Mizo “ Sakhua ” in Transition

Abstract

Mizo people, a small ethnic group spreading across the international boundary from India's northeast to Myanmar, has come to understand itself as nothing less than Christian. After fifty years of its introduction among the Mizos, the Gospel has transformed this community into a zealous missionary-minded Christian people. In this article, the author, who is a Mizo himself, examines if and how features of traditional primal religion of the Mizos continue in Mizo Christianity. After delineating the main characteristics, essential beliefs, and practices of the primal “animistic” religion of the Mizos, the article then analyzes how the new religion was received and conceptualized by the people to produce its distinctive Christian nature. Not discounting the transforming act of conversion, the author concludes that there are strong lines of continuity when the primal worldview and ethos came to be utilized as connecting links to the message of the new religion.