Cloverdale resident Kyle Jackson has written a new history book with a “decolonial lens.”
Jackson, a Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) historian, has rewritten some of the history from Northeast India in his new book, The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj: Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890–1920.
“At its heart, the book showcases the urgency of decolonizing history in the region, and globally,” Jackson said in a press release from KPU. “It identifies a huge range of historical assumptions and categories of analysis—all received from the colonial era—and then sets out to challenge them, often in ways that end up turning them completely inside out.”
Thus, the book examines the history of the modern-day state of Mizoram, India, from a perspective that embraces decolonization.
To flip the official narrative on its ear, Jackson looked at alternative history records ranging from Mizo diaries, village-level sources, rare newspaper articles, and letters or certificates from private collections.
After sourcing these unique records, Jackson worked in collaboration with Mizo scholars and elders to digitize the items under the Endangered Archives Programme—an initiative funded by the British Library.
Told from local perspectives, The Mizo Discovery relates how the Indigenous peoples of the area interacted with the British Empire. It outlines the reasons why diverse groups of people in the Indo-Burmese borderlands definine themselves as Christian Mizos.
In one example Jackson writes about, he cites the disparaging title of “headhunters” as an illustration of how the British officials at the time, and thus subsequent historical texts, defined people from the area.
British soldiers in Northeast India removed skulls from villagers’ homes, grabbed heads from the skeletons of dead prisoners, stole from cemeteries, and “cut off the skulls of slain highland forces as part of a wider trade in human skulls in the racist field of colonial craniometry,” added Jackson.
“So, who was really doing the headhunting? Who was really doing the discovering?” Jackson asked. “The book argues that existing approaches to the history of empire in the region miss a fundamental question: How did upland populations discover and make sense of the British Raj (rule) and Christian missionaries, rather than vice versa?”
He cites the example of early British missionaries who felt they failed in their attempts to convert the local Indigenous population to Christianity. But, he explained, the locals were happy with the attempts. They saw it as “a win” as they collected glass bottles, umbrellas, and “hymns that made good beer-drinking songs,” among other reasons.
Jackson said his “decolonial approach” sets aside some of the metrics missionaries used to measure success, such as conversions and church growth.
“An era of missionary failure starts to look more like an era of highlander success, an era of Mizo selectivity in assessing foreign missionaries on their own terms.”
The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj: Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890–1920 is available from Cambridge University Press.