Unlike any place on earth

The sun does shine in the land where the clouds come home. We had a clear night last night after a late return from a shopping trip in the city two hours away. We were on a mission to buy all the supplies we would need for our guest house when it is finally finished. We are guests now in the home of a church elder and we are looking forward very much to having our own place. The idea is that we will go far down south to Cuddapah at the end of the week and when we return our house will be finished.

The Garo people are actually the Achik people. I have not been able to discover the story of how the Garo title was imposed upon them, probably by a British explorer with a need to name something, but it seems that for millennia they have known of themselves as the Achik and that is how I will henceforth refer to them. The Achik speak Achiku, a very simple language with verbal forms that vary with the tense but not the person or number. The sentence structure closely resembles Central Asian languages with many verbal suffixes. They say I can learn it in a couple months. So far my vocabulary is restricted to namingima – hello.

The seven states which make up North East India bear very little resemblance to the people or landscape of the Indian subcontinent and there are a number of underground militant groups dedicated to the freeing of the northeast from Indian supremacy. For that reason, I try to watch my tongue and not refer to the North East as a part of India. If you want to really understand North East India, you must forget that you are in India at all and look for the characteristics that make this region so unique. Among the many peculiarities of the northeast people are their round faces and slanted eyes. The Achik claim to have come all the way from Mongolia and they certainly resemble Mongolian people.

Many of the northeast tribes are matrilineal. I’ve been watching family dynamics trying to learn how a matrilineal culture operates. I was curious to know whether I would find the gender roles reversed from patrilineal traditions. To my surprise, women still do much of the cooking and cleaning. A foreigner entering this society would not suspect that this is an example of one of the rarest societal structures on earth. One reason for that may be the long standing Christian influence. Christian missionaries entered this place long ago and taught the tribal people about the humble Jesus, denominational division, the male priesthood, and God’s plan for female submission. Despite the Christian influence, of which I have observed very little positive to write, women are still treated with respect, and daughters inherit the family wealth. There is no walking ten paces behind a man here but neither is there husband abuse. My initial impression is that gender relations in North East India are marked by an extraordinary equality and mutual respect. The great experiment the world was afraid to try, has, in my estimation, proven successful.