Inclusion of the Garo Hills into State and Market Structures
The “community way of living,” as mentioned in the Indian Draft National Tribal Policy, which is projected onto communities such as the Garo, suggests that people are only partially integrated in the overarching structures of market and state. For the Garo, this may have been true in precolonial times, but currently, they are gradually becoming more and more encapsulated by market and state. In precolonial times, the Garo Hills seem to have consisted of semi-autonomous villages. Landlords based in the plains and foothills levied tribute at weekly or monthly markets (hats), but this did not imply territorial-political or administrative control (Misra 2011). When the colonial state expanded from Bengal to Assam in the early nineteenth century, the Garo Hills were initially omitted, since the area had few resources that were of importance to the colonial economy, and deadly strains of malaria discouraged early colonial administrators and clergymen and -women. When the region was eventually colonized, it became a “lightly” administered district, which allowed for a certain degree of exclusion from colonial control. This state of exclusion was instituted after independence under the sixth schedule of the Indian constitution.
Garo upland farmers have a long history of producing for markets. Over time, the importance of these markets for the sale of their produce, and the acquisition of other goods, has increased. This has led to a change in agricultural practices. Experimentation with the cultivation of permanent crops on the hill slopes has a long history, extending to the early days of colonial expansion in the region. In the village where I did most of my research, older people remembered that when they were young, none of the hill slopes had been permanently cultivated. But over the last two to three decades, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of hill land that is used for orchards. The most popular orchard crops are areca and cashew. Most significantly, villagers themselves have been searching for alternatives to make the cultivation of their fields more profitable. This has been especially notable since the 1980s, when due to reduced rainfall, and the subsequent shortening of the crop cycle, swidden yields began to drop.
The occupational pattern of the swiddens is facilitating a changeover to the cultivation of permanent crops. Rather than abandoning a swidden after two years of cultivation, which was the standard practice until a couple of decades ago, people simply continue to occupy it. Soon after they sow their first swidden crops, those who intend to keep their swidden as an orchard will plant saplings on it. After one or two years, when the field is no longer used as a swidden, they continue to care for the saplings so that these can grow into trees that bear fruit. Even in those locations where land is abundant, this gradual increase of permanent cultivation eventually creates shortages of land that is available for swidden cultivation.
This permanent occupation of land does not translate into ownership rights, but it does create a right to permanent usage that is so “solid” that it can be sold between villagers. The regional body in charge of land management, the Garo Hills District Council, officially supports the continuation of communal land ownership. But contrary to official policy, many officers involved with agriculture in the region are convinced that a change from swidden agriculture to permanent crops is part of an inevitable, and in a way desirable, modernization of agriculture, which necessarily includes the “individualization” of the landholdings that accompany it. Permanent crops are generally considered more profitable, and the resulting cash income is believed to allow families to accumulate surplus more easily than from the subsistence crops that are central to swidden agriculture. However, the price of some of these cash crops, such as areca nuts, has declined for many years in a row. And the prices of cash crops do not necessarily keep pace with inflation, which reveals some of the vulnerabilities of market-oriented agricultural production.
Transforming swiddens into orchards also only makes sense to families who can mobilize the labor to maintain them. Even though areca and cashew trees are relatively low maintenance, people do need to keep them free from weeds and creepers in order for them to thrive. Young saplings, such as those of areca nut trees, also need to be protected from wild and domestic animals, and demand fencing. Since people need to stay close to their orchards, this limits them in maintaining their swiddens, because of the distances between them. Consequently, once orchards gain importance, people end up living dispersed across the land that belongs to their village, abandoning the village nuclei that until recently were considered characteristic of the Garo. This lends further support to the common idea that traditional Garo culture is closely tied to swidden cultivation, and the former loses meaning once the latter ceases to be practiced.
One major consequence of the increasing importance of permanent cultivation is that it “fixes” the access that families have to land. The more families depend on orchards to which they maintain a permanent claim, the less they depend on the village head and the families who are close to him, to obtain access to land. This means that villagers become less dependent on one another, in an economic sense, than they previously were. The communal resource management, which is so much at the center of popular imaginations of indigenous people’s connectedness to nature, is increasingly challenged.
Christianity and the Pacification of the Environment
As previously mentioned, according to Garo community religion, the village head not only positions himself as an experienced leader, but also facilitates and hosts some of the most important ceremonial interactions with the deities. Remarkably, it is in villages where most of the land has become permanently cultivated that the majority of people have converted to Christianity. This implies the abandonment of most, if not all, of the earlier religious responsibilities of the village head. Most people are aware of the close link between swidden agriculture and the community religion, and in the cases where swidden agriculture has declined, the practicing of community religion has followed, and vice versa. In addition to ascribing the ownership of the land and the crops it yields to the deities, these celebrations epitomize people’s mutual dependencies. In order to make and cultivate swidden, people need to cooperate, and thus overcome any conflicts of interest that they may face.
The conversion to Christianity in the Garo Hills has not so much meant an “erasing” of the traditional cosmology, but rather the imposition of Christian religious tenets onto the existing pantheon (de Maaker 2013b). Christianity projects an omnipotent God, who thus encapsulates the deities and other entities identified within the community religion. The Christian clergy have subsequently emerged, with regards to agriculture, as the negotiators to the divine. People who have become Christians no longer take part in the collective celebrations that are so central to the community religion. The seasonal Christian celebrations that have replaced them no longer emphasize relationships between families, the way those linked to the community religion do, and do not underscore the position of the village head as a senior kinsman to the entire village.
The “privatization” of land use, in combination with the conversion to Christianity, also reduces the mutual dependence between villagers. Previously, economic success would translate into prestige, under a broad array of socioreligious mechanisms. In the course of that translation process, much of the wealth (e.g., animals for meat, and heirlooms or valuables) that people collected would be redistributed in potlatch-like feasting. The conversion to Christianity sharply reduced the need for this redistributive feasting, thereby placing those who are Christians in a better position to accumulate wealth. Nowadays, such wealth typically takes the form of a brick house, or consumer goods such as furniture, a television, a bicycle, or a motorbike—which in turn imbue social status. The weakening of the earlier redistributive mechanisms makes way for an increase in income disparities among villagers. Owning houses and consumer goods is an increasingly important “modern” ideal, in which villagers identify