In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.

So far, Christianity in Mizoram has been understood as having a specific birthdate: 11 January 1894, the day two Christian missionaries from London carried the world religion - along with technologies of writing, education, and print media - into the foothills. Despite the centrality of forest animals and spirits to everyday life in the past, the roles of forest-dwellers in this story have drawn little more than a cursory glance in historical writings. This chapter paints a different picture. The story of the Christianization can be seen afresh by paying attention to both continuity and change in older human relationships with the forest as well as by taking seriously both vernacular sources and the environmental knowledge of uplanders. Ecological transformations and catastrophic collapses in animal populations attended the arrival of the colonial state in the late nineteenth century, alongside the mass ‘vermin’ eradication schemes of the early 1900s. The changes wrought during this period altered the most historically significant of human relationships in the Lushai Hills - those with other animals, plants, and non-human beings. In this complicated ecosystem, these shifts both shaped and mirrored changes in upland society towards modern institutions: a cash economy, state rule, missionary and state medicine, and, most importantly, the near total conversion of the human population to Christianity from the early to mid-twentieth century. It was through the actions and reactions of specific forest species, and through changing human relations with them, that Christian missionaries first become relevant to upland people.

In the last decade, the field of sensory history has made great strides in advancing understandings of the historical and cultural articulations of human ways of knowing. While this body of scholarship has been helpful in broadening our understanding of complex histories infused by the human senses, it nonetheless treats the continents with an uneven hand, largely ignoring the non-Western world. A preliminary ‘history through photographs’, this chapter mobilizes historical sources only recently located and digitally preserved in Mizoram to explore how upland encounters with Christianity were also encounters of the senses. The chapter is organized into six related sections of human knowing: hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the upland harhna (or ‘awakening’). By including a sixth ‘sense’ - the non-biological but still sensory-charged world of the historical upland harhna - we can attempt to approach the earliest Christians on their own terms, remaining attentive both to the diversity of sense broadly defined and to the potential hamfistedness of traditional Western models applied without due reflexivity to sensory cultures in other world regions. Paying special attention to the human senses in zo ram reveals a thicker and more highland-specific understanding of how Christianity in the Lushai Hills became a specifically and overwhelmingly Lushai Hills Christianity.

In the Lushai Hills, colonialism provided the infrastructure for the circulation of violence and disease that helped drive upland populations towards its own institutions. An overlooked age of warfare underwrote the destitution, poverty, dislocation, and sickness that invading colonial agents misrecognized as primitivism but that was, in fact, the results of their own cataclysmic disturbances. A focus on profound violence and disruption - rather than the celebration of continuity, cross-cultural interaction, and cultural resilience that often characterizes Indigenous-centred studies of colonial encounter - demonstrates that highlanders had to adapt and reinvent themselves within a particular colonial situation and its imposed constraints: brutality, heartache, disease, forced labour, sexual violence, hunger, and loss. At the same time, Mizos developed creative responses to, and confidently articulated critiques of, their invaders - forces that often found themselves dependent on upland know-how, hospitality, and labour. Far from passive victims, Mizos resisted colonialism and sought out ways to moderate its most profound effects. They adopted new trade goods not only to make their lives easier but also (as with the adoption of colourful synthetic materials for headdresses and jewellery) to make everyday life more beautiful amid the bleakness of fear, dispossession, and conflict.

This chapter offers a different take on the standard teleological story of Christianization in the Lushai Hills by focusing on what the missionaries themselves deemed an utter failure: their first decade of mission work. It views the earliest foreign missionaries to the Lushai Hills as uplanders did: first, as ‘sap vakvai’ - strange and insignificant wanderers; and, later, as ‘zosap’ - usable and incorporable newcomers, asking not what foreign missionaries wanted from highland people, but what highland people wanted from missionaries. The weakness and vulnerabilities of foreign missionaries opened up space for a first generation of young people with sensibilities spanning the Lushai Hills District and the globe. Upland populations became interested in Christianity - a new yet combinable spiritual power - as well as the knowledge dispensed on the mission compound because they were completely and inherently involved in its interpretation and dissemination. Everyday technologies, the studies and movements of students, regional meetings of nascent Christian groups, and ‘celebrations’ of empire began synchronizing time and both connecting and circumscribing space, all with profoundly far-reaching and unpredictable effects. Maps, schools, and the harmonization of space and time would help spark ideas about a wider, more integrated ‘Mizo’ identity. Children, adolescents, and youth were not only critical partners but also often operated in networks completely unmediated by the white missionaries, in channels of circulations that generated important redefinitions of space, time, and ethnicity in the uplands.