COMMENT On the eleventh of May, an event took place in a sports facility in Maluri that was certainly not advertised by the press, bringing together hundreds and hundreds of Myanmar youth.

In fact, there were two concurrent events. One outdoors - a sports competition (I briefly watched both volleyball and football matches) held by the Falam Christian Association - and an indoors one, held by three different Mizo organisations. Both Mizo and Falam are members of different groups within the Chin ethnic minority living on the border between Northeast India and Myanmar.

It was amazing to be practically the only non-Chin among hundreds and  hundreds of Myanmar youth (in what concerns the Falam, overwhelmingly men), bar the scant Malaysian staff on the grounds. This was taking place in Malaysia and yet it was a thoroughly non-Malaysian event.

Chapchar Kut is originally a festival held after the end of the jungle-clearing operations needed for slash-and-burn agriculture in the valleys and mountains of the Indo-Burmese border. It is the most important traditional festival of the Mizo still staged, to the point that some Falam I know referred to it as the ‘Mizo Festival’ or ‘Mizo National (sic) Day’.

Though they are closely related peoples, the Falam and the Mizo have different languages that not everybody on either side can understand.

Apparently, the festival was no longer staged after Christianisation, originally brought about through the efforts of two famous British missionaries, namely Lorrain (called Pu Buanga by the Mizo) and Savidge (named Sap Upa in Mizo), who reached the Lushay Hills - in today’s Mizoram state in Northeast India near the Myanmar border - in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Back then the Mizo were called Lushay or Lushei (it was apparently only after the Second World War that they took their current name), and were a recently ‘pacified’ warring hill tribe who raided settlements in the lowlands controlled by the British, as well as engaging in headhunting in neighbouring villages of their own people.

Though it was not a Christian festival originally, it was depurated of its pre-Christian, animist connotations, and eventually revived as a wide-ranging cultural festival in the 1970s. Singing and dancing are very important to the festival, first and foremost the various versions of traditional dances, when dancers go on stage in full ethnic garb. However, breakdance and rock ’n roll are also clearly very popular.

I have attended a couple of the late night rehearsals of one of the three dance ensembles who presented themselves. It is not the first time I have watched Mizo dancing, as I had seen it staged or rehearsed before, in earlier versions of Chapchar Kut (held in February or April, for instance. The regular month for Chapchar Kut in Mizoram seems to be March, however).

The dancing I know is highly choreographed, and somewhat exhaustively rehearsed. Significantly, Puia, a young Mizo man, however, told me that ‘improvements’ have been made to some of the dances. Considering that he is in his twenties still, and that he has already seen ‘improvements’, it is very much to be doubted that the dances, as they now stand, are really in their original form.

Tradition is not set in stone

Of course, this does not necessarily make them less traditional or authentic, as tradition itself was not, as we know, frozen in time or set in stone. On the contrary, it is always shifting.

It is hard however not to speculate - and speculation is all I can do here as I have no hard data at my disposal - that there must have been some missionary input. The music for instance is very gospel-like; and the rhythm sounds like that of much European folkloric music.

At the time the British missionaries arrived in the Lushay Hills, the Irish Revival - including traditional dances and music - was at its peak. It was enormously influential not only in the British Isles, but also in Continental Europe. I wish I was an ethnomusicologist so that I could speculate further here.

Some of the movements which include dancing in pairs, with boys and girls holding hands, turning around together, etc, are suspiciously similar to movements in various kinds of European folk dances.

There are however several different types of Mizo dances. In one of them, people do not touch each other, and boys and girls actually dance around each other or next to each other. The body is in a squatting position, with knees bent, and the dancer moves around slowly flapping his or her arms, in fact, much in the manner of a large bird.

This strikes me as a very non-European kind of dance and body movement. It vaguely reminds me of dance movements of some lowland South American indigenous peoples (sic). Considering that indigenous Americans of all kinds were ultimately once Asians who crossed over from what is today Siberia into today’s Alaska, this vague resemblance may have very ancient roots.

In reality, one of the myths or stories (as there are apparently no written records, it is difficult to say with any certainty) about the origin of the Mizo and the Chins in general places their original homeland in historical Mongolia, a country that also included the southernmost reaches of Siberia. At some point they would have migrated southward to their present location in the Indo-Burmese borderlands.  

They do not do a full dress-rehearsal and will instead only wear their colourful clothes on the day of Chapchar Kut itself. Feasting on good food and drinking lots of alcohol are also part of both the traditional festival and its modern version.

The Mizo community however officially and otherwise frowns on liquor drinking. They claim that Christians do not consume alcohol (sic). In Mizoram, until recently, even the sale of alcohol was banned. Besides, there was of course no liquor on sale at the facility they had rented in Malori, nor were organisers providing any on the sly.

Nonetheless, it was striking how quite a few very enterprising young men disappeared from the scene for a while, only to return slightly inebriated some time later. They had obviously managed to procure liquor somewhere, though they wisely kept themselves from showing any bottles or flasks.  

Later, after the festival had finished around early evening (it had started early in the morning and therefore took one whole day - traditionally it might in fact take several days), many young men went to one of the Myanmar shops in Kuala Lumpur to get really drunk, as they often do on Christmas Day and New Year (and, in Malaysia, also on Chinese New Year, when many of them are off duty).

I noticed that one of the shops deliberately closed its door early in the evening exactly to avoid the rush of alcohol-seeking Mizo customers.

Lure of profit speaks higher

The lure of profit however spoke higher, and the shop in this way re-opened soon afterwards. It got quite crowded. And, as expected, quite a few fights broke out. Some Mizo customers would start shouting at each other when they became very drunk. It is interesting to note that usually you fight a friend or close acquaintance, rather than a stranger. Even a relative might do, it is my impression.

I used to try and find out the reasons for the quarrels, but eventually gave up. Not only was there a language barrier, but also whatever I found out sounded trivial at best to me. The most commonly recited phrase and reason given would be ‘he challenged me’ (sic). Young Mizo males have a very keen sense of honour, and bristle at any other Mizo who they sense to be stepping on their toes.

A Mizo manager of a Myanmar shop told me that he usually knows who the troublemakers will be in 80 percent of the cases (sic). These are often people who are, he said, pleasantly urbane and kind. Until they get very drunk, that is, when they may change into little monsters. Of course, there are also many people who drink and remain unobtrusive throughout.  

Chapchar Kut is in this way a festival of ‘pagan’ origins which seems to have retained quite a good deal of its original flavour. Though to the authorities of the various Mizo associations this is to be regretted, to my mind it is a sign of a culture whose youth have kept a great degree of vitality and a lustful energy.

That they are virtually all foreign workers (I hardly know a single student or blue collar worker among them), in spite of their at times very diverse background in Myanmar itself, also makes for what is to me a surprising degree of cultural vitality. One would have expected an oppressed, marginalised group of people, and yet Chapchar Kut seems to at least partially give the lie to this perception.

It is also great that this takes place in Malaysia, and therefore in a country where the Mizo are not known to have roots (they apparently started coming here as workers and refugees in larger numbers only in the early 2000s). It is also intriguing to think that they in general may never put down roots here, as their final destinations remain overwhelmingly the West or else back to Myanmar or India.

What is also intriguing is that a transient population may stay in Malaysia for many years, leave its marks (there are even Mizo sections in cemeteries outside Kuala Lumpur), and then move on, unrecorded, unsung, and largely unnoticed except by itself. The Mizo, like other Chins, already have in this way constructed a whole history in Malaysia, a history that however remains to this day without any teller outside their own community.

As Malaysia however is not a homeland, nor a final destination, I suspect the Mizo themselves usually regard their history here as fleeting and unimportant in comparison to their history in the Indo-Burmese borderlands and in the West. This is very sad, because their history in Malaysia is actually already deep, varied, and very vibrant as well. It is in this way definitely worth recording, remembering, and even celebrating.

FRED ROSEN has been gallivanting around South-East Asia for quite some time now. He is interested in foreign communities in Malaysia’s large cities. He has also been writing about Malacca, both in the present and the past, as well as other ancient port cities in the Indian Ocean.