Tribal Science: Imperial Violence and Indigenous Experimentation in Colonial Northeast India, 1890–1910

The idea that historical tribal populations conducted science in meaningful, everyday ways does not easily fit into the traditional categories that structure the historiography of imperialism in Northeast India: those who participated in science and those who did not. This article unveils the scientific curiosities of ordinary people in India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a world of ‘tribal science’ – an era of bubbly innovation that flourished despite, and in part because of, the violence, anxieties, and constraints that colonial invasion unleashed across Mizo lands. Drawing upon fragmentary and material sources, we show how Mizo vernacular scientific practice was the cumulative product of regular people tinkering away from the gaze of the colonial state and outside the hierarchical spaces patrolled by credentialed scientists or medical missionaries. In the shadows of state violence, ordinary individuals were prepared to test and peer-review the results of a prayer as much as a new tree-bark tincture, while women’s long-overlooked ‘plant-based knowledge’ involved the careful management of microbial life in fermented cuisine, and organic forms of applied mathematics and geometry in textile production. Their stories show how, far from mutually exclusive, the histories of Northeast Indian tribal peoples and the histories of scientific practice have long been entwined.