Mizo chiefdoms

The chiefs

Mizo society was organised around the village under a lal or chief, in most of the hills a member of the Sailo clan, advised by a council of elders. The chief allocated jhum cultivation plots each year, which was the substance of his authority, and maintained the zawlbuk, the bachelors' hall that trained the young men.

The Sailo chiefs expanded across the hills in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absorbing or displacing other clans, and raided the plains of Cachar and Chittagong.

Annexation and after

The raids brought British expeditions in 1871–72 and 1888–89, and the hills were annexed in the 1890s. Welsh missionaries followed almost immediately, and Mizoram is now among the most heavily Christian territories in Asia; the missionaries' Roman script for Mizo and their schools produced near-universal literacy.

Chieftainship was abolished in 1954 at the demand of a popular movement. The mautam famine of 1959 — a periodic event caused by the flowering of bamboo and a consequent explosion of the rat population, occurring roughly every forty-eight years — and the government's poor response to it produced the Mizo National Front insurgency, which ran from 1966 to the peace accord of 1986. Mizoram became a state in 1987, and the accord has held.