Mizos in unexpected places: Northeast Indian travellers in the Raj and beyond, 1870s–1930s

In the late nineteenth century, British officials characterised tribal populations in Northeast India as rural, primitive and place-bound. State-sanctioned forms of migration into the region—of tea-plantation labourers, missionaries, scientists, ethnographers, mapmakers and armed forces—generated paper trails that underscored the separateness of two worlds: an urban and mobile imperial world that entered other lands, and a rural and immobile tribal world that was entered. Decentring the concerns of empire, this article focuses on Mizo travellers from the Lushai Hills District (modern-day Mizoram) who not only travelled in the opposite direction but also changed the imperial world as they worked, learned, wrote, loved and conducted diplomacy in scales that spanned it. Tribal presence in distant urban centres—as choir members, students, labourers, diplomats, chiefs, nurses and preachers—challenged imperial fictions, often flying under the radar of colonial recordkeeping. This article argues that illuminating their stories requires an alternative archive: vernacular newspaper travelogues, Mizo-language diaries and historical materials today held in family collections across Mizoram unveil an overlooked era of outbound mobility, predating by over a century the current swell of travelling tribal youth, but also offering a way to reconceptualise it as part of a tradition rather than as a rupture. The histories of highlanders at lower elevations and in bustling urban centres—far away from rural frontiers and imperial borderlands—do not simply add to, but in fact constitute, the history of Northeast India.