Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills · Northeast Hill Massif
Everything here is woven on a backstrap loom in narrow panels and joined, which sets the design grammar: the cloth is built from lengthwise bands, so motifs run in stripes and blocks rather than as scattered figures. A puan is a rectangle wrapped at the waist, and what distinguishes one from another is the band structure and the supplementary-weft motifs carried in it. Those bands are read, not merely admired — they say whether a cloth is for a bride, a dance, a funeral or a man who has completed the feasts of merit. The same grammar, with different names and colour weights, runs across into the Chin Hills, the Manipur hills and the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
What is worn
The most ornamented Mizo cloth and the hardest to weave — three lengthwise panels, the middle one narrowest, joined into one textile, with supplementary-weft motifs inserted by hand. Red, black and white dominate. It is a bridal cloth and the standard dance cloth, so it is the puan outsiders see most and the one a Mizo woman is likeliest to own in her best quality.
Worn for: Weddings, Chapchar Kut, Cheraw and Chai dancing
A dark cloth with red edges and bold bands of yellow, green and blue. It is required in a married woman's trousseau, and its recorded funerary use is exact — the cloth a wife brings is the one used to cover her husband's body at his death. A textile that begins a marriage and ends it.
Worn for: Everyday, courtship, and mourning
White ground crossed by deep black bands and a contrasting stripe — the most restrained of the major puans, and the one whose design is legible at a distance in a crowd of dancers.
Worn for: Festivals
Roughly two metres of white cloth carrying four black interlaced bands. The name comes from tawlhloh — to stand and not give ground — and the cloth was worn as a statement that its wearer would not retreat. It is the clearest case in the region of a textile used as a declaration rather than as clothing.
Worn for: Campaigns and occasions of prestige
A short waist-cloth with a white warp pattern on a black ground — an older garment that fell out of daily wear when the full-length puan became standard, and now worn mainly for dance and heritage occasions.
Worn for: Festivals; now rare in daily use
The woven blouse, made from two rectangular pieces joined to leave openings for head and arms. Worn as the upper half of the dance costume, so its motifs are chosen to match the puan below it.
Worn for: With the puanchei, for dance and formal wear
Restricted by custom to those who had earned the Thangchhuah title through a set sequence of public feasts or hunts, and to chiefs. Wearing it was a claim about what a household had given away, and in the older belief it also marked the right of passage to pialral, the paradise beyond Rih Dil.
Worn for: Ceremonial
Weaves and textiles
Registered as a geographical indication in August 2019 along with four other Mizo cloths. Three joined panels, supplementary-weft motifs, and a colour scheme built on red, black and white. Motif names recorded in weaving documentation include disul and halkha for contrast bands, hruih for black transverse stripes, siniar for the triangle-and-diamond field, and sakri zangzia, read as the marking on a tiger's back.
Registered in 2019. The dark banded cloth of the trousseau and the funeral. Its official GI spelling is Pawndum; puandum is the common transliteration.
Registered in 2019. Black-banded white cloth, historically unisex, now largely a women's festival puan.
Registered in 2019. The warrior's cloth of four interlaced black bands, still woven in Thenzawl and bought as a formal gift of respect.
Registered in 2019. The short white-on-black waist cloth, now more often displayed than worn.
Not a cloth but a place — the town where several thousand fly-shuttle looms turned household weaving into the region's main non-farm rural industry. Most puans sold in Aizawl are woven here.
Jewellery
Traditional dress of Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills — garments, handloom weaves, GI-tagged textiles and jewellery. (13)