Mautam is the synchronised flowering of Melocanna baccifera — a simultaneous, forest-wide event that happens roughly once every forty-eight years. The bamboo fruits, sets seed, and dies. The seed feeds an exploding rat population. The rats, when the seed is gone, move into the rice.
The last full cycle began in 2006. The one before it, in 1959, killed an estimated fifteen thousand people. The delhi government’s response to the 1959 famine — dismissive, slow, officially indifferent — is the political fact that produced the mizo national front, the twenty-year insurgency that followed, and most of what mizoram became in the second half of the twentieth century.
The current flowering event — thingtam — is underway across parts of the state in 2024–25. The state is readier than it was in 1959. The research is thinner than it should be.