Lushai or Lusei is a small indigenous community living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts(CHT). They are the sub-clan of “Zo or Zomi ”. They belong to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Chino-Tibetan community. To the outsiders also known as “Zo” and “Kuki. However, a single name has technical limitation within its own context, since the Lushai, the Kuki, the Bawm and other ethnic groups would not normally accept a single identity collectively in the CHT. When the British divided the Kuki inhabitance with three international boundaries into India, Burma and Bangladesh; the above stated three main distinctive identities submerged, although those given names are not being used locally, and unknown to the natives initially.
The term Lushai, native Lusei, is commonly used to refer to the Zomi of the Mizoram. It was Mr. Edger, the Deputy Commissioner of Cachar who first officially used the term Lushai instead of Zomi around the year 1897. It may be mentioned that the term may have been derived from the custom of certain tribes keeping their hair long and fastening it in a knot at the back of the head. Its meaning, “Lu” means head and “Sei” means long i.e. keeping the head long or long head. It could also have originated from the custom of head hunting. Its also “Lu” means head and “Shai” means cut i.e. head cutting. However, the British later adopted Lushai as the official designation of all Zo people. Then in the year 1946 the tribes of the Lushai changed their nomenclature into Mizo in Lushai Hills. It was on the 9th of April, 1946 that the Mizo Union was founded at the Muallungthu (Lushai Hills) Conference.
Due to external dominance and influence, the Bengali called them Kuki, the Chakmas called them Hugi, the Burmese called them Chin and the Indians called them Mizo or Lushai . But they never called themselves by those names. Zomi is the most commonly known identity regardless.
Origin:
The different Zomi tribes hold the common belief that they originally emerged out of a Cave or Hole. This mythological cave is known by various names like Khuul, Khur, Khurpui, Khurtu-bijur, Sinlung, Chinlung, etc by various tribes like Thadou (Shaw 1929:24-26), Lushai ( Shakespeare: 1912), Lakher (Parry 1976:4), Tedim/Paite-Chin (Kamkhenthang 1967:1-2) and Moyon-Monsang, etc.
The Lushai migrated into the CHT from the Tripura and Lushai Hills of India some 150 years ago. Before the British conquest of the Lushai Hills in 1892, the Lushais were extremely ferocious. They choose mountain tops as their abodes. Entrance to the village was heavily guarded.
The Lushai migrated into CHT from Kingdom of Tripura and Chin State of Myanmar in the end of 18th century. In 1871 and 1890, the two British generals led an expedition against Lushais in India. This is known in history as the Lushai Expedition. The Lusai were originally inhabitant of the Kingdom of Tripura and also to the adjoining hilly areas. They have settled down on Jampui Hills under Kanchanpur Sub-Division in North Tripura (mentioned: Folklore).
(Lushai: Eiteng khawlkhawm a tuam omlou Vannuai chiteng KHUUL a piang; Tuunsung khat a piang hi ngeingei, Tuunsung khat a piang hi ngeingei, Suahpih sanggam khat hi hang; Laizom khat hi ngeingei hang. Free translation: We, people who are in aggregation are of one stock, Every body under the heaven is born of a cave (Khuul). And born of the same mother. Being born of the same mother, we are all born together as siblings, we are really descendants of the same siblings).
Location:
In general, the Lushai people who occupied part of India, Burma and Bangladesh are considered to be indigenous people. The Lushai who live in Mizoram State of India referred themselves as Mizo, although the two terms Lushai and Mizo simply mean "Zo People”. Basically, Lushai people covered the whole Chin State of Burma; Mizoram, Tripura and Manipur State of India and in the CHT of Bangladesh. It is believed that there are about 529,000 in India (1997), 12,500 in Myanmar(1983) and approximately 1,041 in Bangladesh in 1981 census.
Lifestyle:
Lushais have a patriarchal society. The Lushais are divided into different sects. It is a patriarchal society. In the past, Lushais did not have a King of their own. Every village used to have a Chief and he was known as “Lal”. Their social life and customs have been objects of great attraction to others. They prefer living in high altitude of the hills and cliffs. Their house is made by bamboo, timber, etc. The typical house is called “In” which is 5-6 metres high from the ground. There is no any partition inside the house. They sleep altogether like in a hall. They make beautiful crafts like shawls and bags. They use home-made wooden carts to carry their wood, vegetables and even people for short distances. Travelling downhill is easy, but not so for the return journey. Smoking is prevalent in the society, even among women and children. Other addictions include alcohol and drugs. These can lead to serious health problems including tuberculosis, cancer and HIV/AIDS, and can also affect family life, sometimes resulting in broken families and orphaned children.
The girls and women from the rural areas carry big baskets on their backs. Each basket has a band of cloth, slung across the forehead to bear the weight. These unique baskets are used to take provisions, farm produce and other essential commodities to and from market.
Livelihood:
Like the other hill indigenous tribes in CHT, with which they have affinities, the Lushai traditionally practised shifting slash-and-burn cultivation, moving their villages frequently. This is their principal means of livelihood. They product varieties of crops as paddy, maize, sesame, vegetables, etc. from the shifting cultivation . Of course, this can be considered chiefly to the dearth of plain land in the hills. Lushai women are hard-working and good with business matters. They care for the family and also work in the fields, growing vegetables, fruit and cultivating paddy and cotton.
Language:
They speak the Kuki-Chin dialect. Initially the Lushai had no script of its own. They have a language of their own known as “Lushai” or “Dolne” (Shafer 1955:107). During the British administration missionaries were active among them, as a result most of them took to Christianity. Their language too can be written in Latin script. Christian missionaries started developing script for the language adopting Roman script with a phonetic form of spelling based on the well known Hunterian system transliteration. The alphabets used are - a, aw, b, ch, chh, d, e, f, g, ng, h, i, í, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, û, v, z. Later there were radical developments in the language where the symbol â used for the sound of long O was replaced by aw with a circumflex accent and the symbol A is used for the vowel sound of O was changed to AW without any accent. The following few words shall suggest that Lushai and the Burmese are of the same family. To illustrate the words that are same as Burmese are: Kun (to blend), Kam (bank of a river), Kha (bitter), Sam (hair), Mei (fire), That (to kill), Ni (Sun) etc. In Lushai, the large groups of words are obviously related to one another both in sound and in meaning, but not by any regular systematic pattern. For example: bu (slightly bulging), bum (to swell up, be swollen), bom (to bloat), bem (chubby), hpum (fat), bum (hill, mountain, heap), pem (to bank up earth into a hillock for planting), bong (to bulge, to grow, as a goitre), bep (calf of the leg the bulging part), um (round/bulbous). These are all obviously related semantically to a notion of bulging or protrusion, and they share a back vowel and a labial initial or final consonant or both. However, the relationships are not regular, i.e., there is no general pattern in which, for example, an adjective is related to a verb by suffixation of a nasal, as bu is to bum in the preceding series.
Lushai is a tone language, in which differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words. Tone systems have developed independently in many of the daughter languages largely through simplifications in the set of possible syllable-final and syllable-initial consonants. Typically, a distinction between voiceless and voiced initial consonants is replaced by a distinction between high and low tone, while falling and rising tones develop from syllable-final (h) and glottal stop, which themselves often reflect earlier consonants.
Lushai contains many un-analysable polysyllables, which are polysyllabic units such as the English word water, in which the individual syllables have no meaning by themselves. In a true monosyllabic language polysyllables are mostly confined to compound words, such as lighthouse. The first syllables of compounds tend over time to be distressed, and may eventually reduce to prefixed consonants. Virtually all polysyllabic morphemes in Lushai can be shown to originate in this way. For example, the disyllabic form “bakhwan” (butterfly), which occurs in one dialect of the “Trung” or “Dulung” language of Yunnan, is clearly a reduced form of the compound blak kwar, found in a closely related dialect. The first element of this compound, in turn, is itself a reduction of an old compound of two roots, ba, ban and lak, both meaning arm, limb, and often turning up in forms for wing.
Religion:
The Lushai are traditionally animism was considered to be the most widely practice religion until the Swedish-American Baptist missionaries preached Christianity in 1894, for the first time. Today, we can witness so many different Christian denominations across among them. Approximately there are about 5 to 10 percent of people who profess to be non-Christians currently, however the rest are Christians either by birth or conviction.
During the early 1900's as a general sense of prohibitionist arose, many Christians, particularly some Protestants Churches like the Presbyterian's, Baptist and Seventh day Adventist came to believe that the Bible prohibited alcohol or that the wisest for the Christian was to abstain from alcohol or prohibit it. The Bible warns that alcohol can hinder moral discretion. Proverbs 31 : 4-5 warns kings and rulers that they might forget what is decreed, and pervert the rights of all the afflicted. Christians should make a public statement against drunkenness because of the negative consequences it can have on individuals, families, and society as a whole. As as the Bible forbids partaking of alcohol altogether, they say medicinal use of wine in 1 Timothy 5:23, the Miracle of water turning into wine are all un-fermented grape juice. They also interpret the passages in the bible where beverages are viewed negatively to mean alcoholic drinks and where they are viewed positively they are to mean non alcoholic drinks.
Culture:
Like other Zomi group, Lushai existence of common cultural traits indication. Possession of clan songs by the clans forming the tribes is a unique feature of the Zomi. Members of the same clan in each tribe possess clan songs which were revered and sang at the time of mourning dead only. They love hunting, fishing and collect vegetables and fruit from the forest.
Folklore:
There are many folk tales in the Lushai society. They have such tales as Khupching, Ngambawm, Thanghou, Liandou, Ngalngam, Temtatpu, etc. These stories are found among the Lushai in Manipur, Assam, Burma etc. Possession of the same folk tales means nothing but the people are of the same folk having similar social ritual norms and similar philosophy of life.
Marriage:
In the Lushai society, the majority people practise agamous marriage in which a man can marry any woman within and outside his clan. All the major tribes in Zomi groups like Gangte, Hmar, Lakher, Lushai, Paite, Tedim-Chin, Thadou, Vaiphei, etc follow agamy. The only exception to this rule are the so-called Old-Kukis (Anal, Kom, Mongsangs, etc) where there are definite wife-takers and wife-giver.
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Birth Ritual:
In naming a child, the Lushai have a strong emphasis on taking the names of their ancestors. In a society that is patrimonial and patriarchal the eldest son of the eldest male member is compulsorily named after the last syllable of the paternal grandfather. This rule serves as a yardstick for tracing the family lineage in successive generations.
Traditional Dress:
The Lushai girls are well dressed. They generally wear their colourful cloth and the ornaments are not very much required except fragrant flowers. They performed welcome dance whenever any visitor pay visits to their house. Women wear “Pajara” like a Pinon to cover the lower part of their body. Its ground has striped designs made of white and black threads. Like Tripura women, Lushai women wear “Risa” at their chest. It is usually 10 inches in breadth and has designs made with coloured threads. Lushai women and men wear shirt to adjust modern civilization. The Lushai in general, with some exceptions, do not cut their hair. They keep their hair long and have two coiffure: 1) The top knot on the top of the head, 2) The chignon on the nape of the neck.
Music and Uniform:
The Lushai have developed their own style of singing and dancing using native drums. The young people's songster groups have participated in many events. The wearing of the Army uniform is cultivated from childhood and soldiers and local officers wear their white uniform with blue trimmings proudly, participating in the meetings along with officers.
Drinking:
In the olden days of Lushai history, housewives used to brew rice-beer with the biggest beer-pots available and made sure that there would be no shortage of “Zu” means wine, when the hunters returned from their hunt. Usually they used to have lots of meat and rice beer better known as Zu with lots of merry making during the festival times.
With the coming of Christianity in 1894, the missionaries through their good work converted most of the Lushais within a few years, With the new religion, many of the missionaries found the habit of getting drunk and festivities did not go in line with the Lushai tradition, hence they were forbidden to drink alcohol and leave behind all their pagan & animistic practices. After Mizoram statehood in 1986, peace gradually changed drinking patterns as economic change and urbanization accompanied with increased crime were often blamed on social problems like drunkenness. Even, affected every segment of the Lushai society in CHT.