Garo

Clans and Kinship

Playfair (1909) describes three levels. The tribe is divided into geographical divisions with their own dialects and customs, among them the Awe or Akawe, Chisak, Dual, Matchi, Matabeng, Kochu, Atiagra, Abeng, Chibok, Ruga, Ganching or Gara, Atong and Megam. Across these run the katchis (now usually written chatchi), the exogamous clans: Momin, Marak and Sangma in his account, to which Garo writers now add Shira and Areng. Within each chatchi are the machong, 'motherhoods', each descended from one ancestress. A child belongs to the mother's chatchi and machong, and husband and wife must come from different ones. Property stays in the machong: a daughter inherits, and her husband, the nokrom (from nok, house, and krom, post), is usually chosen from the father's line, often the father's sister's son, and lives in his wife's parents' house. The heiress is called nokna (the Encyclopedia of World Cultures gives nokna dongipika mechik; Jengcham writes Nakna and says she is usually the youngest daughter). The nokma, the village headman, holds the village land through his wife and her machong, and disputes within families are settled largely by the mahari, the lineage (Encyclopedia of World Cultures).

The five chatchis are as Shuvash Jengcham gives them in Banglapedia; Playfair (1909) has the first three and describes Shira and Areng as groups then becoming separate. The machongs, the lines inside each chatchi, are a small selection from Playfair's Appendix A, 'Names of some of the subdivisions of the Garo exogamous septs', which he calls a list of the best known only; the totems and stories are his. Some machong names appear under two chatchis, and Playfair says such machongs belong to both.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Meghalaya, Assam, Mizoram, Nagaland, West Bengal

  Listed as: Garo

  In Assam the entry is in both parts of the list, for the plains and for the autonomous districts.

• Scheduled Tribe

  Tripura

  Listed as: Garoo

Himachal Pradesh's list has an entry 'Domba, Garo, Zoba', which is not counted here: the compilation's own table of the largest Scheduled Tribes gives the Garo's states as Meghalaya, Assam, West Bengal, Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura. Checked against a compilation of the Order; amendments of 2022 to 2024 were not checked.

Checked on 2026-11-06 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Among themselves the Garo use the names A·chik, 'hill man', and Mande, 'man'. Playfair (1909) thought the name Garo came from the Gara or Ganching, the southern division whom outsiders met first; another account derives it from Garu, a leader of the migration. Shuvash Jengcham, writing in Banglapedia, says that Garos regard the name Garo as one imposed by others and prefer to be called A·chik Mande. Garo tradition, as Playfair recorded it, tells of a migration from a land called Torua in Tibet under two chiefs, Jappa-Jalimpa and Sukpa-Bongipa, down to the plains of the Brahmaputra, west again to the Goalpara country, and at last into the hills; the tribe split into its divisions on that journey. Playfair called it a legend.

History

According to the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, zamindars of Mechpara and Karaibari led expeditions into the Garo Hills in 1775 and 1776, the first contact with the British came in 1788, and the hills came under British administration in 1873. After annexation the British formed a body of laskars, rural police and honorary magistrates who settled minor disputes in village meetings, which Playfair describes as an adaptation of the old village conference. The American Baptist mission worked from Tura; in Bangladesh, Baptist and Catholic missions opened at Birishiri and Ranikhong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the census of 1901 Playfair counted 160,436 Garo, 103,538 of them in the Garo Hills district. The Garo Hills are now in Meghalaya, formed in 1972.

Faith and Worship

The traditional Garo religion, whose followers are called Songsarek, recognises many spirits. Playfair (1909) names Tatara-Rabuga as the creator, at whose command the world was made; Saljong, the spirit of fertility represented by the sun, in whose honour the Wangala is held; and Goera, the spirit of strength and of thunder. Offerings of animals and rice-beer are made through a kamal, a priest, whose office Jengcham describes as open to anyone with the knowledge, not hereditary. Most Garo are now Christian; in Bangladesh, Jengcham writes, Catholics outnumber Baptists.

Customs

Playfair records that a proposal of marriage must come from the woman's side, not the man's, except when a daughter is given to her father's sister's son, who then becomes the nokrom of the house. Marriage within one's own chatchi was a social sin, though he was told that nearly one marriage in ten broke the rule. A widow may be provided with a new husband from her late husband's machong, so that the tie between the two machongs, called akim in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, continues. Young men did not live with their parents but slept in the nokpante, the bachelors' house, where strangers stayed and the elders met. The dead were cremated in the open square of the village, and memorial posts (kima) were set up under the eaves of the house.

Festivals

Stories and Legends