By Bhogtoram Mawroh
Rice is one of the most important staple food crops in the world. Together with maize and wheat, it provides more than 50% of the world’s energy intake. And as such, there has been a great deal of debate regarding its place of origin and domestication, with both India and China laying claim to that title, with claims and counter-claims. However, what does not get much visibility in these debates is the contribution of indigenous peoples like the Khasi-Jaintia and Garo, who might have played a very important role in either the domestication or, most probably, the spread of the crop throughout the subcontinent. In fact, their part in the rice story can also reveal a lot of their own history much of which is not known because of the lack of written records or the availability of archaeological sites, which are still very few and far between.
Presently, there are two cultivated rice species: Oryza sativa, known as Asian rice, which again has two sub-species, Oryza sativa indica and Oryza sativa japonica; and Oryza glaberrima, also commonly known as African rice. The latter is said to have originated in West Africa around 3000 years ago, where it is still being grown. Oryza sativa, on the other hand, is accepted to be the oldest and economically the most important. In fact, it is replacing Oryza glaberrima in its areas of erstwhile dominance. When it comes to Oryza sativa itself, there are intensely competing claims regarding its place of birth. There are two competing theories: the single-origin theory, which suggests that Oryza sativa indica and Oryza sativa japonica were domesticated once from the wild rice Oryza rufipogon, and the multiple-origin theory, which suggests that they were domesticated separately in different parts of Asia. Even if both theories are correct, it raises the question – Who was first?
The China origin theory has been discussed by Briana L. Gross and Zhijun Zhao in their 2014 paper, ‘Archaeological and Genetic Insights into the Origins of Domesticated Rice’. According to them, domestication of Oryza sativa japonica happened around 8000 years ago in the Yangtze River valley of southern China. At the same time, there appears to have been an independent origin for the cultivation of ancestral indica or proto-indica rice taking place in the Ganges plains as well. But the plant was completely domesticated only when domesticated japonica arrived from China and hybridised with it about 4,000 years ago. This work was referred to by Ewen Callaway in his story ‘The Birth of Rice, published in Nature, the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. Biswajeet Thankur, Anju Saxena, and Inderbir Singh in their 2018 paper, ‘Paddy Cultivation during the Early Holocene: Evidence from Diatoms in Lahuradewa Lake Sediments, Ganga Plain, published in Current Science, which is India’s leading inter-disciplinary science journal, however, argued that based on the occurrence of diatoms (microorganisms that in land are found in rivers and lakes), the date of paddy domestication in the Gangetic valley is earlier than those recorded in China, i.e., around 9000 years ago. The debate regarding the antiquity of the antecedent aside, there is consensus that the present indica is a hybrid of the japonica with an already existing Indian, most probably semi-domesticated species. How did this hybridization happen? It is here that the story of the Garo and the Khasi-Jaintia becomes important.
On the 12th of January 2009, the Financial Express published a story ‘6,000-year-old species of rice discovered in Meghalaya’ in which they mentioned that the Meghalaya Mission for Indigenous Knowledge had found a 6,000-year-old traditional species of rice from the village of Sandolpara in Garo Hills. This particular village was the subject of Mira Nair’s film ‘Still, the Children Are Here’. It is interesting to note that North East India (where Meghalaya and the Garo Hills are located) lies at the transition between South, Southeast, and East Asia. Having received migrations from both directions, there is a high possibility that not just people but crops must also have passed through the region. Therefore, if the japonica arrived from China and hybridised with the Indian variety to produce the indica about 4000 years ago, as claimed by the China origin theory, the 6000-year-old rice from Sandolpara could represent the transition.
However, there are other possibilities as well. The wild relative of rice, Oryza rufipogon is widely distributed throughout South, Southeast, and East Asia. Could the rice found in Garo Hills be something that has been developed independently by the Garo, i.e., an indigenous independent invention? Or, depending on the migration history, did the Garos adopt it from a community that might have arrived in the region a little earlier? It is the last question that brings the Khasi-Jaintia into this story.
The Khasi-Jaintia people belong to the Austro-Asiatic linguistic family, which has been acknowledged to be one of the oldest groups in the subcontinent. The 2013 paper ‘Two thousand years of iron smelting in the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, North East India’ by Pawel Prokop and Ireneusz Suliga has suggested that, based on iron smelting, the Khasi-Jaintia must have inhabited the area known today as Meghalaya for at least the last 2000 years. At the end of the paper, they also mentioned that “the Khasi and Jaintia groups, belonging to the Austro-Asiatic language family, migrated from Southeast Asia and spread up to the lower Ganges around 3000 BC,” or 5000 years ago. These dates have been corroborated by other studies as well. The 2015 paper ‘A late Neolithic expansion of Y chromosomal haplogroup O2a1-M95 from east to west’ by Arun Kumar and his colleagues proposes that O2a1-M95 carrying people (which is distributed across the Austro-Asiatic speaking belt of East and South Asia, i.e., it is found among the Khasi-Jaintia as well) arrived in the North East during the late Neolithic period, around 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE, or 6000 and 4000 years ago. The latter is also the date when the Khasi-Jaintia and the Munda last shared a common ancestor. Herein lies the interesting part.
In her 2021 book, ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages’, Peggy Mohan describes Munda as one of the original people of the Gangetic Plain who were growing rice in the Lahurdewa area (Gangetic plains) for 7000 years. Then, around 4000 years ago, they came into contact with the Austro-Asiatic migrants who brought the japonica rice with them. This group then not only bred with the local Munda women (on the maternal side, Munda have 75.2% Indian ancestry, while on the paternal side, they have 60.56 Southeast Asian ancestry), but also combined the local rice with the one they brought, creating the now-indica rice. Peggy Mohan, however, did not think that the Austro-Asiatic migrants who mingled with the native Munda were the Khasi-Jaintia, but that they were an earlier group. However, genetic evidence from the 2015 paper by Arun Kumar and his colleagues hints at the strong possibility that the group could actually have been the Khasi-Jaintia, a group of whom, mostly men, travelled to the Gangetic plain and mingled with the local population, who are now called Munda, while at the same time creating the indica strain by mixing with the japonica rice they had brought from their original homeland. The date during which this happened, around 4000 years ago, matches the date when the domesticated japonica arrived from China and hybridised to create the indica variety (Briana L. Gross and Zhijun Zhao), the date when Khasi-Jaintia and Munda shared a common ancestry (Arun Kumar and his colleagues), and when Austro-Asiatic migrants came into contact with the inhabitants of the Gangetic plains who were growing rice (Peggy Mohan). Since the Garo, who belong to the Kokborok language group (which includes the Bodo and Tipra groups as well) of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family, were among the earliest group after the Khasi-Jaintia to have arrived in the North East, they would have brought their own rice or taken it from the people who were already there, i.e., the Khasi-Jaintia; thus, the 6000-year-old rice in Sandolpara.
All of this happened long before the arrival of the Indo-European people, who brought Sanskrit around 3500 years ago to the subcontinent and were the progenitors of the Vedic civilization, which included the development of Hinduism as an important religious ideology. In short, the history of the Khasi-Jaintia and the Garo told through rice is one of the oldest in the subcontinent. However, it is not a story that is often told or known, which is unfortunate considering what they did is what made possible the emergence of the subsequent Indic civilization, culminating in the modern nation-state of India today. Hopefully, more work will be done in the future so that we can learn more about this story, of which we are all the product of.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organization or institution)