distinguish what is real and what representation is. The simulacra, as Baudrillard argues, conceals the fact that there exist none; it feigns what one hasn’t: it feigns to have solidarity. It argues that through simulation, there is a process of corrupting the notion of ‘solidarity’ against its conventional application and understanding due to the intrinsic embodiment of the individual into the hyperreal. The question then is, does the media kill ‘solidarity’?

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India.

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The volume contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas.

A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

Twenty-first-century India faces multitude of security challenges. At the core of India’s security concerns is its ‘internal security’ – a major national security challenge. Among many imponderable factors of India’s security calculus, internal security is regarded as one of the principal underlying aspects. In the present context, it is considered “the most urgent issue”.
Unfortunately, today, there is a blurring distinction between internal and external threats. Some go to the extent of arguing that “India does not face an external threat in the conventional sense” but only internal security threats from external sources. These external sources, consisting of both state and non-state actors, combined with those anti-state forces within India, have made the situation more complex in a daily situation. Very few countries in the world are placed in such an unfavourable, troubled and uncertain security environment as India. External sources of threats to India’s internal security, therefore, spring from almost all countries of its neighbourhood. China is not an exception.

Rural women entrepreneurs play an important role in the development of Indian economy although they face a serious of problems and challenges. They are an important factor for the development of rural areas. They also help in checking the rate of migration by rural people to urban communities, thereby decreasing the problem of overpopulation. However, in the practical world, the condition of rural women entrepreneurs is still very backward. So, this study is conducted in an attempt to find out the various problems faced by these women. In this study, primary data were collected through structured questionnaire and interview. The secondary data were collected from journals and books. Statistical tools like Correlation, Reliability Test, Cronbach's alpha, KMO and Barlett's test of Sphericity and Factor Analysis were used for analysis of the data collected. The result shows that there are ten (10) various problems faced by rural women entrepreneurs. These problems are classified into three components or factors, which are Financial Problem, Production and Marketing Problem and General Problem. The major problem in the life of rural women entrepreneurs is the Production and Marketing Problem followed by General Problem and finally the Financial Problem.

This essay is a reflection on coming to terms with the category ‘tribal’ through a decade and a half of researching the Northeast. As a non-historian who has worked on issues as diverse as agricultural change, pro-development groups, Northeast migrants, race and the media, and inter-ethnic relations in urban India, I come to this essay from a position of puzzlement: What am I supposed to do with the category ‘tribal’? Challenge it? Adopt it? Stand up for it? Further, what are ‘we’, as scholars engaged with the Northeast professionally and personally, to do with the category? On the one hand, scholars are finely attuned to the category as a thin colonial construction, and scarcely a seminar or special issue goes by without a call to challenge the category, deconstruct it, rethink it, or lay bare its precarious assumptions. On the other hand, the category is used by those subject to it, is desired by those who do not have it, and is resolute in a great deal of scholarship on the region as evidence for an ongoing ‘identity crisis’ that offers a ready-made logic for almost everything. As many authors have pointed out, including many in this volume, communities of the region, particularly in the hill areas, are largely de-historicized in this process: history is for the valleys, anthropology for the hills. As such, the past is told as a series of recent encounters: communities in the region emerged out of primitive pasts through contact with colonial authorities and missionaries, were categorized and subject to forms of colonial subjugation which dramatically altered their previously unchanging lives, and were then forced to survive in the modern Indian state. Recent scholarship has posed a major challenge to these standard practices of understanding the region. Despite these welcome shifts, I still find the category challenging, particularly as much of my academic life has required me to explain ‘tribal’ for audiences outside the Northeast, and often outside South Asia entirely. Further, having used race as a way of analysing the politics of integration, solidarity, and representation for Northeast communities in India, I have noted a fascinating reaction from scholars anxious about the use of race lest it transgress the tribal/non-tribal distinction in the region. This has called for a careful retelling of a particular historical narrative by scholars and by activists and politicians. In this paper, I explore the resoluteness of the category ‘tribal’, and some alternative ways of approaching it, by using the example of Meghalaya. Although I have conducted little research in Meghalaya since 2010 as my focus has shifted to other parts of the region, Meghalaya was the first place I went as a researcher. I spent almost a decade researching here – almost all of it in the Khasi Hills – including all my doctoral work. Thus, it was – and remains – the setting where I have struggled most with the category of ‘tribal’: its past, its legacy, and what I am to make of it. Though this, I suggest, holds true for other contexts in the Northeast too.

Violence against women (VAW) in India is commonly attributed to an overarching metacultural patriarchal framework. Focusing on this national culture of violence obscures the experiences of VAW among ethnic minority women. This article focuses on VAW in Northeast India, a region populated by large numbers of Scheduled Tribes with different cultural norms, and where society has become militarized by ongoing insurgency and counterinsurgency. Though tempting, militarization alone is not a sufficient explanation for VAW; instead, this article focuses on the interplay between nonfamilial and familial contexts in creating a " frontier culture of violence " in which VAW is experienced and contested.

A well preserved and diversified trace fossil assemblage has been identified from the Middle Bhuban unit of the Bhuban
Formation, Surma Group (Lower to Middle Miocene) exposed along the Bawngkawn - Durtlang road section, Aizawl, Mizoram. A 615 meter thick succession comprising sandstone, siltstone, shale, mudstone and their admixtures in various proportions is exposed along this section. Trace fossils mostly occurred in fine to medium grained sandstone. These are ethologically diverse and represent predominantly infaunal structures of both suspension and deposit feeders. A total of 30 ichnospecies belonging to 19 ichnogenera have been identified from the collection. These are Arenicolites carbonarius, A. tenuis, A. helixus isp. nov., Conichnus conicus, Didymaulichnus lyelli,
Diplocraterion helmerseni,Gordia marina, Gyrolithes isp., Katbergia isp, Laevicyclus mongraensis, Lanicoidichna metulata, Lockeia siliquaria, Monomorphichnus bilinearis, Ophiomorpha irregulaire, O. nodosa, Palaeophycus annulatus, P. tubularis, P. heberti, P. striatus, Planolites beverleyensis, Polykladichnus irregularis, Psilonichnus lutimuratus, P. upsilon, Skolithos linearis, S. verticalis, Teichichnus flexuosus, T. rectus, Thalassionoides horizontalis, T. paradoxicus, T. suevicus, and a large complex burrow system. Vertical burrows of Arenicolites, Gyrolithes, Psilonichnus, Skolithos and Ophiomorpha are infaunal colonization of the suspension feeders under high energy and shifting substrate conditions. Horizontal burrows like Planolites, Palaeophycus, Teichichnus and Thalassinoides are the infaunal deposit feeder structures, which usually live at sediment-sediment interface in low to moderate energy conditions. The behavioural nature and distribution pattern of the ichnofossils as well as sedimentological attributes suggests that Middle Bhuban succession was deposited under fluctuating energy conditions in foreshore to shoreface/offshore zones of shallow marine environment.

This article examines the reception of Chin refugees from Myanmar in Mizoram State in northeast India through the framework of boundaries and belonging. Strong historical, cultural and ethnic connections between Chin and Mizo might suggest a strong claim to belonging. This has been true to some extent but the reception of Chin in Mizoram has also been shaped by perceived otherness. This article explores the co-existing discourses of Chin as other/brother in relation to processes of boundary-making, boundary policing and boundary manipulation. It argues that these contrasting narratives illustrate a dynamic relationship between national borders and boundaries of belonging that speak to deeper truths about the legitimacy of the nation state and the role of place, politics and identity in the construction of insiders and others. This case study generates several conclusions of wider relevance to refugee studies, namely the flexibility of perceptions of belonging, the possibility of deliberately reshaping perceptions of belonging and the existence of multiple, overlapping identities (i.e. citizenship , faith, ethnicity and culture) that are accorded different weight and value at different times.

Despite of having an enriched gender equal societal antiquity, India is presently experiencing a patriarchal wave. In disparity with the main land India, North East has always represented a more gender equal society. Therefore, this paper intends to focus on wedding customs of the North Eastern tribes to analyse how gender equality and philogyny is reflected though marriage rituals. The paper will cover the separation, liminality and reintegration phase-oriented rituals associated with marriage among selected tribes of Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Moreover, the paper will look into marriage and kinship related kyriarchy that is widely prevalent in this so-called gender equal tribal societies in the form of bride price, marriage by serving etc. The research will rely on existing literature for interpreting the history and semi structural interview of tribal women for understanding their perception of gender equality in the sphere of marriage and kinship.

'Debating Race in Contemporary India is one of those rare books that initiate a dialogue about the idea of India, seen through the prism of Northeast communities. With characteristic flourish and elegant prose, Debating Race touches on these core issues with care and sensitivity, and questions the very idea of what it means to belong in India.' - Arkotong Longkumer, University of Edinburgh, UK

'Who said race didn't matter in South Asia, that it is something of the past, something that only had to do with the British? Duncan McDuie-Ra turns such thinking on its head, showing with great force that race and racial discrimination is very much alive and kicking in India today. This is social science at its best; attention to ethnographic detail and a close reading of everyday experiences are coupled with theoretical insights, analytical sharpness and political commitment. McDuie-Ra's call for a more nuanced debate about race is timely, it is a must read for anyone concerned with the larger drama of social differentiation and racism in today's world.' Bengt Karlsson, Stockholm University, Sweden

During 19-21 May 1988 an unusual gathering took place at Champai, a small town in the Indian state of Mizoram, some 20 kilometres from the Myanmar border. It was the First World Zomi Convention and was attended by a large number of people, estimated at more than...

This chapter discusses the provisions in the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution for the formation of autonomous regions and regional councils in districts with multiple scheduled tribes, and stresses on the formation of such regional councils for smaller ethnic groups within the district or territorial area. In the formation of district councils and regional councils in the erstwhile hill areas of Assam, minority groups within the scheduled districts were neglected, thereby largely obfuscating the presence of multiple groups within the district and their governance. In recent decades such groups are engaged in militant activities and have destabilized the whole governance mechanisms in such areas. The paper argues that the formation of regional councils for such ethnic minorities within the district or territorial area is 'a conflict management device' and a path towards peace and development in the Northeastern region.

Northeast Indian women have a significant social role as compared to the women of the other parts of the country. Since ages evil practices like Sati, dowry and female foeticide is absent in this region and in the post-Independence, this region has seen many political and social upheavals, where women have entered the public space. But a region shaken by insurgency and decades of unrest has shown a devastating effect on the psyche of the people, especially women. The media has failed to provide a wide national coverage. Nevertheless, considerable writers in English and other regional languages have centred their works on these issues. This paper will focus on the lives, role and struggle of Northeast Indian women during the insurgency period with select texts from a few writers of the region. The paper will present a background of the status of women in Northeast Indian society and at the same time, the vulnerability posed by insurgency.

This chapter analyzes the changing realities in the India-Myanmar borderlands. The analysis here is grounded on field visits in two different border areas along the India-Myanmar borderlands: Longwa and Hmaungbuchhuah. Field visits indicate that the traditional notions about security, connectivity and ethnicity are undergoing a change that are specific to ethnic linkages, local perceptions on security and age-old connectivity across these border areas. The discussion in the chapter also reveals that the cross-border access to socioeconomic activities like primary education and informal economic exchanges are indispensable and have been historically followed out of necessity in the livelihoods of the borderlands.