By Erik de Maaker
I first came to Garo Hills some twenty-five years ago, when I was a PhD student. I lived for two years in a village in West Garo Hills, witnessing the intricate knowledge which farmers have of the natural environment they depend on. It made me aware of the tactility required to split and weave bamboo, of how recognizing the chirping, buzzing, trilling, and humming of insects announces changes in the weather, and of the powers located in boulders, deep river pools, and vested with animals seen and unseen. As I tried to gain an understanding of the complexities of Garo of matrilineal kin relations, I came to appreciate the orality of men and women who typically had had little or no formal schooling, but whose language was lyrical and sumptuous. Over the years, I have been able to continue to visit my adoptive family in Garo Hills, make new friends, and become acquainted with new places. This year, for the first time in all those years, I was able to join in celebrations for Christmas in East Garo Hills.
It is December 24th, and the rock band plays ‘Gloria in excelsis deo’ (‘Glory to God in the highest’) in the Rongjeng Baptist church. We have about one and a half hour to go before midnight. The hymn is all too familiar to me, as it is also a staple in my home country the Netherlands. But tonight, in Rongjeng, the rhythm is accelerated, forced by the pouncing beats of a drum set, and the piercing chords of several electric guitars. The hymn, in my memory slow, melodious but also a little boring, has become a rock song. It is followed by a sermon, and more singing of hymns accompanied by electric guitars. At midnight, we wish each other “Merry Christmas”, to then move out of the church onto its courtyard. There, we dance as a group to the quick rhythm of a drum, in a circular movement. Christmas in Rongjeng is fun.
“How do people celebrate Christmas in your country, I am asked?” Well, yes, some of us go to church. Yes, we do celebrate with close family and friends, but our Christmas celebrations do not include such large numbers of people as I saw in Rongjeng. And our Christmas meals do not have such a large variety of tasty dishes, featuring meats, fermented soybeans, and savoury vegetables from the swiddens. And no, we do not dance around the bonfire until way after midnight, sometimes even in a churning mass with hundreds of people, in which class, age and gender dissolve.
Celebrating Christmas in Garo Hills evidences how Garo Christianity is a tradition in its own right, reflecting what constitutes society, and what means it lives with. Social media, enabled by 5G network access, have come to shape a Garo-cyberspace, creating connections across Christmases celebrated in preceding years, linking locations far apart in Garo Hills and beyond. And yes, Garo Christmas also integrates with its global counterparts, as one of the many constituent parts of this global tradition.
Christmas celebrations require food, and among Garos, as for most of the other communities of upland North East India, that means a substantial amount of meat. Pooling money, households on Christmas day, early morning, share the meat of a pig they have jointly bought and cared for. Pork, with its thick layer of buttery fat right below the skin, is no doubt a preferred meat. Depending on the financial leeway, beef, chicken and fish will also be part of the menu. In one pre-Christmas celebration I attended, I counted a spread of no less than twelve different meat dishes. It could even have been sixteen. Cooked or fried, combined with fresh greens harvested from one’s own garden, or the subtle crops from the swiddens, the many meats had been turned in a wide variety of exuberant curries.
Food creates bondages. What we ingest could also have been eaten by one of our commensals. Food also excludes, and that notably holds for meat, which almost inevitably comes with strong cultural connotations attached. In the Netherlands, a small country in which animal husbandry is typically large-scale, industrial, unsustainable, and cruel in terms of animal welfare, abstinence from meat can be a statement to oppose such treatment of animals and resources. In South Asia, meat is similarly heavily culturally labelled. With the rejection of either beef or pork—or both—by the subcontinents’ majoritarian communities, relishing these meats—as well as fish and chicken—creates a gustatory niche which Garos share with many of the other minority communities of the region.
In North East India, with its unprecedented linguistic, cultural and religious diversity, ethnic ties provide the comfort of being able to talk in one’s own language and dialect. Ethnicity emerges in interpersonal connections, from shared upbringing, shared tastes, and shared interpretations of what carries value from the past, to perhaps be carried forward towards the future. Garo Christmas celebrations want to be inclusive, and refrain from drawing ethnic boundaries. Yet the social norms that shape the celebration, in which both women and men dance, no doubt goes against the conventions of those who are uncomfortable with this.
In North East India, people’s experiences of ethnicity, centring on shared values, do not necessarily equal its political and administrative interpretations. Garo are in Meghalaya labelled as a tribal community, emphasizing their intricate connection to its soil, and how Garo ancestors were among the first to negotiate an equation with its dense forests, and the ubiquitous more-than-human presences which shaped the western part of what is currently the State of Meghalaya. Tribe, as an English term, has widely diverging connotations the world over. For Garos, the legal and political relevance of being labelled tribal is beyond doubt, also since it enables administration of the region under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Yet, I have almost never heard any of my adoptive family and friends here actively self-identify as ‘tribal’. Rather, they see themselves as included in groups of relatives, expanding in ever larger concentric circles to include those they feel close to, and want to be connected to. In Garo Hills, who counts as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a cousin, a niece, and uncle or an aunt certainly reaches far beyond the limitations carried by such terms in the Netherlands.
Dancing around the bonfire, celebrating Christmas in Garo Hills shapes, reinforces and redefines relationships among those who take part. Commemorating the birth of Christ, more than 2000 years ago, unequivocally provides the motive for the celebration, but the rock rendition of traditional Christian hymns is a reminder that this is 2025, bringing those who want to be included together on their own terms. In Garo Hills, Christmas celebrates community, reaching far beyond the confines of formalized religion.
People the world over define themselves with reference to terms such as indigeneity, ethnicity and belonging, but what these entail varies from context to context. Too often, in political discourse, superficial interpretations are flaunted, foregrounding primordiality and ethnic closure. It is important to recognize that people in everyday life continue to nurture bonds which are meaningful, defining who they are, what they may want to escape from, and who they may want to be. In the Netherlands, influential politicians are peddling anti-immigrant sentiments, which belie the many involved trajectories of relationship building, across perceived ethnic boundaries, of the people they are negatively targeting. Celebrating Christmas in Rongjeng reminded me once again of the importance to foreground such everyday acts of bonding. The values and connections these reveal serve as a powerful reminder of how we as humans are endowed with the ability to forge meaningful relationships with others, allowing us to build our lives with the environments we depend on.
(Erik de Maaker is an Associate Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and a visiting faculty at Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan). He is the PI of the ‘Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas’ research project (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/futuringheritage), which is being conducted jointly by Leiden University, Ashoka University (Sonepat) and RV University (Bangalore), in close cooperation with policy makers and NGOs of the North Eastern Region).
