The different sub-groups of the hill people shared many notions about earthly existence and life after death. We can speak of this cluster of shared notions – for which they did not need a single term – as the hill religion. We have only very limited visual material to explore and illuminate religious ideas and practices prior to colonial rule – and even less to explain the hill people's remarkable openness to new ideas and practices. Their ready acceptance of Christian ideas was the major cultural transformation of the colonial period (1891–1947), the focus of this chapter.

The earliest Europeans who contacted the hill people were baffled by their religion and often doubted that they actually had one. In 1798, Francis Buchanan questioned six individuals and concluded: ‘They have no writing, nor Priests: nor could I discover, that they had any belief in a God, nor in a state of future existence’. Meeting them again and probing further, he learned that,

They expressed their ‘ideas of a future state’ in rituals, stories, dance and songs but rarely visualized them in forms that are readily accessible today. Visual representations of their religious activity do not become available until the 1870s. Figures 4.1–4.3 show invading British troops posing in front of an elaborate shrine in northern Mizoram and closeups of the shrine and the ‘prayer house’ behind it.