Jamatia

Clans and Kinship

The Jamatia marry within the community and are patrilineal in descent, inheritance and succession (Bhattacharjee 1995). They have no exogamous clans: they say all of them belong to the Kashyapa gotra, but marry within it, so that the gotra has no practical meaning. Relatives in the father's line, those who may perform the sraddha and offer the funeral cake, are santay; other kin are more distant. The community is governed by the hada, the supreme council, through three levels: the luku, the village council of the Jamatia households of a village, headed by the chakdiri; the mayal, the regional council, headed by the mayal panchay; and the hada itself under the hada akra, with an advisory committee of eight members (upadesta) drawn from the whole community. Officials must be married and of settled means, can be removed by the members, and are chosen without the votes of women, whom custom keeps out of the councils. The hada settles disputes, including divorce, and its annual meeting fixes the village for the Garia puja. Adoption of children by childless couples and ceremonial friendship are both common.

No clan list is given because the Jamatia have no exogamous clans (Bhattacharjee 1995): they all claim the Kashyapa gotra and marry within it. Older lists placed the Jamatia themselves among the septs or dafa of the wider Tipperah people (Hutchinson 1906; Das, Choudhury and Tripura 2011).

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Tripura

Checked against a compilation of the Order and the Census 2011 table for Tripura; amendments of 2022 to 2024 were not checked.

Checked on 2026-11-07 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

Bhattacharjee (1995) sets out the explanations of the name. The most common derives it from jamat, an Arabic word for an assembly: the Jamatia were soldiers of the Tripura kings, drawn from several hill peoples, above all the Tripuri, who lived in camps and in time became a tribe of their own; Somendra Chandra Debbarma and Omesh Saigal took this view. The Jamatia themselves explain it from jama, tax, and a Kokborok word meaning 'not to bear': people freed from tax for their military service, which Bhattacharjee doubts, since nineteenth-century records show them paying the same house tax as the Tripuri. Some elders tell that their hero Pubnarayan brought the image of Garia from the Kukis of Thanangchi and gave it to the king, who ordered it to be worshipped by an assembly, a jamayet. Bhattacharjee concludes that the Jamatia took shape as a separate people in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, when Arabic words entered Tripura through contact with the sultans of Bengal and Dhanya Manikya (1490 to 1515) organised his army on their model.

History

Hutchinson (1906) described the Tipperahs of the Chittagong Hill Tracts as of two classes, the Puran and the Jamatia. Bhattacharjee (1995) records that, by the account of Jamatia elders, the hada changed under Maharaja Birchandra Manikya (1862 to 1897): from then the akras, its chiefs, were nominated by the king's brothers, and the hada akra received from the king a rope and a cane as signs of his authority, which the office still keeps. Nomination later gave way to indirect election by the community. Ploughing has largely replaced jhum, and the Jamatia weave most of their own cloth. The 1981 census made them the third largest tribe of Tripura, 7.63 per cent of its tribal people.

Faith and Worship

Bhattacharjee (1995) describes the Jamatia as Hindus who revere the tulsi plant, wear the sacred thread and go on pilgrimage, and who also worship local deities such as Shani, Sitala and Saraswati. They keep their own pujas, Garia, Lampra, Ker, Gang, Naksu and Maylwngma among them, led by their own priests, the ochai, of several grades. The images of the deities are made of green bamboo, set out in particular ways for each deity. Garia has two images, the Biyakwrwy and the Biyagwnang, each kept all year by a hereditary keeper, the kherfang, from its own lineage, in whose courtyard the puja is held; the Biyagwnang lineage is traced to the Kukis of Thanangchi. The chief priest of the Garia puja, the ochai, is not a hereditary office.

Deities named in the sources: Garia

Customs

Marriages are usually arranged by the parents. Bhattacharjee (1995) records three forms: the oldest, in which the groom lives and works in the bride's house for a time before the wedding; one in which the bride is brought to the groom's house and married there; and a newer one, in which the groom goes to the bride's house for the wedding and returns with her. The bride is often older than the groom. The dharmagola, a traditional co-operative, plays a large part in village economic life, and households exchange labour (yagul) and share-crop land (baga).

Festivals

Stories and Legends