Mizo

Clans and Kinship

A Mizo belongs to the clan (hnam) of the father. Shakespear (1912, pp. 41-44) divided each clan into families and each family into branches, nearly all named after an ancestor: the Lushei clan has several families, one of which is the Thangur, and the Thangur family has six branches, the chiefly lines. Each village was a separate state under its own chief (lal). When a chief's son came of age to marry, his father gave him a wife and a number of households from the village and sent him to found a village of his own; the youngest son stayed and succeeded to his father's village and property. The chief was helped by elders (upa) whom he chose, and appointed the ramhual, who advised where the fields should be cut, and the crier (tlangau); every village also had a blacksmith (thirdeng) and a priest (puithiam). A large village was divided into quarters (veng), each usually of one clan. The unmarried men slept in the zawlbuk, the bachelors' hall, which stood opposite the chief's house.

From Shakespear (1912): the branches of the Thangur family and the other families of the Lushei clan as listed in his appendix (pp. 125-128), then the clans he counts within the wider term Lushai (Part II, ch. I) and three he describes as much influenced by the Lushei (ch. II). He writes Pachuao and Kiangte; the spellings Pachuau and Khiangte are those of the site's index. It is not a full list: Shakespear said a complete list could not be made, and gave only the Lushei families in full.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura

  Listed as: Any Mizo (Lushai) tribes

  In Assam the entry is in the list for the autonomous hill districts only. Tripura's entry is 'Lushai'.

Some related peoples have entries of their own: Manipur lists the Hmar, Paite and Ralte by name, and Mizoram the Hmar and Paite. The compilation used may not show amendments made between 2022 and 2024.

Checked on 2026-11-06 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Shakespear (1912) used Lushei for the clan and Lushai for all the clans under the Thangur chiefs; Mizo became the general name later, and in 1954 the Lushai Hills District was renamed the Mizo District. Shakespear held that Lushei, like the other clan names, comes from an ancestor's name, and he rejected a derivation from lu, 'head', and shei, 'long'. The Lushei chiefs all claimed descent from Thangura, who, Shakespear estimated, lived early in the eighteenth century, and whose first village is said to have been at Tlangkua, north of Falam; accounts of Thangura's own birth differ between Lushei, Paihte and Thado tellers. In Lushai tradition all the clans came out of the earth at a place called Chhinglung.

History

From Thangura sprang six lines of chiefs, the Rokum, Zadeng, Thangluah, Pallian, Rivung and Sailo. Moving west from the hills of present Myanmar, they absorbed the small communities of blood relations they found in the hills of present Mizoram, which became their subjects, while some of those communities moved north and west into Manipur, Cachar, Sylhet and Tripura (Shakespear, pp. 3-6). The Sailo, descended from Sailova, a great-grandson of Thangura, came to the front last and by the end of the nineteenth century held nearly the whole of the Lushai Hills. The British occupied Lungleh in 1889, and the hills were brought under one administration in the 1890s. Lt.-Col. J. Shakespear, an officer there, wrote The Lushei Kuki Clans (1912). Mizoram became a Union Territory on 21 January 1972 and a state on 20 February 1987.

Faith and Worship

Shakespear recorded that practically all the Lushai-Kuki peoples believed in Pathian, the creator of everything and a kindly being with little concern for men; far more important in daily life were the huai, spirits of streams, hills and forests to whom illness and misfortune were laid, and the puithiam, the priest, knew which sacrifice would appease them. Each family kept its own household sacrifice, the sakhua. The dead went to Mi-thi-khua, and beyond the Pial river lay Pial-ral, open to those who had won the title of Thangchhuah. Christianity spread from the 1890s; about 87 per cent of Mizoram's people are Christian, mostly Presbyterian and Baptist, and the Presbyterian Church grew from the work of the Welsh missionary D. E. Jones from 1894.

Customs

Shakespear describes three crop festivals, the kut. Chapchar kut, the most important and never omitted, is held after the jhum fields are burnt, about the time of sowing, and lasts three or four days, with feasting and the chai dance of the young men and girls; mim kut is held when the maize ripens; pawl kut at the harvest. A man won the title of Thangchhuah, with its honours in this life and the next, by giving a series of feasts in a fixed order. The marriage price is shared among the bride's relatives in set portions.

Festivals

Stories and Legends