इतिहास
Authority in these hills was held village by village. The lal — the chief — owned the village site and its cultivation, allotted jhum plots, took a share of the harvest and a share of game, and governed with a council of upa, elders drawn from the households; his sons founded new villages rather than inheriting one, which meant the system spread by budding rather than by conquest and produced hundreds of small chiefdoms instead of one large state. Some clans, the Sailo above all, came to hold many of these villages at once, but even a great Sailo chief commanded his own villages and his allies' goodwill, not a kingdom. The Chin side of the ridge worked the same way with different words. That is why the region's dates are almost all external — a raid on a plains tea garden, an expedition, an annexation, a regulation, a boundary — and why the two conflicts that are remembered as wars, in 1871 and in 1917, were fought by coalitions of chiefs sworn to each other rather than by an army. Note also that this region's history is written across four modern borders, and that the same events appear in Indian, Burmese and Bengali records under different names.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनprehistory – c. 1700
There is no written record of these hills before outsiders wrote one, and no local chronicle was kept. What stands in for chronology is genealogy: clans count generations from named ancestors, and those counts, read against each other, put the movement of Kuki-Chin-speaking communities westward out of the Chindwin side of the ranges into the present Lushai and Chin hills within roughly the last four to six centuries. Tradition traces the whole group's emergence to Chhinlung, a rock or cave from which the ancestors came out — an origin story, not a location that can be checked. The technologies that define the region are all in place by the end of this period and none of them can be dated: the ridge-top village, the backstrap loom with its shared motif vocabulary, the boiled-and-smoked kitchen, and the bamboo economy that supplies house, water pipe, basket and fuel.
मध्यकालीनc. 1700 – 1871
The Sailo clan established an ascendancy over much of the central hills during the eighteenth century, and the westward drift of villages continued until it reached country that was already administered. That is the collision. By the middle of the nineteenth century Lushai villages stood within reach of the Cachar plain and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where tea gardens had been planted on ground the hills regarded as within their reach and the Company regarded as revenue land. Raiding across that edge — for captives, for guns, for standing — became frequent from the 1840s, and the Company answered with fines, blockades and small punitive columns. On the eastern side of the watershed the Chin polities of Falam, Hakha and Tedim were doing the same thing towards the Chindwin lowlands. The raid on the Alexandrapur tea garden in Cachar on 23 January 1871, in which the planter James Winchester was killed and his daughter Mary, about six years old, was carried into the hills with many other captives, is the event that ended this phase, because it produced a response on a scale nothing before it had.
आधुनिक1871 – 1947
The Lushai Expedition of the winter of 1871–72 sent two columns into the hills, one from Cachar and one from Chittagong, released 649 captives including Mary Winchester, and extracted submissions — and then withdrew, which settled nothing. The permanent occupation came with the Chin-Lushai Expedition of 1889–90: the North Lushai Hills attached to Assam, the South Lushai Hills to Bengal, and a post established at Fort Aijal in 1890. Resistance to that occupation is what killed Khuangchera at Changsil in September 1890 and what put the chieftainess Ropuiliani in confinement at Rangamati, where she died on 3 January 1895. On the far side of the ridge the Chin Hills were brought under the Chin Hills Regulation of 1896. Three things then remade the region without a shot. Missionaries arriving from January 1894 fixed a Roman orthography for Mizo in 1898, revised in 1903, and literacy spread faster here than almost anywhere in India, with the hymn becoming the dominant musical form. The two Lushai Hills were amalgamated into a single district in 1898. And the frontier hardened: Burma was separated from India in 1937, putting the Chin ridges on the far side of an international boundary from the Lushai ones. The largest anti-colonial action of the period was fought not by Mizo chiefs but by Kuki chiefs in the Manipur hills, from October 1917 to the spring of 1919, over labour recruitment for the war, the house tax and forced portage.
शासक और सेनापति
The lal of a village Lal शासक
Owned the village site and its cultivation, allotted the year's jhum plots, took a share of the harvest and of game, judged disputes and led in war. His authority was over one village. Younger sons founded new villages rather than inheriting, so the system multiplied chiefdoms instead of concentrating power.
The upa of a village council Upa प्रशासक
Elders from the leading households who advised the lal, apportioned land and settled cases with him. A chief who lost his upa lost his village, because households could and did move to another chief.
Vanhnuailiana Lal शासक died c. 1870
One of the most powerful Sailo chiefs of the central hills, known in British records as Vonolel. His death shortly before the Lushai Expedition left his sons holding the territory the columns were sent against, and his widow Rolianpuii negotiated with the Cachar column.
राजवंश: Sailo.
Lalburha Lal शासक active 1871–1872
Son of Vanhnuailiana and the principal object of the Lushai Expedition of 1871–72, whose villages the Cachar column was directed against and from whose country captives were recovered.
राजवंश: Sailo.
Ropuiliani Lal शासक 1828–1895
Chieftainess of Denlung and eight other villages after her husband Vandula's death. She withheld tax, labour and rice tribute, boycotted all three sittings of the chiefs' durbar in 1890 and worked with neighbouring chiefs against the occupation. Taken with her son and held at Rangamati, where she died on 3 January 1895.
राजधानी: Denlung, near Lunglei
Khuangchera Pasaltha सेनापति c. 1850 – September 1890
A pasaltha — a warrior of recognised standing rather than a hereditary officer — killed at Changsil while carrying a wounded companion out of the fighting. He is the figure through whom Mizo memory holds the resistance of 1890.
राजधानी: Parvatui
Chengjapao Doungel Chief of Aishan शासक active 1917–1919
One of the four chiefs who bound themselves to each other by the killing of a mithun at the outset of the Kuki Rising in 1917. Detained under Bengal Regulation III of 1818 after the rising and held for four years, longer than any of the others.
राजधानी: Aishan
Pache Chief of Chassad सेनापति active 1917–1919
Directed the fighting in the eastern sector of the Kuki Rising and was the last of the principal chiefs to surrender, in April 1919.
राजधानी: Chassad