Under processes of modernity, the imagination of the ‘territorially bound community’ and its affiliation to the ‘state’ has been the dominant form of lived and imagined community. This predominance of the state in the cultural imagination of the nation has however been critiqued by scholars like Arjun Appadurai, emphasizing the effects of globalizing processes of capital and mobility. Despite such challenges to its legitimacy, the state today continues to be a dominant form of societal consciousness that binds the people living within its territorial limits. Scholars like Partha Chatterjee have however emphasized on focusing on what is ‘within’ the nation in order to understand communities and political formations in the contemporary age. This article however argues that community formation is not necessarily affiliated to the state but rather to mechanisms of meaning-making and their cultural reproduction. Although these mechanisms are primarily attached to the state, such mechanisms especially in the case of subaltern communities takes place outside the direct realm/intervention of the state. Taking que from James Scott’s conception of ‘Zomia’ - the highland massif that traverses across the borders of several south and southeast Asian nation-states – as a site of contestation between states and community formations, this article traces factors of community formation among the Zo people, otherwise referred to as Mizo-Zomi-Kuki-Chin along the Indo-Burma border. As such, this article traces the formation of community and the role played by the state as a mechanism in two distinct phases – the initial dominance of ‘state’ as an institution in determining the sedimentation of particular identities, and the later pluralism of processes that determine community formation.
