RELIGIOUS HYBRIDITY: THE MIZO CONTEXT

This paper is an attempt to analyze how Christianity has ventured into the realm of traditional culture and customs of the Mizos, an indigenous tribe of the North-East region of India. Missionaries from the west introduced Christianity to this tribe and had a great impact on the lives and indigenous culture of the Mizo people. However, the Christian missionaries did not find complete assimilation in the traditional culture. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony refers to the complex means by which those who are ruled over come to accept and feel they have a stake in the powers that are exploiting and controlling them. The ‘subaltern’ can resist and challenge the hegemonic culture of the rulers and assert themselves. Moreover, mimicry can be threatening and may perpetrate itself as an unconscious strategy of resistance. The Western theology advocated binarism and inculcated in the mind of the natives a dichotomy between Christianity and heathenism. The confluence of modernity and traditional values, western culture and indigenous culture, can be attributed to a religion which is more or less hybrid in nature in the sense that it has accommodated both the western values and the traditional values both in its belief system and outward forms of worship.