Dynamics of Violence in the North East: An Environmental Turn in the Mizo Uprising

War annihilates civilization and heralds a demolition of culture and human consciousness. Countless lives get stuck in this hell-hole of war and violence, unable to find an agency to escape the stagnation. North East India is often racked by multiple layers of conflict, which are visibly manifested in everyday life. The Mizo Uprising, or the Ram buai of the 1960s, is one of the faces of the multifaceted violence in the North East that witnessed an unprecedented assault on humanity. However, violence in the North East must be looked beyond surface-level manifestations in the form of “direct violence” to consider the broader aspects that remain below the waterline. The impact of war violence on the Environment has long remained unrecorded, rendering Nature the silent casualty of war. Malsawmi Jacob, whose novel Zorami: A Redemption Song addresses the trials and tribulations of her land during Ram buai, also touches upon the interconnection between genocide and ecocide through her poems. This article explores the ecological rhetoric of violence through Jacob’s poems. It examines how the twenty-year-long armed conflict in the serene Lushai hills vandalised human lives and profaned the ecological space.