ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a case study of the Kuki-Chin people of the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. Identified by different names, Kuki and Mizo in India and Chin in Myanmar/Burma, the Kuki-Chin ethnic group is a fringe community and a non-state entity that has sustained a fluid identity under changing historical contexts. The chapter discusses the Kuki-Chin community, ‘transborder peoples’ who constitute the minority in the states they inhabit but have ‘connected history.’ It tries to understand how their notion of ethnic identity and territory had been displaced and fragmented by the colonial and postcolonial states boundaries. The current engagement of the government of India with various insurgent groups in the region makes it imperative to revisit certain problems related to the rise of ethnic nationalism and to explicitly tackle the issues of overlapping territorial demands. The article argues that such overlapping territorial claims, which have their roots in colonial processes of ethnicization and territorial demarcation, need immediate attention to bring durable solution. Such competing claims arose only after colonially constructed categories of local people who shared local living spaces began to claim exclusive ownership of the entire territory of certain administrative units. Drawing on archival sources and ethnohistory, this article examines the Kuki-Chin ethnic insurgents group operating in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands.
