THE ORIGIN OF THE CHIN by Lian H Sakhong
First, I would like to thank all of you for giving me this opportunity to discuss about the Origin of the Chin. Talking about the “Origin of the Chin”, of course, is very much about searching for our identity: Who are we? Where we come from? What makes us Chin a Chin? What are the chief features which distinguish the Chin people as an ethnic nationality from other human collectives or ethnic groups? And which criteria make it possible for us to be recognized as a distinctive people and nationality? Why we are in different countries though we all still living in the same homeland of our forefathers? etc…
But before I touch upon the topic of my presentation, I would like to request one thing: please bear with me that I am standing before you as an activist and historian. As an historian, I am engaging a dialogue between the past and the present; and when I look the future I look backward, that is.., I first look backwards in order to look towards the future. And the future that I can see is more or less the reflection of how far I can look backwards into the past. The future, in any case, is partly conditioned by the past: it is not entirely predictable but equally it is not the outcome of pure chance.
And as an activist, I’m currently engaging dialogue between the present and the future. But an activist approach is quite opposite to historian: When I look the past I first look towards the future. For activists like me, the future is not the end of time but the fullness of time, not the transcending of the world and mankind but the fulfilment through the world and through mankind, that is., the fulfilment of human actions. The record of such human actions in the past is what we called “history”.
So, as an activist, learning history for me is not just looking into the past but looking forwards to the future in order to see whether there is any opportunity for me to create the present more positively. As Victor Hugo once said, “the Future has many names; for the weak it is unattainable, for the fearful it is unknown, for the bold it is opportunity”. But without knowing the past and without understanding the present, the future cannot be an opportunity even for the bold. As Herbert Butterfield once stated, “a people that lived without the knowledge of its past—without serious attempt to organize its memory—would hardly be calculated to make much progress in its civilization” . A Roman historian Cicero also said, “If you don’t know what happened before you were born, you then remain forever a child”. As a people, and as a Chin, we don’t want to remain forever a child. And that’s the reason why we want to re-organize our past memory in order to preserve, protect and promote our identity, our culture and our ways of life so that we would be able to create a vibrant and admirable future for the next generations to come.
The very purpose of this seminar is looking back into the past in order to understand the present and looking forwards to the future. As a matter of fact, the Euro-Burma Office has organized a series of historical workshops and seminars for all the ethnic nationalities in Burma under the title of “Knowing the Past and Understanding the Present”. We have conducted the Arakan Historical Workshop in 2006 and Mon Historical Workshop in 2007, and now is for the Chin, and next year we will be organizing a seminar for the Shan in Shihsong-panna in Yunan Province of China. Shih-song-panna, like Aizawl for the Chin, is the largest city of the Shan homeland.
The paper that I present to you is entitled: “Origin of the Chin”. Before we look at the “Origin of the Chin”, I would like to explain why we need to look at the origin at all, which as you all know is much obscured, I must admit. But, by studying the “Origin”, we are hoping to know our own past more objectively and understand our present more clearly. My purpose, therefore, is quite simple: by studying the “Origin of the Chin” we hope to understand better what happened to us: Why we are divided by the so called international boundaries? Why do we live in different countries? What does these international boundaries meant to us? Why we are known and called in many different names though we are the sons and daughters of the same ancestors? In order to understand what happened to us during the past few centuries, we must look back our past and try to see the “Origin of the Chin”
through the prism that transcendent the outside interventions in our history, which hopefully will give us a clearer picture of what happened to us.
I must confess that we have very little knowledge about our own history after 1896, and also after 1948. This is not our fault: the reason simply is we do not have the right of selfdetermination.
Until recently, history is mostly written by the people who obtained the right self-determination, that is., the people who are able to build or re-build their own sovereign nation-state. I think such practice of writing history from above is still the norm here in India and in Burma. In such a case, writing history is a national project as part of nation-building process. We have to challenge such an old notion of writing history from above, along with many schools of thought, including “Annales” school of historians. History should not be written only by the people those who have the right of self-determination, in which the term self-determination is interpreted so narrowly as “sovereignty” or “sovereign state”. History can also be written by the people from below, people like us, those who lost the fundamental right of self-determination, while challenging at the same time the very notions of “selfdetermination” and “nation-state” . What I am trying to say is that by writing history from below, we can challenge the very notions of “self-determination” and “nation-state” .
My point here is not to talk about the right of “self-determination” and the concept of “nation-state” but try to point out why we do not understand our own history. We don’t know who we were before 1896. We don’t know what happened to us between 1896 and 1948, and after 1948. We don’t know why we are now in different countries although our homeland is still the same as before. Why? I think we should ask the Question of “Why” very boldly. After all, you and me who are here in this room today claimed ourselves as scientists, or at least social scientists, because we ask the question of why? Without asking the question of why, we are neither scientists nor historians: we would merely be collector of facts. I understand that we are here today not as collector of facts but as scientists who ask the question of WHY?
In order to ask the Question of “Why”: Let me tell you my own experience in 1991. It was when I first came here to Aizawl: the Zo Khuapui, or now I call the Chin Khuapui. After being awhile in Aizawl, one evening, me and my friends decided to go to the theatre to watch movie. But while on the way the Mizoram police arrested us. I strongly protest my arrest not on the legal ground, after all I was the one who illegally entered into another sovereign country, but I protested my arrest on the ground of the term that they used when I was arrested: “Burma ho!”. I said, “Burma ho ka ni miah lo”. And they asked, “Tung nge ani, Burma ttong na ttong miah ko”. The word that they used “Burma ttong” made me more angry, and I said, “Tung nge ka ni, Khua Chak ka ni mei. Burma ttong ka tong miah lo. Lai ttong ka ttong miah ko. Poih tong nan ti mi kha ka ttong.” And I tried to explain them that Lai dialect is the same as Poih dialect, which is part of Mizo language. And I told them not to call me “Burma ho”, and even challenged them: “If you call me Burma ho, I would call you Vai ho, or Indian Kala ho. But you and I are not Burma ho nor Vai ho. You and I are just brothers from Khua Chak and Khua Thlang. Our differences is only Khua Chak and Khua Thlang, not Burma ho and Vai ho”. But, poor me! My Mizo dialect was not enough to convince the angry polices. Luckily, before I was brought into the locked-up, my aunty Kheng Hrang nu, Mrs. Hi Phei, came to my rescue.
That incident in 1991 makes me think to myself: If you and I were born before 1896 when the Chin Hills Regulation was promulgated or even before the First Anglo-Chin War of Annexation in 1872, then there would be no such terminology as “Burma ho” to denote your brother from Khua Chak like me. Before 1896, there would be no such thing as international boundaries that dividing us today as Indian citizen, Burmese citizen and Bangladeshi citizen, and there would be no such immigration laws that applicable between bothers and sisters.
And there would be no such thing as India Standard Time, Burma Standard Time and Bangladesh Standard Time, which divided the same time zone of our homeland into three pieces and make us different in the way we manage our time and our lives. Gradually, such simple fact as different Standard Times lead us into different life styles and different ways of life, which eventually would become different traditions, customs and cultures. This is part of the destruction of primordial identity that bound us as a distinctive ethnic group with clearly defined territory of homeland before.
Our forefathers in this homeland woke up every morning at the Cock crow and when the Sun rises from the East. The Cock still crows exactly the same time as our forefather’s days, and the Sun also rises the same every morning. But, because of different time zones, while we—your brothers and sisters in the so called “Burma side and Bangladesh part”—are more or less wake up at the Cock crow as our forefathers did; you, my brothers and sisters in Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland are still sleeping, waiting for a new and artificial time that has been given to you by the Government of India from New Delhi. You no longer value dutiful Cock that crowed at the rising of the Sun. You are still sleeping and looking at your watch, which runs according the Delhi Government’s order. I thought you are Christians who worship the Supreme God, Pathian, who created the Sun, the Moon and the Universe but it seems to me that you do not obey Him. God has given us a different time zone for us: the Sun rises in different time for this homeland, the Cock crows in the morning to wake up the children of God in this homeland. But you simple disobey the Natural Law of God, and you worship the time of New Delhi. By doing this, how many hours you wasted every morning, every day, every week, every year, and in your life time.
I sincerely think that you do this because you don’t know that you disobey the Law of God, or may be you don’t ask why you do this. The question of “Why” is very important here! If you ask the question of why and claim your right of self-determination, then you should follow the Natural Law which is given to us by God, rather than following an artificial time from New Delhi. After all, in the global era, the world has standardized the Natural Law of God into many different time zones, not necessarily following the boundaries of the so called sovereign nation-states. Simply, Mizoram should have a different Standard Time from New Delhi. If you—my brothers and sisters from Khua Thlang—are aware of the fact that God has given us different time zone for this homeland, then you should demand the New Delhi Government through the Mizoram Legislative Assembly by passing the law that declares a Chin Standard Time, or if you so wish, just call it a Mizoram Standard Time. This is what we call practicing the right of self-determination.
Let me tell you one thing that although we are still in the midst of our struggle: We, your brothers from Khua Chak, already exercised our right of self-determination by adopting the Chin Standard Time when we held the First Chin National Assembly at Victoria Camp (on Indo-Burma Border) in 2004. As I said, the right of self-determination should not be narrowly interpreted as a sovereign nation-state because there are many levels of self-determination, especially in federal countries like India. That is the good part of federal system, which we also are advocating for the future of Burma.
Let me go back to my experience in 1991 and ask myself a few more questions. If you and I were born before 1896, then there would be no such name with suffix “a” for male and “i” for female in this room and in Mizoram. Your name would just be Biak Lian, instead of Biak Liana, or if you happened to be a female, your name would just be Dar Duh, not Dar Duhi.
Please look back our past and you would find that history recorded no such name with suffix “a” or “i”. This is just a new identity that imposed on us by the outsider because they didn’t know the beauty of our language and our culture. In order to reclaim our identity and declare that we are brothers and sisters from the same ancestors, who proclaimed this land as our homeland —Kan Ram— by their lives and their destiny: in order to reclaim our homeland, in order to reclaim our identity, and in order to declare that we are brothers and sisters, we have to look back our past and ask the Question of “Why” very boldly.
Asking the Question of “Why” in history is very much related with the question of change and continuity: what change brought to us, like different time zones, international boundaries, and our names with suffix “a” and “i”, etc.., etc.., and what still remain with us continuously, such as the Sun still rises and the Cock also crows every morning exactly the same time as our forefathers’ days, and the bamboo still flowering in every fifty years which bring us much hardship and hunger to our people and to our homeland as in our forefather’s time. We all know that we human beings are very much conscious about change: because everything in social or natural world is subject to change with the passage of time. It is this process of change that influences our day-to-day behaviour, thereby our ways of life and our thought pattern, which eventually creates our new identity.
Through change, we created socially constructed identity but continuity allowed us to preserve our primordial identity. If change occurred on constant basis and if we didn’t realize what happened to us, then we wouldn’t be able to freeze the reality, and then we all would become the strangers in the midst of our brothers and sisters. That’s what happened to me in 1991, and I do not wish such incident happens again to my fellow brothers and sisters from Khua Chak, to my children and to my new generations to come; even if we still living apart as different citizens. That’s the reason why I would like to invite you today—let’s look back together into our past in order to see our origin.
In my paper, I argue that our original name was “Chin”, by applying Ethno-symbolic theory, and defined the Chin people as a “nationality” or “ethnic nationality” , and Chinland or Chinram as a “nation”, but not as a nation-state, based on all the well-recognized theory that I have just mentioned, and also based on the traditional Chin concepts of Miphun, Ram, and
Phunglam. The meaning and concept of Miphun is an “ethnicity” or a “people” who believe that they come from a common descent or ancestor. Ram is a homeland, a country, or a nation with well-defined territory and claimed by a certain people who have belonged to it historically; and the broad concept of Phunglam is “ways of life”, which includes almost all cultural and social aspects of life, religious practices, belief and value systems, customary law and political structure, and all kinds of aesthetic aspects of life such as dance, song, and even the customs of feasts and festivals, etc, all the elements in life that “bind successive generations of members together” as a people and a nationality, and at the same time separate them from others.
Under the subtitle of The Chin Concept of Miphun in my paper, I try to find out our Collective Name, by arguing that the common proper name of the “Chin” is inseparably intertwined with “the myth of common descent” and the “myth of the origin” of the Chin. According to the myth of the origin, the Chin people emerged into this world from the bowels of the earth or a cave or a rock called ‘Chinlung’, which, as we will see below, is spelled slightly differently by different scholars based on various Chin dialects and local traditions, such as ‘Chhinlung’, ‘Chinn-lung’ , ‘Chie’nlung’ , ‘Chinglung’, ‘Ciinlung’, ‘Jinlung, ‘Sinlung’, ‘Shinlung’, ‘Tsinlung’, and so on.
The tradition of ‘Chinlung’ as the origin of the Chin has been kept by all tribes of the Chin in various ways, such as folksongs, folklore, and legends known in Chin as Tuanbia. For the people who had no writing system of their own, a rich oral tradition consisting of folksong and folklore was the most reliable means of transmitting past events and collective memories through time. The songs were sung repeatedly during all kinds of feasts and festivals, and the tales that made up Chin folklore were told and retold over the generations. In this way, such collective memories as the origin myth and the myth of common ancestors were handed down from one generation to the next. Different tribes and groups of Chin kept the tradition of ‘Chinlung’ in several versions; and I cited two songs from the Hmar group of the Mizo tribe, who now live in the Mizoram State of India, which I refer in this study as West
Chinram.
In addition to Folksongs and Folklore, I also quoted a number of modern scholars, who generally agree with the traditional account of the origin of the name “Chin” and that the word “Chin” comes from ‘Chinlung’. Hrang Nawl, one of the most prominent scholars and politicians among the Chin, confirms that the term “Chin … come(s) from Ciinlung, Chhinlung or Tsinlung, the cave or the rock where, according to legend, the Chin people emerged into this world as humans.” Even Vumson could not dispute the tradition that the
Chin “were originally from a cave called Chinnlung, which is given different locations by different clans.”The literal meaning of Chin-lung is “the cave or the hole of the Chin”, and this has the same meaning as the Burmese word for Chindwin as in the “Chindwin River”, that also is—”the hole of the Chin” or “the river of the Chin.” However, the word Chin-lung can also be translated as “the cave or the hole where our people originally lived” or “the place from which our ancestors originated.” Thus, the word Chin without the suffix lung is translated simply as “people” or “a community of people.” A Chin scholar, Lian Uk, therefore defines the term Chin as follows: “The Chin and several of its synonymous names generally means ‘People’ and the name Chinland is generally translated as ‘Our Land’ reflecting the strong fundamental relationship they maintain with their land.”
Similarly, Carey and Tuck, who were the first to bring the Chin people under the system of British administration, defined the word Chin as ‘man or people’. They recorded that the term Chin is “the Burmese corruption of the Chinese ‘Jin’ or ‘Jen’ (pronounce Chin/Cin or Ciang/Chiang) meaning ‘man or people’.” Evidently, the word ‘Chin’ had been used from the very beginning not only by the Chin themselves but also by their neighbouring peoples, such as Kachin, Shan and Burman, to denote the people who occupied the valley of Chindwin River. While the Kachin and the Shan still called the Chin as “Khyan” or “Khiang” or “Chiang”, the Burmese usage seems to have changed dramatically from “Khyan” ( c†if; ) to “Chin” ( csif; ). In a couple of stone inscriptions, erected by King Kyanzittha (1084-1113), the name Chin is spelled as “Khyan”( c†if; ). As far as historical and linguistic records are concerned, these stone inscriptions are the strongest evidence indicating that the name Chin was in use before the eleventh century AD.
Prior to the British annexation in 1896, there have been at least seventeen written records in English regarding research on what was then called the “Chin-Kuki linguistic people” in the “Chin-Lushai Country”. These early writings variously referred to what is now called and spelled, “Chin”, as “Khyeng”, “Khang”, “Khlang”, “Khyang”, “Khyan”, “Kiayn”, “Chiang”, “Chi’en”, “Chien”, and so on. Here I quoted a number of scholars, including Father Sangermono, who lived in Burma as a Catholic missionary from 1783 to 1796 A.D. In his now classical book: The Burmese Empire, he spelled the name Chin as “Chien” and the Chin Hills as the “Chien Mountains”. I also quoted Reid (Chin-Lushai Land, 1893), C.A. Soppit (Kuki-Lushai Tribe, 1893), Shakespeare (The Lushai-Kuki Clan, 1912), Snodgrass (The Burmese War, 1824-1826, 1826), Sir Author Phayer (History of Burma, 1883), and finally, after convincing myself quite well, I concluded by saying that: It was in 1891 that the term “Chin”, to be written as “CHIN”, was first used by Major W.G. Hughes in his military report, and then by A.G.E.
Newland in his book: The Images of War in 1894, and the conventional spelling for the name CHIN became legalized as the official term by The Chin Hills Regulation in 1896.
So, the canonical process of the term CHIN was completed in 1896.
Note: This is a verbal presentation of my paper: “Origin of the Chin” at “Seminar on Exploring History, Culture and Identity of the Chin”, organized Department of History and Ethnography Mizoram University, Aizawl.
Lian H. Sakhong
Aizawl, 2008-10-13
First Published at http://crcmalaysia.blogspot.com