Off With Their Heads
An age-old Mizo practice of headhunting is recreated in a faraway village.
Men dressed as traditional Mizo warriors place artificial severed heads next to Sahlam tree.
A group of bare-footed men with swords and country-made guns walk up the hill with bulging cotton sling bags, firing their guns and chanting as they do. A little later, a group of women in traditional wraparounds chant a welcome and offer each of them liquid tobacco.
Once at the square, shaded by a large tree, the men take out seven artificial human heads, made of wood, from their bags and place them near a tree. Shortly after, several of them climb the tree as those on the ground hand them the severed heads, which they hang in a neat row on an overhanging branch, using pieces of vine.
The ceremony is a recreation of the traditional Mizo practice of lu lak or headhunting, which was a part of Chawngtlai village’s declaration of itself as a “Mizo Historical Village” and a celebration of their ancestral chief Nikuala’s 1891 victory over invading tribes from the east (what is now Myanmar), a battle that marked the historic end of the Mizos’ headhunting practice.
The spectacle was organised by Chawngtlai villagers who now live in Aizawl, including students and professionals, and are connected with their kin and neighbours through a “Chawngtlai group” on Facebook. They came home for the weekend on motorcycles and cars, to make a name for their village as one that lives in today but treasures yesterday.
Back in the 1890s, the British administration took strong exception to Nikuala’s act of hanging seven of the enemies’ heads on a tree. The chief was imprisoned for life and the village was burned down as punishment, an event described by British officers Bertram S Carey and HN Tuck in their 1895 book The Chin Hills. It was, in fact, the Mizo tribes’ warlike nature and frequent raids mounted on various colonial outposts led British military expeditions, and later Christian missionaries, into the hills.
Little of that life survives in the village now. The residents here are mostly farmers, many owning profitable fields of passion fruit and grapes. Many others own heavy machinery and hire laborers, who work in the small quarries dotting the hills nearby. Still others are government employees.
There are at least 400 houses in the village, many of them built of wood with tin roofs, several built from concrete. One of the several churches that dot the village boasts of Mizoram’s tallest monument to Christianity, a 24-foot menhir carved from a single rock and erected in 1994 to mark the 100th year of the faith’s entry into the Mizo hills.
In Chawngtlai, village leaders explain why the tree from which the severed enemy heads hung (19 heads hung from it at one time, and the tree still stands in the middle of the village today) was specifically called Sahlam — Sah means “to strike with a sword” and lam means “dance” — instead of Milukhai — literally, “a place from where human heads hang” – as such a place is known in some places within Mizoram.
“In our village, the threat of invading tribes from the east was ever-present as we lived in the region that stood close to the border between Mizo tribes and other tribes from the east,” says C Laltlangmawia, a local historian, adding the tree is, in fact, the only one that has been preserved through the years.
“The place, at least in our village, was specifically called Sahlam because every boy old enough to hold a sword was made to strike the hanging heads with a sword so they were acclimatised early on to warfare. It is said the struck heads spun as if they were dancing,” he says.
Headhunting was a practice among various communities through what is now north east India, such as Mizos, Nagas and some tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, as well as among various south-east Asian communities and even some in Europe and the Americas (such as native Americans, who took the scalps of enemy tribes as well as non-native settlers).
Mizo writer F Lalremsiama writes that the practice was intertwined with the Mizos’ belief in an afterlife. In the old Mizo belief system, there were two places a person could go to after he died. One is called pialral (paradise), reserved for those who attained a special status through either material wealth or exceptional hunting skills.
The rest had to go to mitthi khua (village of the dead) and live there pretty much as how they lived in this life, complete with the hardships, toil and worries of everyday life. The taking of heads, however, would offer them comfort at mitthi khua, as those whose heads they took would be their slaves there.
Warriors would also, during wars and raids, take heads for similar reasons. As a warrior cut off his victim’s head, he would shout out his name thrice. This, it was believed, would familiarise the victim with his killer even after moving on into the afterlife, where he would wait for his killer to arrive, and serve him as a slave.
There were also other reasons prompted by frequent wars among the various Mizo villages at the time, for Mizo tribes fought not only non-Mizo tribes, but among themselves as well — a warrior who brought home the heads of enemies was considered a great fighter and entire villages and communities considered him someone who could protect them. Such was the comforting power of brave warriors at the time that Chawngtlai village still claims a role in the material tradition of Mizos.
According to local leader and historian PC Zoramsiama, Nikuala’s wife Lalngurvungi made a tradition of presenting the village warriors a black shawl with red-and-white stripes to mark them as men who would not retreat in the face of enemy attacks from the east. “The shawl is called tawlhloh puan (literally, a weave that marks the end of retreat) because it signifies the battle that marked victory for the Mizos,” says Zoramsiama.
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