Event From Date: Friday, 8 March 2019
Event End Date: Friday, 8 March 2019
Event Title: SCSNEI organises a lecture by Golan Suanzamung Naulak
Event Details:
MONTHLY SEMINAR SERIES
SPECIAL CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF NORTH EAST INDIA
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES – BUILDING I
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI
Naming a People in Imaginary Homelands:
Tracing histories of Zo categorisations along the Indo-Burma borderland
Golan Suanzamung Naulak
Integrated Mountain Initiative, New Delhi
Contemporary scholarship in North East India often misrepresent the Zo people, known by various names such as Chin, Kuki, Mizo or Zomi, with conflating ideas of nation, tribe and language. This paper traces the historical contexts in which these nomenclatures emerged and gained currency, especially during the post-Independent period and their accompanying political movements. It argues that the politics of naming the Zo people into various nomenclatures was driven by multiple factors including British colonial classifications, recognition into scheduled tribes by the Indian state and the self-projection of ‘national’ movements within different Zo groups with their respective boundaries.
The preference for any of these nomenclatures to refer to the same group or a section of the group, in what F K Lehman considered as an exercise which is ‘far from being unambiguous’ and ‘replete with ambivalence’, also raises questions of their politics which produces the recurring need to find an encompassing, acceptable nomenclature for the Zo people. Each of these movement-based nomenclatures are examined in their respective histories of ideas, growth, territory, scale and significance so as to suggest a more meaningful engagement with local histories in the region.
DATE: March 08, Friday, 2019
TIME: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
VENUE: Room no.324, 3rd Floor, SSS-I, JNU, New Delhi