By Anna Notsu
For many residents of Meghalaya, lineage matters. When one meets another for the first time, one will eventually ask, “What is your (clan) title?” Often, one’s title indexes an ethnic group and even suggests a migration history. In this sense, it is not simply a question of categorical belonging but also invokes the history and prosperity of the clan, which is, confusingly, often referred to as ‘family.’ Crucially, most people in Meghalaya carry their mother’s clan title.
When I first set foot in Meghalaya, more specifically in the Jaintia Hills, I found myself confused about matrilineage. Coming from a patrilineal society, where women change their title to the husband’s once married, it took me some time to understand how carefully the inheritance of the maternal title is protected, and how this protection shapes everyday life.
Yet matriliny, while widely associated with Meghalaya, remains only partially understood. The implied kinship structure alone—that a child inherits from the maternal line, thereby requiring a daughter for continuity—does not fully explain how lineage and clanship are deeply rooted in everyday living.
One time in Shangpung Pohshnong (the Niamtre quarter), I had a meeting about a planned seminar in the living room of my host family—the house that belongs to the mother. We were deciding on the location for the next meeting, and since my host father was part of this seminar discussion, I wrote the following—“Location: the residence of Ma Chibor.” Seeing this, one of them said to me, laughing, “I think we need to change this phrasing. Otherwise, people would show up at his mother’s house.”
House, family and clan—in many intertwined ways, these revolve around matrilineage. Its significance comes to the fore in the way everyday events unfold: marriage, childbirth and housewarming ceremony, to name a few. Take naming ceremonies, for example. In Shangpung Pohshnong, some days or weeks after childbirth, the newborn undergoes a series of rites, one of which is called ‘Pyrtuid Boo’ (child naming ceremony). The name of a child is not simply given but first proposed through several suggestions from the relevant clans. These suggested names will then undergo divine testing to determine whether they are acceptable. A simple process of naming a newborn within a family thus becomes an important clan affair.
Events such as this occur almost every week across the village, and sometimes several take place simultaneously. One cannot attend them all. At other times, one becomes obliged to attend because of clan ties. In the case of a naming ceremony, on this celebratory occasion when the newborn symbolises clan prosperity, invited guests also embrace their relationship with the couple. Yet here too, the couple’s lineage demands attention. Alongside the mother’s—thus the child’s—clan, the mother’s father’s clan, the husband’s clan, the husband’s father’s clan, and so on, instantly become crucial participants in this ceremony.
To outsiders, the question of which clans must attend, and why, can appear as a complex social structure. Attendance itself is not a simple matter. Members of the required clan first gather at the natal house of the subject clan member and carry items such as rice, mustard oil, bananas, dry fish, ginger and rice beer from that house. The success of the naming ceremony therefore depends on other villagers knowing the couple’s family tree and their matrilineage.
In my case, the mother’s father belonged to my host father’s clan, and he told me he was therefore expected to participate. On the morning of the naming ceremony, I followed him to the house from which the march to the house of the child’s mother would begin. “How would they know not only the clan to which the mother’s father belonged but also the location of his mother’s house?” I wondered. This is the kind of knowledge that can only be acquired by living within the web of relationships that shape the village.
What confused me even more was that everyone at that house was introduced to me as my host father’s ‘siblings.’ “But not from the same mother,” he—a momentary pause later—added.
But at the same time, they do, in fact, share the same ‘mother,’ called ‘Seinjait’ (the original mother), who enabled the very beginning of the clan. Today, she, the originator who started their matrilineage, remains almost as though a goddess. Her presence is such that some clans in Shangpung maintain a dedicated altar, where they perform ‘Kñia Seinjait’ (sacrificial ritual for the originator). Yet she appears not only in this ritual. Each housewarming ceremony in Shangpung Pohshnong, for instance, requires the chanting of matrilineage from the seinjait down to the owner of the newly constructed house, tracing each and every mother as far back as people can remember. Again, lineage, family and house appear inseparably, embedding the significance of daughters.
“It is a kind of storytelling,” a friend of mine in Jowai once said to me when I told him about my experience of a Niamtre housewarming ceremony in Shangpung. Through these rituals, matriliny is not only a given context but continually performed, as each generation retells the story of descent from the original mother, Seinjait. Every day, somewhere in the village, people give birth, pass away, name a newborn child, construct a house or perform sacrificial rituals for loved ones. Ordinary events such as these become extraordinary through the remembering of their own existence. In these spaces, where kinship extends beyond bloodline, time also becomes blurred as future prosperity, origin stories and current practices intertwine.
As I immerse myself in Shangpung Pohshnong, my relationship with certain people—and with them, their clans—has become central to my participation in events. Depending on the occasion, I attend through, and sometimes ‘as,’ a member of my host mother’s clan, almost like her daughter. At other times, I attend as an invited guest because of friendship, or as part of another clan. When people let me carry their wicker basket containing offering items from their clan house to the host’s for a naming ceremony, they jokingly tell me, “From now, or at least today, you belong to our clan.” One day I am a sister to the Ymbon clan, and the next day I might represent the Manar clan. In this way, my ‘belonging’ constantly shifts.
Perhaps because I am foreign to the village, yet participate in ways similar to villagers themselves—through their clan, family and personal relationships—I, too, have become part of these networks of relationships. And through such participation, the handover of ritual items from the attending clan to the host clan becomes more meaningful. “We don’t just hand these items to them,” my Shangpung companion once told me. In the context of a naming ceremony, this handover forms an essential moment of the ritual, solidifying the connection between the host clan and its relative clan through whispered prayers from each side at a time. In this sense, the connection concerns not only immediate families but entire clans.
I used to think that matriliny itself gave shape to the Niamtre community. But it is in their practices that matriliny is embedded. The importance of matrilineage in Shangpung Pohshnong does not solely narrate descent or inheritance as a mere tradition; it demonstrates how people honour their relationships across the past, the present and the future.
In this sense, Niamtre storytelling does not only occur through spoken narratives but through repeated acts of participation. Each ritual and ceremony rehearses the same genealogical memory: who belongs to whom, which house one comes from and which mothers precede the present generation. It is at once individual and collective. What appears to be an ordinary gathering around food, offerings and prayer is also a moment when relationships are collectively cherished and remembered.
The past is recalled through origin stories, the present is enacted through the gathering of relatives and clans, and the future is anticipated in the child whose name is being tested or in the house that will shelter the next generation. Through these moments, matriliny is honoured through lived repetition.
Today, as calls for patrilineal inheritance gain attention across the hills, Niamtre storytelling continues to sustain matrilineage through everyday events. My point here is not to argue whether matriliny should or should not be protected in Meghalaya. Rather, I show how matriliny endures—perhaps even strengthens—through the everyday practices of the Niamtre Pnar. Moving back and forth between ancestral origins and future continuity through present relationships to one another, Niamtre communities in Shangpung Pohshnong continually reaffirm the value of and add value to matrilineage.
(The author is a PhD scholar from Leiden University, the Netherlands currently doing research in Jaintia Hills. Her PhD research is part of a five-year project, Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas, initiated by Leiden University and Ashoka University. Her research is funded by NWO and the Delta on the Move Foundation).
