The Lushais are a fine intelligent tribe of Mongoloid hillmen inhabiting parts of the wild forest-covered mountainous region forming the watershed between India and Upper Burma.
Their ancestral home would appear to have been somewhere in the neighbour- hood of S.E. Tibet and Western China, whence, by slow degrees through the centuries, they have pressed southward and westward to their present habitat. Their speech belongs to the Assam-Burma branch of the Tibeto-Burmese family of languages.
Until the annexation of their country by the Indian Government in 1890 they were only known to the outside world as a race of daring headhunters, whose periodic raids were a source of terror to their more peaceable neighbours in the lower hills and plains of Eastern Bengal and Assam.
With the suppression of headhunting and the establishment of law and order by the British Raj-followed almost immediately by the arrival of the late Rev. FW. Savidge and myself as Christian missionaries-a new day dawned upon the Lushai Hills, giving to the hardy inhabitants just the opportunity they needed to develop their latent powers of heart and mind hitherto held in check by the deadening weight of their animistic beliefs and fears. We have had the privilege of watching from the beginning the wonderful change, which-thanks to a sympathetic and wise government and the God-blessed labours of many missionaries both Welsh and English-has gradually through the years trans- formed this once wholly illiterate and semi-savage tribe into one of the most loyal, literate and progressive communities in the Assam province. When we first came into contact with the Lushais at Kassalong in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in 1892, and settled amongst them at Fort Aijal in January, 1894, the tribe had no written language. Years before in 1874 Lt. Col. (then Capt) Thomas Herbert Lewin, Deputy Commissioner of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, had published his 'Progressive Colloquial Exercises in the Lushai Dialect', and in 1884 Assistant Surgeon Brojo Nath Shaha, Civil Medical Officer of the same district, had published his 'Grammar of the Lushai Language', both of which we found extremely useful in our earliest efforts to learn words and phrases. Neither of these works, however, pretended to suggest a mode of literation which could be taught to the Lushais. It therefore fell to our lot to reduce the language to writing in such a way that our system could be readily adopted by the people themselves. For this purpose we chose the simple Roman script, with a phonetic form of spelling based on the well-known Hunterian system, and this, with a few slight emendations adopted since, is still used throughout the tribe with eminently satisfactory results.
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