Chin-Kuki-Zo People Are NOT Migrants

Dr. L. Lam Khan Piang

The Zo people are identified with various names such as Kuki, Chin, Shendu, Khongsai, etc. by the anthropologists, ethnographers and colonial administrators.

However, some of them mention that Zo is the name by which they call themselves. So it is imperative to employ the name Zo, as it has cultural implication and a tinge of primordial element, and to clear the confusion due to the various different names given by their neighbors from whom the colonial ethnographers and administrators picked up.

For example, they got the name Chin from the people of the East (the Burman) and Kuki from the West (the Bengalis).

When the first Anglo-Burmese was concluded with the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1926, the British gained control over Assam and Manipur. By that time, the Zo country was neither part of Burma nor India.

It was certainly not a part of Manipur. However, with the intervention of the British colonizers, the Zo country was segmented and part of it was integrated to Manipur, Assam, Tripura, Chittagong and Burma.

Realizing the immorality of the segmentation of the Zo people and their territory for their administrative convenience, the British convened the Chin-Lushai conference in 1892, to keep the Zo people under single administration but the resolution for the amalgamation of the Chin Hills and Lushai Hills is never implemented.

The historical process of the ethnification of the Zo people by boundary demarcation during the colonial regime is very complicated that even some writers made mistakes in their presentation of history.

Some writers are of the opinion that the Zo people migrated from Burma and even branded them as emigrant or nomad. So it is necessary to clarify the historical fact that parts of Zo territory integrated to India, Burma, and Bangladesh were the homeland of the indigenous Zo people inherited from their forefather since time immemorial.

It was the British colonisers, who sliced out part-by-part and bit-by-bit the Zo territory and attached them in the states they constructed such as Manipur, Burma and India (including Bangladesh).

So, in writing history, one cannot keep aside the temporal aspect, as that is the most important aspect in the study of history objectively. The Zo people never migrated to India from Burma as the areas they occupied in the face of the earth was neither India nor Burma.

They were dispersing from certain villages such Ciimnuai, Seipui, Khawrua, Sunkhla, Lotsawm, etc., which were very close to each other and located in the present Chin state in Burma (Myanmar). Group by group and clan by clan they moved from here and dispersed into different directions.

Their movement is necessitated by the practice of shifting (Jhum) cultivation so as to maintain the jhum cycle as well as to accommodate the increasing population.

They expanded until they were stranded by other settlements. It is clear that the territory which they inhabit presently is what they inherit from their ancestors, from where their culture is evolving.

The land where the Zo cultural practices and their festivals are evolving is called by the Zo people as Zogam.