Abstract

 Famine (locally known as Tam in Mizoram, India) recurs due to bamboo flowering in about every thirty (Thing-Tam) and fifty years (Mau-Tam).

This paper focuses on the Mau-Tam of 1959-60 (also known as the Mizo Famine of 1959-60). The paper attempts to investigate the memories of  this particular Mizo Famine engraved in the Mizo psyche as a significant event, and a direct ‘trigger’ (Holt, 2022) for the Mizo insurgency. The paper highlights the particular structural failures concurrent to the nation-building efforts that led to the alienation and subsequent separatist conflicts in the region. It notes the State’s formal apathetic response to the famine through inadequate distribution of relief and counter-insurgency strategies, including the unarchived & denied air bombing on Aizawl by the Indian Air Force in 1966. The paper aims to document the phenomenological experiences of the survivors of the bombing and its lacerating memories. It finally goes on to argue that the myopic view of postcolonial Indian bureaucratic machinery and inutile welfare initiatives catalytically acted in the Mizo civil war against the Indian State. Subsequently, it fueled the Mizo political consciousness towards secession from the Union of India to construct a sovereign Nation-State.