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Staying Garo
Staying Garo
For decades,
the Garo have resisted assimilation with the Bengali Muslim majority of
Bangladesh, and today this defiant minority still face a battle to keep hold of
their distinct identity. Priscilla Ellis-Canzio reports
Hurtling north out of Dhaka, sprawling megacity, capital of
Bangladesh, the ‘God-off-Speed’ emblazoned on the bus’s back bumper isn’t
reassuring. I keep
my eyes off the
road and my mind off the record-breaking accident statistics.
‘Make way!’ yells the conductor, gesticulating through the open door. Goats scatter, rickshaws swerve. The driver leans on his horn as we plunge past lopsided lorries, belching dirt, diesel and disrespect along the potholed highway.
The volatile energy of Bangladesh is behind the wheel of every vehicle. Survival is a pitiless gamble for 158 million people crammed into the most densely populated, fertile, flood- and cyclone-prone land on Earth.
The majority of Bangladeshis are Bengali Muslims. The three million remaining Bangladeshis belong to about 46 different ‘tribes’, which struggle for citizenship, cultural recognition and land rights. The Garo are one such group.
More than half a million Garos live in northeastern India, but an estimated 100,000 live in Bangladesh, 20,000 of them in the Madhupur Forest. Records confirm that centuries ago, their ancestors became the forest’s original settlers.
As an anthropology student during the 1980s, I lived with the Garo, who accepted this camera-wielding, note-taking interrogator into their lives. Their disarming straightforwardness left a lasting impression on me.
More than 100 years earlier, in 1872, Edward Dalton, a British government official had written:
‘The Garo are lively, good-natured, hospitable, frank and honest in their dealings, till contaminated by their intercourse with Bengalis, and they possess that pearl of great price so rare amongst Eastern nations – a love of truth. They will not hastily make engagements, because when they do make them, they intend to keep them. They are affectionate fathers and kind husbands, and their conduct generally towards the weaker sex is marked by consideration and respect. Notwithstanding the lavish exposure of their persons, the women are chaste and make good steady wives.’
Turbulent history
It’s October 2011, and as the ‘God-Off-Speed’ tears along the crowded highway on its every-man-for-himself journey towards Madhupur, I wonder how the Garo have made it into the 21st century.
Political turmoil and natural disasters have blighted the story of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) since its creation after a brutal independence war against West Pakistan in 1971. The Garos, who had joined the freedom fighters, believed that the birth of Bangladesh spelled the end of prejudice. Instead, President Sheikh Mujib Rahman proclaimed Bangladesh a uni-cultural, uni-linguistic state and invited ethnic minorities to become Bengalis and Muslims. In the words of one young Garo, ‘Bengalis would see Garos and spit.’
After the UN Year of Indigenous People in 1993, international pressure forced Bangladesh to review its policies. In 2005, it published a report stating that ‘over the years, tribal people have experienced a strong sense of social, political and economic exclusion, lack of recognition, fear and insecurity, loss of cultural identity and social oppression… tribal people are losing their own heritage, which threatens their sustainability’. It was a significant step in the affirmation of Garo identity.
Slain glory
The ramshackle boneshaker shudders to a halt 150 kilometres north of Dhaka, tipping its human cargo into the dusty cacophony of Madhupur bus depot. A swarm of Bengali rickshaw drivers squabble, barter and grab our luggage. ‘Only 15 taka, sister! Okay you give me just ten!’
Succumbing to the least insistent, I’m bundled behind the bars of his rickshaw. Just half an hour of phut-phut and splutter and I’ll be in the vast, splendid Madhupur Forest.
But no… the sight of the once magnificent forest is chilling. A ghostly plantation of lean eucalyptus has replaced the slain glory of the sal trees. There’s no birdsong; only the relentless roar of a chainsaw echoes through the dying forest.
A young Garo couple beckons me over to their roadside stall. ‘Remember me sister?’ asks the smiling young man. ‘I am Lawrence. This is Rumi, my wife.’
I no more recognise Lawrence than I do the Madhupur Forest. In the 1980s, Lawrence had been a schoolboy at the Catholic mission. Now he’s a father and the forest has gone. ‘Much has changed here, sister,’ he says. ‘The Forest Department has destroyed everything.’
Lawrence’s stark comment is born out by Dr Tawhidul Islam of Jahangirnagar University, who used satellite images to show how the government, deaf to ecological alarm calls, has overseen the destruction of the Madhupur Forest – from 3,826 hectares in 1962 to just 594 hectares in 2003. As the forest shrank, environmental depredation spread like an oil slick. Sawmills, pesticide shops and brick kilns mushroomed on the encroached forest land. Foreign-donor-funded social forestry projects not only violated Garo land rights but ignored the knowledge of plants and wildlife that they have acquired over generations.
Ronald Halder, a renowned Bengali naturalist, relates how ‘the Garo have looked after the forest for generations and the wild habitat is a part of their life and culture. This forest was once a haven for black-capped langur, rhesus macaques, palm civets, porcupines, hares, barking deer, tree frogs, dusky eagles, tawny fish owls and more; now almost all of them have disappeared.’
Legal trickery
A tradition of communal ownership means that Garos rarely hold title deeds for their land, so they’ve been easily duped by savvy Bengali settlers and greedy landgrabbers, as well as by the Forest Department. ‘The Forest Department tells us that if we hand over our land, they will share the profit from the woodlots with us,’ Lawrence tells me. ‘It’s a trick. Mostly we get nothing.’
‘There are more than 5,000 false cases against the Garo in Madhupur alone,’ says Sanjeeb Drong, secretary general of the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples’ Forum and a Garo himself. ‘For the Garo, it’s like being in the water and fighting with crocodiles.’
Over a cup of syrupy tea, the local Bengali forest officer proudly describes his role as guardian of the forest. ‘I have a Honda motorcycle and a gun. If I see illegal cutting, I shoot!’ he proclaims, slamming down his teacup. When asked if powerful outsiders are ever involved in illegal logging he seems surprised. ‘Rules are different for politicians, isn’t it?’ he replies.
Out on the dusty track, a young Garo woman balancing a metre-high load of firewood on her head looks my way, ‘Nangi dongoma? [How are you?],’ she calls, pressing her palms together in the traditional Garo greeting.
A rickshaw trundles by. Two shrouded figures in black hijab crouch among the pineapples. Poor Bangladeshi Muslim women are among the most oppressed in the world. Constrained by a deeply conservative, patriarchal mindset, tyrannised by dowries and honour killings and unprotected by a feeble judiciary, most have learned to keep their heads down, their faces covered and their thoughts to themselves.
The contrast is striking between these voiceless, largely uneducated and economically dependent Muslim women and their Garo counterparts, who are free to work, to travel and to argue with their husbands. Garo society is matrilineal, which elevates the status of women – girls may take the initiative in courtship, and in the past, they even had their grooms captured. Couples settle in the wife’s village, where the husband cultivates his wife’s land. Children belong to the mother’s clan and only daughters can inherit.
Traditional Garo marriage created alliances between clans, so some unusual customs exist. When a husband dies, his clan must provide the widow with a new husband in order to maintain its stake in the land. As a consolation for marrying an older woman, the new husband also marries the widow’s daughter. If a woman is widowed once her daughter is already married, the daughter’s husband must also ‘marry’ his widowed mother-in-law.
Christian influence
Lawrence dusts the boxes of cigarettes and detergent while he waits for customers. ‘We also grow pineapples, bananas and ginger to sell in the market, but we’ve no land for rice,’ he says. ‘Many Garos now leave to work in Dhaka. Everything is changing.’
Ever since Christian missionaries arrived in Bengal ‘to civilise the natives’ during the 18th century, the Garo have had to adapt to survive. Missionaries impressed the Garo with schools and dispensaries and converted them in large numbers. Their traditional Songsarek gods were banished along with their music and dance, which ‘conjured up the devil’. ‘Soon we were using our sacred gongs to feed the pigs,’ relates Jugesh, a Christian old timer.
According to Robbins Burling, a US linguist and anthropologist who lived among the Garo during the 1950s, ‘becoming educated was to become Christian. It was almost an inevitable step to becoming modern. One could stop being a Songsarek, but that did not imply that one would stop being a Garo.’
Nowadays, many Songsarek festivals have been assimilated into Christianity. Father Eugene Homrich, a maverick US Roman Catholic priest who has lived among the Garo since the 1950s and fought many of their battles, insists that Songsarek instruments be played during Mass. Despite his efforts, the evocative music and dance is rarely seen outside ‘cultural programmes’. Hymns and the harmonium have won the day. Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore may sound hopelessly incongruous in the Madhupur Forest, but it’s a favourite with modern Christian Garos.
During the 1980s, the Wangala festival was an extravaganza of music, dance and inebriated feasting fuelled by rice wine. By 2011, it had morphed into a hybrid harvest festival funded by local NGOs and the Catholic Mission. Restraint and syncretism fuelled by soft drinks are the order of the day. Revamped folk songs and carefully choreographed dances, interspersed with long-winded eulogies by local dignitaries, weave together the disparate elements.
At one end of the high school football pitch stands an altar with freshly starched white cloth, Bible, crucifix, water and wine; at the other, a three-metre high crucifix casts its shadow over an enclosure housing the great Songsarek gods Susume and Saljong. Bishop Ponin, the first Garo bishop, decked out in purple robes and mitre, mobile phone to hand, pays them homage before offering Mass. ‘Garos still practise their culture,’ the bishop assures me over lunch. ‘Christianity has brought us education. It is education that will save the Garo.’
Urban migration
Literacy rates among the Garo are high and every year, more mission-educated students attend Dhaka University. Those who move to Dhaka discover that the Garos’ reputation for honesty and reliability is paying dividends. They are favoured by NGOs and as security guards and drivers, while Garo women, untrammelled by taboos and patriarchy, are much prized as ayahs, nurses, beauticians, hairdressers and garment-factory workers.
At Shapla’s Salon in downtown Dhaka, Nisha and Nipu, two barefoot sisters in traditional Garo dress, combine their studies with training under the watchful eye of Shapla, who left the forest to set up shop ten years ago.
Nisha, 19, hopes for a place at Dhaka University; Nipu, 25, who left school at 14, attends literacy and numeracy classes. ‘There are more opportunities in Dhaka,’ says Nipu as she mixes a herbal facepack and waits for her client to lift her veil. ‘Our future is here.’
In the hurly-burly of dusty Dhaka, far from the tight-knit forest community, the centuries-old fabric of Garo society is being stretched. Traditional norms are losing their resonance as modern values, based on individual liberty, gain ground. The pressures of change, the rank injustices and their peripheral position in Bangladeshi society challenge Garo solidarity, but their striking pride in staying Garo seems set to survive well into the 21st century.
November 2013
‘Make way!’ yells the conductor, gesticulating through the open door. Goats scatter, rickshaws swerve. The driver leans on his horn as we plunge past lopsided lorries, belching dirt, diesel and disrespect along the potholed highway.
The volatile energy of Bangladesh is behind the wheel of every vehicle. Survival is a pitiless gamble for 158 million people crammed into the most densely populated, fertile, flood- and cyclone-prone land on Earth.
The majority of Bangladeshis are Bengali Muslims. The three million remaining Bangladeshis belong to about 46 different ‘tribes’, which struggle for citizenship, cultural recognition and land rights. The Garo are one such group.
More than half a million Garos live in northeastern India, but an estimated 100,000 live in Bangladesh, 20,000 of them in the Madhupur Forest. Records confirm that centuries ago, their ancestors became the forest’s original settlers.
As an anthropology student during the 1980s, I lived with the Garo, who accepted this camera-wielding, note-taking interrogator into their lives. Their disarming straightforwardness left a lasting impression on me.
More than 100 years earlier, in 1872, Edward Dalton, a British government official had written:
‘The Garo are lively, good-natured, hospitable, frank and honest in their dealings, till contaminated by their intercourse with Bengalis, and they possess that pearl of great price so rare amongst Eastern nations – a love of truth. They will not hastily make engagements, because when they do make them, they intend to keep them. They are affectionate fathers and kind husbands, and their conduct generally towards the weaker sex is marked by consideration and respect. Notwithstanding the lavish exposure of their persons, the women are chaste and make good steady wives.’
Turbulent history
It’s October 2011, and as the ‘God-Off-Speed’ tears along the crowded highway on its every-man-for-himself journey towards Madhupur, I wonder how the Garo have made it into the 21st century.
Political turmoil and natural disasters have blighted the story of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) since its creation after a brutal independence war against West Pakistan in 1971. The Garos, who had joined the freedom fighters, believed that the birth of Bangladesh spelled the end of prejudice. Instead, President Sheikh Mujib Rahman proclaimed Bangladesh a uni-cultural, uni-linguistic state and invited ethnic minorities to become Bengalis and Muslims. In the words of one young Garo, ‘Bengalis would see Garos and spit.’
After the UN Year of Indigenous People in 1993, international pressure forced Bangladesh to review its policies. In 2005, it published a report stating that ‘over the years, tribal people have experienced a strong sense of social, political and economic exclusion, lack of recognition, fear and insecurity, loss of cultural identity and social oppression… tribal people are losing their own heritage, which threatens their sustainability’. It was a significant step in the affirmation of Garo identity.
Slain glory
The ramshackle boneshaker shudders to a halt 150 kilometres north of Dhaka, tipping its human cargo into the dusty cacophony of Madhupur bus depot. A swarm of Bengali rickshaw drivers squabble, barter and grab our luggage. ‘Only 15 taka, sister! Okay you give me just ten!’
Succumbing to the least insistent, I’m bundled behind the bars of his rickshaw. Just half an hour of phut-phut and splutter and I’ll be in the vast, splendid Madhupur Forest.
But no… the sight of the once magnificent forest is chilling. A ghostly plantation of lean eucalyptus has replaced the slain glory of the sal trees. There’s no birdsong; only the relentless roar of a chainsaw echoes through the dying forest.
A young Garo couple beckons me over to their roadside stall. ‘Remember me sister?’ asks the smiling young man. ‘I am Lawrence. This is Rumi, my wife.’
I no more recognise Lawrence than I do the Madhupur Forest. In the 1980s, Lawrence had been a schoolboy at the Catholic mission. Now he’s a father and the forest has gone. ‘Much has changed here, sister,’ he says. ‘The Forest Department has destroyed everything.’
Lawrence’s stark comment is born out by Dr Tawhidul Islam of Jahangirnagar University, who used satellite images to show how the government, deaf to ecological alarm calls, has overseen the destruction of the Madhupur Forest – from 3,826 hectares in 1962 to just 594 hectares in 2003. As the forest shrank, environmental depredation spread like an oil slick. Sawmills, pesticide shops and brick kilns mushroomed on the encroached forest land. Foreign-donor-funded social forestry projects not only violated Garo land rights but ignored the knowledge of plants and wildlife that they have acquired over generations.
Ronald Halder, a renowned Bengali naturalist, relates how ‘the Garo have looked after the forest for generations and the wild habitat is a part of their life and culture. This forest was once a haven for black-capped langur, rhesus macaques, palm civets, porcupines, hares, barking deer, tree frogs, dusky eagles, tawny fish owls and more; now almost all of them have disappeared.’
Legal trickery
A tradition of communal ownership means that Garos rarely hold title deeds for their land, so they’ve been easily duped by savvy Bengali settlers and greedy landgrabbers, as well as by the Forest Department. ‘The Forest Department tells us that if we hand over our land, they will share the profit from the woodlots with us,’ Lawrence tells me. ‘It’s a trick. Mostly we get nothing.’
‘There are more than 5,000 false cases against the Garo in Madhupur alone,’ says Sanjeeb Drong, secretary general of the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples’ Forum and a Garo himself. ‘For the Garo, it’s like being in the water and fighting with crocodiles.’
Over a cup of syrupy tea, the local Bengali forest officer proudly describes his role as guardian of the forest. ‘I have a Honda motorcycle and a gun. If I see illegal cutting, I shoot!’ he proclaims, slamming down his teacup. When asked if powerful outsiders are ever involved in illegal logging he seems surprised. ‘Rules are different for politicians, isn’t it?’ he replies.
Out on the dusty track, a young Garo woman balancing a metre-high load of firewood on her head looks my way, ‘Nangi dongoma? [How are you?],’ she calls, pressing her palms together in the traditional Garo greeting.
A rickshaw trundles by. Two shrouded figures in black hijab crouch among the pineapples. Poor Bangladeshi Muslim women are among the most oppressed in the world. Constrained by a deeply conservative, patriarchal mindset, tyrannised by dowries and honour killings and unprotected by a feeble judiciary, most have learned to keep their heads down, their faces covered and their thoughts to themselves.
The contrast is striking between these voiceless, largely uneducated and economically dependent Muslim women and their Garo counterparts, who are free to work, to travel and to argue with their husbands. Garo society is matrilineal, which elevates the status of women – girls may take the initiative in courtship, and in the past, they even had their grooms captured. Couples settle in the wife’s village, where the husband cultivates his wife’s land. Children belong to the mother’s clan and only daughters can inherit.
Traditional Garo marriage created alliances between clans, so some unusual customs exist. When a husband dies, his clan must provide the widow with a new husband in order to maintain its stake in the land. As a consolation for marrying an older woman, the new husband also marries the widow’s daughter. If a woman is widowed once her daughter is already married, the daughter’s husband must also ‘marry’ his widowed mother-in-law.
Christian influence
Lawrence dusts the boxes of cigarettes and detergent while he waits for customers. ‘We also grow pineapples, bananas and ginger to sell in the market, but we’ve no land for rice,’ he says. ‘Many Garos now leave to work in Dhaka. Everything is changing.’
Ever since Christian missionaries arrived in Bengal ‘to civilise the natives’ during the 18th century, the Garo have had to adapt to survive. Missionaries impressed the Garo with schools and dispensaries and converted them in large numbers. Their traditional Songsarek gods were banished along with their music and dance, which ‘conjured up the devil’. ‘Soon we were using our sacred gongs to feed the pigs,’ relates Jugesh, a Christian old timer.
According to Robbins Burling, a US linguist and anthropologist who lived among the Garo during the 1950s, ‘becoming educated was to become Christian. It was almost an inevitable step to becoming modern. One could stop being a Songsarek, but that did not imply that one would stop being a Garo.’
Nowadays, many Songsarek festivals have been assimilated into Christianity. Father Eugene Homrich, a maverick US Roman Catholic priest who has lived among the Garo since the 1950s and fought many of their battles, insists that Songsarek instruments be played during Mass. Despite his efforts, the evocative music and dance is rarely seen outside ‘cultural programmes’. Hymns and the harmonium have won the day. Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore may sound hopelessly incongruous in the Madhupur Forest, but it’s a favourite with modern Christian Garos.
During the 1980s, the Wangala festival was an extravaganza of music, dance and inebriated feasting fuelled by rice wine. By 2011, it had morphed into a hybrid harvest festival funded by local NGOs and the Catholic Mission. Restraint and syncretism fuelled by soft drinks are the order of the day. Revamped folk songs and carefully choreographed dances, interspersed with long-winded eulogies by local dignitaries, weave together the disparate elements.
At one end of the high school football pitch stands an altar with freshly starched white cloth, Bible, crucifix, water and wine; at the other, a three-metre high crucifix casts its shadow over an enclosure housing the great Songsarek gods Susume and Saljong. Bishop Ponin, the first Garo bishop, decked out in purple robes and mitre, mobile phone to hand, pays them homage before offering Mass. ‘Garos still practise their culture,’ the bishop assures me over lunch. ‘Christianity has brought us education. It is education that will save the Garo.’
Urban migration
Literacy rates among the Garo are high and every year, more mission-educated students attend Dhaka University. Those who move to Dhaka discover that the Garos’ reputation for honesty and reliability is paying dividends. They are favoured by NGOs and as security guards and drivers, while Garo women, untrammelled by taboos and patriarchy, are much prized as ayahs, nurses, beauticians, hairdressers and garment-factory workers.
At Shapla’s Salon in downtown Dhaka, Nisha and Nipu, two barefoot sisters in traditional Garo dress, combine their studies with training under the watchful eye of Shapla, who left the forest to set up shop ten years ago.
Nisha, 19, hopes for a place at Dhaka University; Nipu, 25, who left school at 14, attends literacy and numeracy classes. ‘There are more opportunities in Dhaka,’ says Nipu as she mixes a herbal facepack and waits for her client to lift her veil. ‘Our future is here.’
In the hurly-burly of dusty Dhaka, far from the tight-knit forest community, the centuries-old fabric of Garo society is being stretched. Traditional norms are losing their resonance as modern values, based on individual liberty, gain ground. The pressures of change, the rank injustices and their peripheral position in Bangladeshi society challenge Garo solidarity, but their striking pride in staying Garo seems set to survive well into the 21st century.
November 2013