Weretigers, sky maidens and bird-beaked witches are some of the fantastical beings that come to life in Cherrie Lalnunziri Chhangte’s Mizo Myths, whose second edition was published by Blaft in July, with nine stories added to the original set of six.
The first edition, published in 2016, was born of her post-doctoral research at Stanford University, a comparative study of Native American and Mizo narratives. “I realised there was a lot of research on the Native American side, but not a whole lot of material on the Mizo aspect, especially in English,” says Chhangte.
So, with time on her hands amid the pandemic, after a recent shift to the US with her husband and two children, she set about expanding the collection, to better flesh out the worlds that her culture’s myths contain.
Don’t expect too many happy endings. Lovers die, sky maidens are kidnapped, a child-eating witch lurks in a forest. But all of it offers a rare window into how an ancient people view themselves, their world, and their place in it.
In her attempts to seek out and translate these tales from her own culture’s oral tradition, she owes a great debt, Chhangte says, to the scholars that came before her, and preserved tales that were fading from memory. Some created dictionaries that helped too. Elders in the community orally related the tales as they remembered them, and helped translate terms from dialects such as Pawi.
“A lot of the chants, songs and spells are in Pawi, which was once far more widespread,” says Chhangte.
Expect versions of Thumbelina and the selkie story, but with a lot more layers to each plot. Here are glimpses, in five tales.
How the bulbul got its red vent
This is a tragic fable of love, loss and death, and Chhangte’s favourite story, she says.
It begins with a meaningless joke. A stranger from the plains arrives at the door of a man named Zawlpala, and asks who his beautiful wife Tualvungi is. Oh, that’s just my sister, he says in jest. The stranger says he would like to marry her, and asks Zawlpala to name his bride price. Not knowing that the man is incredibly rich, the young husband reels off an exorbitant list, in a silly extension to his joke. When the man pays up, he loses his wife.
Bereft, Zawlpala visits Tualvungi soon after. At which point, the new husband slips poison into his meal of roasted yam and rice beer. Zawlpala returns home and dies, and now his fellow villagers are distraught. The beloved wife must be told, they say. So they turn to some of the local wildlife for help, and potential messengers are auditioned.
The crab turns out to be rather useless; his cry is not decipherable. The angry villagers stamp on him in anger, causing the crab to walk sideways from then on. The crow and red-vented bulbul turn out to have indecipherable calls, so the people attack them with black dye and a pointed fence, giving them their colouring.
Tualvungi, meanwhile, escapes her new husband and returns home, to find Zawlpala in his grave. She is so distressed that she asks an old village woman at the site to kill her, so she may join him. This shared grave, sometimes described as a twin grave, can be seen in the village of Phulpui, about halfway between Aizawl and Thenzawl, the tale concludes.
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An angel for a wife
Sichangneii is a beautiful sky-dwelling maiden with enormous feathered wings. On one of her visits to Earth, she is kidnapped by a widower, who strips her of her feathers so she cannot return home, and then makes her his wife. The story has much in common, so far, with the Scottish folk tale about a fisherman who steals the skin of a selkie (or seal woman), but in this Mizo myth, that is just the beginning of a long saga involving generations of a family, a quest for revenge, and magic.
The ultimate hero is Sichangneii’s grandson, Fahrahtea, who loses his entire family to a Chawmnu, a big, burly, hairy, female demon. The young orphan believes his mother is still being held captive, so he travels the land, cleverly gaining boons from different communities. This helps him eventually outwit the Chawmnu, and reunite with his mother.
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A witch meets a violent end
The Hmuichukchuriduninu is an evil, old, bird-beaked, child-eating witch of the forest, bearing echoes of both traditional tellings of Hansel and Gretel and the Russian folk villain Baba Yaga. In this tale, she leads two girls down the wrong forest path and to her home, pretending to be their aunt. She then kills one, snacks on her brains, drinks her blood and devours her flesh. And dreams of having the other one for dinner. But the second girl manages to escape and returns with her family, who set up a complicated and brutal trap, at the end of which Hmuichukchuriduninu is torn to pieces by a ferocious dog, an angry goat, a wild boar and an enraged ox.
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A trick to trap a Thumbelina
The Story of Kungawrhi has elements in common with Thumbelina. In the Mizo tale, a keimi, a human who can turn into a tiger, falls in love with a beautiful young woman born from the thumb of her father, the village chief.
The weretiger sees the girl, decides he must marry her, then uses witchcraft to first make her ill, then heal her, thus convincing her that she can only be healthy be his side.
She is taken in by his ruse, and they marry. But when her father discovers his true identity, he sends out a rescue mission in the form of two brothers (sort of heroes-for-hire). With some help from the gods, they use seeds of fire, seeds of water, seeds of thorns and seeds of rocks to defeat the weretiger.
It doesn’t end there. One of the two brothers now has his heart set on marrying the beautiful Kungawrhi, and betrays his brother to the Khuavang (which are goblin-like forest beings), in order to flee with her. The betrayed brother turns out to be the true hero, valiantly fighting off the Khuavang, returning home to reveal his brother’s evil plot, and ending up with a grateful (if traumatised) Kungawrhi for his wife.
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A good disguise for a goblin
The Phungpuinu is an extremely ugly and rude sort of female goblin. In the story of Tumchhingi and Raldawna, she mistakes the beautiful shadow of Tumchhingi for her own, tricks her into exchanging clothes with her, then swallows the beautiful woman whole.
When the woman’s husband returns to the banyan tree where she had been waiting for him, he and the Phungpuinu engage in an exchange quite like that between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf masquerading as her grandmother.
“Tumchhingi, why do your eyes look so stretched?” Raldawna asks.
“I kept straining them, looking in the distance, waiting to see you return,” she says.
“And why are your fingers so long and pointy, like talons?” he asks.
“From the moment you left, I kept pointing in the direction you went,” she says.
The story continues thus, with Raldawna eventually finding his beloved in a bottle gourd that grew from a seed belched up by the Phungpuinu. The women must now fight to the death until Tumchhingi cuts the Phungpuinu in two (with a little trickery and help from Raldawna), and is finally reunited with her husband.
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