OUR GENERIC NAME IS ZOMI
‘For convenience and also in line with my conviction, I have done away with the obnoxious given names.. and adopted the term Zo and related terms like Zogam and Zoram for our people and land. I want to express my feeling at the outset that we have now come to a stage where it is no longer necessary to make elaborate efforts to prove the ethnic homogeneity of the Zos. Our task today is to make an earnest effort to see that the oneness with which God has created us is manifested in a visible form. While this requires a number of things, our main goal is to seek an acceptable nomenclature as our common name…
In the ignorance of the existence of a comprehensive common name to identify the Zos, the earlier writers used various names such as Chin,Kuki,Lushai,etc…Naturally, therefore,the Britishers, the common rulers of the two nations [Indian and Burma] adopted the given names.Thus were they known until the early 1870s when the third one, Lushai, was added to confound the confusion.
..At that state the Zos were still in political wilderness. Political consciousness with a wider application was nowhere to be seen. That consciousness, however, grew as the Zos came under the influence of modern civilization.The first of this sign came when the Mizo Union, on the eve of Indian independence, submitted a memorandum to His majesty's Government,Govt.of India and its constituent Assembly through the Advisory Sub-Committee on the 26th April 1947 in which the party deplored the existing condition in which it found itself subjected to in strong terms:
‘It is a great injustice that the Mizos used inclusively for all Zo people having one and the same culture,speaking one and the same language,professing one and the same religion,and knit together common customs and traditions should have been called and known by different names,and throws among different people with their homeland sliced out and given to others’.
Since then the unity and integrity of the Zos and that of their homeland remains the dream of every patriot and issues on which every struggle, peaceful or otherwise, base their ideologies. And today, more than ever before, the need for the realization of that dream is greater and pressure harder..
The Zos have a number of traits peculiar and unique to themselves. One of such traits relevant is the peculiar sense of great importance we attach to names. Good and important as it may, it leads us to almost insurmountable problems. While others in our neighbourhood accepted the given names and [were] happy for [the] unity afforded by them, the Zos would not. We would rather choose to suffer without one of our own.
What, then, is to be the name that could cover and would be acceptable to all clans of the Zos whose ethnic homogeneity has been proved beyond doubt? Any attempt to pin the numerous clans down under one nomenclature eluded solution and continues to be so even today. It does not mean, however, a solution is an impossibility. In fact the people seem to have found the right term on which to base and build, and which might be considered and accepted as the common nomenclature, which also appears to be more ancient and more original than any other term current at present - Zo.
The first mention of that term for the so-called Kuki-Chin people as Jo race is found in the writings of the Rev. Father Vincentious Sangermano, whose book,The Burmese Empire, was published in Rome in 1835…Another early mention of the term, the first on the side of the Lushai Hills, comes from the writings of Lt.Col.T.H.Lewin [who became the first] to know that the generic name of the whole nation is Dzo...the fact remains that Zo was the only term used extensively both, in what now Dr.Vumson Suantak, in his recent book, calls Eastern and Western Zoram.
The main problem now is on the question of acceptance and use of the term by all concerned uniformly. For some reasons, rightly or wrongly, the need seem to have been felt in the past to affix the word mi,meaning man or people, to the generic name Zo either as a suffix, as in Zomi which is a form of common speech, or as a prefix as in Mizo which is a poetic form ,both meaning exactly the same, Zo people or People of Zo. And while the people of the Chin Hills adopted the former, those in the Lushai Hills adopted the latter from which their Hills later received its name as "Mizoram"...
If we accept "Zo" as the generic name of the so-called Kuki-Chin-Lushai people, then the problem connected with the affix 'mi' (to "Zo") either as a prefix or a suffix will no longer stand as an obstacle on the way to our adoption of a common nomenclature. It was the misrendering of the word "Zo" as hill or highland which necessitated the use of the affix "mi" to make the inhabitants of a hill country, Highlanders.
We are "Zos" and the land we inhabit is Zoram or Zogam. It is God's will that we should be United as He has created us to do so.The exclamation of the Psalmist should ring in our ears as he sings:
“Behold,how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity". (Psalms 133:1)’
Rev. Dr. Mangkhosat Kipgen, was former principal, Eastern Theological College, Jorhat and author of the widely read book "Christianity and Mizo Culture: The Encounter between Christianity and Zo Culture in Mizoram" (1997). He was a Zo visionary who strongly advocated for Zo oneness in his time. Rev. Kipgen was one of the few Zo theologians who specialized in contextual theology. He was a man who practiced what he taught, and was widely known for his peacebuilding initiatives. He passed away on October 14, 2020, in Lamka.
(The following text is reproduced from the book Prism of the Zo People, published by the 60th Zomi Nam Ni Celebration Committee in 2008)
