The Hmar people of the Barak valley: a community between borders and dialects
The Hmar community, scattered across three states and several dialects, is scripting a common literary language.
The Hmar people live across Manipur, Mizoram and Assam — a community divided by state borders but joined by a language that is itself in the making.
Writers and scholars are now standardising a written Hmar, drawing the dialects together for school textbooks and a literary revival.
The project is cultural first, political only by implication: ‘If our language survives, so do we.’