You scroll through a reel of Aizawl at dusk. The camera pans across the ridge. Terraced houses cling to the slope, holding on the way our houses do because our land is nearly vertical and there is nowhere else for them to sit. The light is soft. The audio is Japanese, likely a scrap of dialogue pulled from a series or a film and laid over the frame. It is not translating anything; it has no connection to what you are looking at. It is there because it sounds like somewhere else, and that is what aesthetic means now.
I have been thinking about that reel for weeks and about the comments under it. Most of them are from Mizos. Most are proud – feels like Kyoto, little Japan of India, hard to believe this is India. And I have been trying to name precisely what is wrong with the fact that we are the ones cheering.
A recent essay on this platform traced how counterculture and marginalized aesthetics only become palatable once dominant groups appropriate, sanitize or rebrand them. That essay was writing about punk, about Gandhi’s ascetic performance, about the Mary Kom yellowface. I want to extend the argument in a direction the writer only gestures toward – what happens when the aesthetic being consumed is not a jacket or a film but a land, a festival, a woman in puan (traditional Mizo wrap) at Chapchar Kut and the consumers arrive by the trainload.
The friend who stopped being interesting
A friend told me a story recently. She was at her hostel in a mainland university, and a non-Northeast girl came up to her, bright and curious, and asked where she was from. Meghalaya, my friend said. The girl became warm, generous, full of questions. They chatted for a while. Then at dinner, in a group, someone mentioned in passing that Meghalaya is a state in India, the girl went quiet. She stopped speaking to my friend. Over the course of the evening she drifted away, and by the next day she had forgotten my friend existed.
I keep returning to that story because it captures the machinery so cleanly. My friend was interesting when she was foreign. She became invisible the moment she was recategorized as Indian. Nothing about her had changed. What changed was the girl’s calculation of what my friend was worth to her – as an exotic acquaintance, potentially high; as a fellow citizen from a place she considered peripheral, nothing. That transaction is what governs how mainland India encounters the Northeast now and it is what governs the shape of the tourism arriving in Mizoram.
Little Switzerland, Little Japan, Little Anywhere-But-Here
The comparisons come constantly. Little Switzerland. Little Japan. Just like Korea. The whole vocabulary is diminutive. Not Switzerland. Little Switzerland. The mainland viewer is not permitted to see Mizoram as itself. They can only see it as a pocket substitute for somewhere they would rather be, somewhere they cannot afford to fly to. The land is granted value only through comparison and only as a smaller, cheaper, more accessible version of an actual destination.
What this does is protect the viewer from having to revise their mental map. Mizoram is allowed to be beautiful only if that beauty is imported. The moment the beauty is claimed as Indian and Mizo, on its own terms, the frame collapses. That is why you see the second move so often – the pivot to “see, this is India too, not a foreign land.” When someone points out that Aizawl does not honk, that Mizos queue, that the streets are clean, the same voice that a moment ago called it Little Switzerland now insists that this is India, this is us. Both moves are doing the same work. Both are refusing to let Mizoram be Indian and orderly at the same time, because that would force a reckoning with why the places the viewer considers the real India are neither.
The railway reaching Aizawl has been described in the national press as a milestone of connectivity. It is. It is also a distribution system for this gaze at scale. When I first heard the trains were coming, my thought was not about goods or jobs. It was about the tourists. How were we going to handle them, not in the logistical sense. In the sense of what they would do when they arrived believing they had earned access to a curiosity and what we would feel obliged to give them.
At festivals across the Northeast now, videos are circulating of men, tourists from the mainland, grabbing women in traditional attire to pose for photographs. Sometimes the woman is pulled by the arm. Sometimes …