Garo
The Garo are a tribal people of India, about half a million of whom live in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, northeastern India. Others live in neighboring West Bengal, Assam, Nagaland, and Tripura. In Meghalaya they are the major Scheduled Tribe (an ethnic subgroup that has faced discrimination and economic privation). They are well known as a matrilineal society who practice shifting cultivation. Being so numerous, they are divided into several dialectal and cultural groups, but nonetheless there is a strong sense of Garo identity, and the culture is still fairly uniform. The biggest distinction today is between Christian and non-Christian Garo, who live in separate villages.
The Garo have uxorilocal households; that is, a man usually finds himself living with his wife, her parents, her sisters, and all their children. The oldest of the sisters is recognized as the heiress. Neolocal residence (establishment of a new household rather than residence with a spouse's parents) also occurs today.
The society is divided into five matrilineal descent groups, or phratries. The clans that make up each phratry are exogamous; that is, members are required to find a spouse who is not a member of the same clan. Within each clan the most significant unit is called the machong, a group of close matrilineal relations who play a key role in the formation and maintenance of each household, and in controlling the cross-cousin marriages. Only an heiress is expected to marry her father's sister's son, while other girls are free to marry more distant cross-cousins. In common with a number of other Indian tribes, the institution of the bachelor's dormitory—a building where young unmarried men lived—was until quite recently an important social institution.
The traditional Garo religion is Sangasarek, which recognizes a supreme being, but is much concerned with the propitiation of spirits that may otherwise bring misfortune. Today, however, about 70 percent of the population is Christian, an effect of British missionary work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that followed upon British seizure of the area in 1873.
Several centuries ago the Garo were infamous as headhunters. The isolation this fostered gave way to numerous trade links with the plains, usually through bartering goods with Koch, Bengali, and various other Hindu or Muslim traders. Garo still go to the plains to sell baskets, ginger, chilies, and bamboo mats, getting rice in exchange. The traditional form of shifting cultivation, called jhum, is still practiced by about half the Garo today. Other land is farmed on a permanent basis, and is losing some of its fertility thereby.
Further Reading
Burling, Robbins. (1963) Rengsangri: Family and Kinship in a Garo Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Playfair, I. A. (1909) The Garos. London: David Nutt.
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