THF Talk Series #4
Negotiating Modernity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Mizoram The Life and Times of Sainghinga
A lecture by Prof Joy Pachuau
Wednesday, 03 April 2024
6 PM | On Zoom
Please register via the link here.
The lecture will try and unravel the changes that occurred in Mizo society as a result of the arrival of colonial modernity in the Lushai Hills (now: Mizoram) in the late 19th century. The changes will be traced through the life of Sainghinga who would have been the first in his family to become lettered. His progress was quick and he rose to the rank of Political Assistant to the Superintendent, the highest colonial official of the then Aijal District. The attempt of the lecture will be to try and see how colonial modernity affected the region and how people who were involved tried to negotiate these changes. The period was one that brought about dramatic changes for the society; while history writing often focusses on the broad changes, the lecture will try to understand how these changes affected lives and how people re-constituted who they were.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Joy LK Pachuau is a Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She has a doctorate in history from the same University, as well as a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK. At JNU she teaches courses related to the history of Christianity in Asia in the 16th -17th centuries and gender and society in medieval India. Her research interest thus includes the history of Portuguese expansion in Asia especially in relation to religion but also other socio-cultural aspects. More recently she has been working on the history of Northeast India with a focus on the history of identity formations. She is also interested in the visual history of the region. Prof. Pachuau’s publications include Being Mizo: Identity and Belonging in Northeast India, (OUP, 2014), The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (with Willem van Schendel, CUP, 2015) and Christianity in Indian History: Issues of Culture, Power and Knowledge (eds with P. Malekandathil and Tanika Sarkar, Primus 2016) and Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, New Delhi (edited with Neeladri Bhattacharya: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Entangled Lives: Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle, co-written with Willem van Schendel was published in 2022 from Cambridge University Press.