The Pasts of a Fringe Community

Abstract

Drawing on the practices of ethno-history and micro-history, this article examines the nature of community-state relation in the borderland between southern Manipur and Upper Burma. Identified by different names, the Zou is a fringe community and a non-state entity that has sustained a fluid identity under changing historical contexts. Within the ‘galactic polities’ of pre-colonial Chin Hills, the confederate Zou chiefs lost out to their agnatic rivals (the Kamhau–Sukte clan) in the battle for local dominance around the 1870s. Thanks to the annexation of Upper Burma in 1885 by Lord Dufferin, the Zou became British subjects who later took part in the anti-colonial ‘Kuki Rising’ or Zou Gal (1917–19) in Manipur. From being ‘rebellious’ subjects of the Raj, the Zou community in independent India managed to get itself recognised as a ‘scheduled tribe’ in 1956. The post-colonial era saw the surge of modernising forces like the birth of local church movement, ethnic identity formation and political consciousness; but the ‘cultural metabolism’ of this marginal community allows for both resistance to and acceptance of external challenges.