picturetank.com
Français Anglais Retour Retour

Garos of Meghalaya

Franco Zecchin

People among the clouds Forgotten by the technological world, Garos are located between Assam and Bangladesh. Although they have been converted to devout christianity, the Garos people have conserved their millinial traditions, comprised of harvest festivities and drinking rice beer, but more importantly those which are anchored in the power relationships between the sexes. The Garos woman chooses her future husband and then has her brother kidnap him until he accepts the marriage. In spite the intense christianisation of the last twenty years, the Garos people have preserved an animiste tradition. They often thank the divinities with animal sacrifices. The divinities ensure good harvests and keep them from natural catastrophies. At sunrise, the family gets ready for a day at camp. While a central fire smokes the interior of the house to get rid of insects and parasites, women cook a morning dish as well as a rice dish wrapped in banana leaves for lunch. The men, women and children then leave for the fields, cutting the rice by hand as a family, or harvesting the cotton. A third of the Garos population live on jhum, a slash and burn crop. A group decision was made where the villagers chose the hilly fields that they mark, cut, dry and burn at the end of the dry season. The ashes fertilize the field. The farmers plant rice and millet and other grains that will later grow, like callebasse, onions or manioc. In an attempt to stop the degradation of the ecosystem provoked by jum, the Dheli government tried to help farmers with the development of commercial plantations like ginger, tea, fruits, tapioca of cashew nuts. But this strategy leads to an economic dependance of the Garos who then must buy their basic nutritional products. Fields must be continually cultivated to prevent the weeds from overwhelming the crops. Women share this job with the men The Wangala festival is celebrated after most of the harvest is well finished, at the end of the rain season, and at the beginning of the cold season, when work in the fields slackens, though a few chilis and some cotton remain to be picked. Created by India in 1972 and located at 300 kilometers north of the Golf of Bengal, the state of Meghalaya, or "home of the clouds", owes its poetic name to its humid and cloudy climate, subject to Bangladesh' monsoons. In the village of Sadolpara, Tami, 17, who lives with her parents, had a man that she loved and wanted to marry kidnapped in the night by her brother and cousins. This practise is an non-violent one. Always according to the ritual, the man escapes three times only to be kidnapped again, until he accepts to marry Tami. The wedding was then celebrated in a most simple fashion, under the protection of the god Saljong, the fertility god. A million Garos live in Meghalaya, protected in their ancestral home of the Garos hills, in a background of misty hillsides, covered with a jungle many water pathways. © text : Frédéric Castel



top
Retour Retour