By Erik de Maaker
A couple of weeks ago, I was in a jeep on a slow road with long time friends. Both are involved with the Council of Nokmas, a society aimed at uniting and supporting Garo village heads. We had a lot to talk about, since I have been a regular visitor to Garo Hills for more than two decades, and our memories recalled times long gone. Amidst all this nostalgia, my friends brought up some poignant questions. “Increasingly, our village heads (nokmas) find themselves in the midst of people competing for land, how are they supposed to handle that?” And, “If village relationships continue to become strained, what will their role be, in two or three decades from now?” These are difficult questions, to which there are no easy answers. Village heads are very important in Garo Hills, and it is not an exaggeration to say that in Garo Hills the land management as enabled by the 6th schedule of the Indian Constitution, revolves around them. The village head is not just a legal signatory for matters relating to the usage and ownership of land and the residence of its inhabitants, but also key to the cultural fabric which shapes Garo villages.
The questions of my friends made me think about the responsibilities of the village heads, as I had experienced them. My thoughts went back to a rainy afternoon, more than twenty years ago, when I was still a very recent arrival in the village which would later for two years become my home. At the time, I was a PhD student in Anthropology. It was the month of June, and the combination of heat and high humidity made me feel hot and sticky. I was at the time staying in a government office which had been temporarily vacated, somewhere away from the village in which I hoped to live. I felt isolated and vulnerable there. But to shift to the village, I needed permission from the village head, a middle aged man.
A meeting was called for, in which my request was discussed. The village head asked me, when he heard me out in my (at that time) rather broken Garo: “Will you depend on our rice? Or will you acquire your own rice?” When I answered that I would not be a burden on him, or on anyone else in the village, he readily agreed. The meeting included many people, notably men, but also a few women. It was only much later that I came to understand that all these people present there, most of whom had stayed siled throughout the short quizzing to which I was subjected, were close relatives of the village head. They were not just onlookers, but their (silent) consent was essential for the decision being taken. The village head may have been the person who formally allowed me to reside in the village, it was his larger group of relatives, which empowered him in that decision.
Perhaps the village head had little choice in the matter, since an elderly woman who had offered herself as my adoptive mother had made clear that she wanted to provide a place to me at which I could make a small temporary house. She was being kind to me, in the resolute kind of friendliness which I would come to greatly appreciate in the months that followed. Yet, in those early days I did not understand why her gesture carried so much weight. The village head with whom I had the meeting had his name, and that of his wife, registered with the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council. This made this couple the legal signatories in all matters official as far as this District Council was concerned. Village heads are typically male, as public offices such as these are usually fulfilled by men. My to-be adoptive mother’s name was not in any of the ledgers of the Council. Yet she did hold title to a lot of land, located within the boundaries of the village domain, and it was on this land that she suggested I would live. Again, this was not just about my to-be adoptive mother. She was a widow, and the mere figurehead of a large clan which encompassed her many daughters and their husbands, her sons and their wives, as well as many more maternal uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces and nephews. Her offering a place to me to live was no doubt a really kind gesture, but it was also a clear statement towards the village head. No doubt, she and her whole clan acknowledged his authority. In addition, they also wanted to make very clear that they held rights to land of their own, located within the village domain.
Garo villages mostly consist of people who regard each other as kin. Women who consider each other mother, daughter, sister, aunt, niece or granddaughter tend to live in each other’s vicinity. If they are married, their husbands will have joined them. In the village where I came to live, many of these men came either from the same, or from neighbouring villages. In a Garo village, consequently, most people are related to one another. The vast majority are farmers, and the land they work constitutes a domain, which belongs to the village. The ways in which people access and control this land varies, and although more and more of it is used for tree plantations, it continues to be firmly associated with the women who are each other’s close relatives. Garo relatedness, at the village level, is pyramidal, and the village head derives his position from being at the apex. His household is typically considered as the one with the greatest genealogical depth, founded at the time when the given village was first created. The position of the village head thus depends first on how he is empowered by his marriage to his wife, and by his close relatives, and only subsequently by how that empowerment translates in them being registered with the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council.
The above explains, I hope, why the village head is at the core of the cultural fabric of Garo Hills. A village head bears great responsibility for the village he (much less frequently she) is heading. This responsibility was even greater at the time when Garo villages depended almost entirely on shifting cultivation, and still even greater when people were Songsareks, and followed the traditional Garo religion. At that time, village heads had to conduct many of the crucial annual agricultural rituals. These rituals enabled the negotiation of relationships with the spirits on behalf of all inhabitants, allowing crops to grow, to be tended, and to be harvested. Nowadays, these religious responsibilities have eroded, but even today the village head is much more than an administrative figurehead.
As in Garo Hills competition over land increases, village heads are challenged to balance the interests of their various relatives. It is not easy, to reinterpret Garo customary land management to the usages which land is put to today. I do not have ready answers to the questions which my friends posed, but I do think it is important to consider how Garo customary practices can be rendered fit for the future. For my friends, for me, and probably for the vast majority of people in Garo Hills it is unimaginable to consider a future in which village heads do not play an important role. Garo-ness, as I have come to know over the years, defines itself in the intricate kin relationships which people trace to one another. The village heads, at the apex of local configurations of relatives, epitomise how these relationships are also always rooted in the very land that constitutes Garo Hills.
(Erik de Maaker is an Associate Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He leads the ‘Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas’ research project (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/futuringheritage), 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. He has written extensively about custom, environment and religion in Garo Hills and authored several books, among which the monograph Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India. Oxford University Press, 2022).
