On the discursive and material context of the first handwritten Lushai newspaper ‘Mizo Chanchin Laishuih’,1898

Abstract

Historically, the study of newspapers has focused on elaborating on the objects of enquiry as an industrial merchandise, a text, a sign of bourgeois promise and extraction or an entity that excites individualistic and nationalistic sentiments. Methodologically, it has concentrated less on the singularity of the event or the univocal character of a newspaper. This study is an effort to correct the imbalance in the division of labour. Mizo Chanchin Laishuih (MCL) may be regarded as a visual text, scaffolded to words and not images. It assumes a complex pictorial composition having varied surfaces and putative depths. The perceptual economy that is incited by MCL speaks of a process that produces an active Protestant silence. It flags off a mythology around the nascent enterprise of writing and scripting that anticipates a prescient self and the absence of a civil state. In summoning and exorcising the good and bad spirits from the woods and the kin-ordered clans, it impertinently addresses the fabled Tiger as a cat and the accompaniment of the Puithiam’s chant with the inducing of a numbed apothecary of the newly arrived Doktor Sap. MCL institutes—and is a product of—a parallel process that demarcates seemingly negotiable and non-negotiable boundaries between the Plains and the Hills. The ‘plainisation’ of the Hills is not a linear process where practices of the plains replaced the practices of the Hills. It is likely that MCL paraded itself and derived its authority as the organ of the Colonial State and it had no pretensions of constituting a liberal subject or serving a liberal order.