Examining Ethnicity: The Context of Mizos in Bengaluru

The continued salience of ethnic consciousness even in an urban setting evokes keen interest among the scholars. Why is that despite being located in an apparently urban context, ethnic identity continues to be dominant is the question that has not been adequately theorised. This article seeks to engage with this question. The excessive dependence on the primordialist or instrumentalist approach to explain the salience of ethnicity has increasingly been questioned. Neither approach alone would enable us to have a proper grasp of the issue of ethnic identity. This article makes use of the oppositional approach which seeks to combine both these approaches and explain the salience of ethnic identity in a more satisfactory manner. The fieldwork has been conducted among the Mizos living in Bengaluru