New Delhi, Sept. 30 -- The Boy from Zarkawt, and the Making of Mizoram is ostensibly a political biography. In reality, it is something more ambitious: an account of how a society moved from insurgency and alienation to peace, statehood and democratic politics and how one of its most consequential political figures navigated that transformation.

That makes Lal Thanhawla an unusually apt subject. His life traversed almost every decisive phase of modern Mizo politics: the emergence of Mizo political consciousness, the Mizo National Front's insurgency, the Indian state's counter-insurgency campaign, the transition to electoral politics, the 1986 Peace Accord, statehood and the subsequent consolidation of democracy.

Hazarika's central propo...