by Ira Trivedi
Despite the liberal attitude towards marriage, there are certain downsides, Kong Pat explains. Amongst the Khasis, there is an increasing number of abandoned women and single mother households. Even though a large percentage of the population is Christian, including Kong Pat herself, Khasi traditions are followed and there are no provisions for maintenance in Khasi law if the man deserts the mother of his child. In the olden days, the kur (clan) was responsible for all of its members, but in modern-day society, the kur doesn’t perform these functions. Kong Pat has been deserted by two men, the fathers of her first two children, and now is on the board of an organization which is pushing for laws making formal registration of marriage mandatory so that women can get maintenance for their children from deserter husbands
Kong Pat tells me that live-in relationships are common amongst the Khasis today. She believes that it is a positive thing, and she encourages all her children to do this before they get married. She talks to me about a discussion she had with her daughter-in-law regarding infidelity in marriage. Her daughter-in-law says that she would never be able to accept her husband being with another woman. ‘It is natural that at certain point in time a man looks at other women for stimulation, be it intellectual or emotional. Suppose a man has a girlfriend, but supports you, maintains you, what is the problem then? This has been Khasi society in the past. Many men have had three-four wives. In our times, we were more open-minded, not because we had to be, but because we wanted to be,’ she says firmly.
What about the other way around? Would it be okay for a woman to take another partner?
‘Why not!’ says Kong Pat. ‘I am the best example of this. It is all about understanding and openness between two partners, which did exist in the Khasi culture of the past before we had Christian guilt and Hindu obsession with purity enter our culture.’
I ask Kong Pat about the influence of Christianity on Khasi life. She considers, then explains, ‘Christianity here is skin-deep. It may affect the religious practices that we follow, but many Khasis become Christians at the end of their lives, maybe just to make sure they get a spot to get buried. Not all is bad, there have been many positive influences such as education and healthcare but the missionaries tried to impose a certain way of life that wasn’t the original Khasi way of life. Our tribal culture is intrinsically open and non-judgmental. Christianity is all about judgment and sin. The only thing that Khasi culture says is that the man should not have an affair while his wife is pregnant, because she then may have trouble in delivering the child.’
On sex, Kong Pat simply says that Khasis have always been able to sexually express themselves, whether it is through their mating rites, dances or songs. Khasis regard sexual repression as the worst form of repression, and instances of rape, sexual harassment, and eve teasing, commonplace elsewhere in the country, especially in the ‘rogue’ states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are unheard of here. Women are highly respected, and problems of female foeticide and infanticide are unimaginable amongst the Khasis who celebrate the birth of a daughter. Kong Pat has recently lost her youngest daughter, the khadduh, to a heart condition. As she speaks about her daughter, whose picture in a frilly, white wedding gown hangs on the wall with a rosary strung around it, she maintains a steady expression despite the sadness creeping into her voice. ‘Sometimes we can’t associate with Indians, maybe that is why we feel like we aren’t really one of them. We don’t understand how people in the rest of this country can kill their daughters. Here, our daughters are more precious to us than even our sons.’
It seems like the liberal ways of the Khasis are leading to a certain number of problems in these modern times. Some months ago, there was a brouhaha in Delhi over the suicide of a Northeastern student—Dana Sangma. It received extensive media coverage because Dana was the niece of Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma. Dana’s suicide was one in a series of recent suicides amongst Northeastern college students allegedly due to discrimination and harassment. The police are finally taking action, putting together a plan to protect female students from the Northeast.
I ask Kong Pat about this suicide and she speaks to me passionately, since she, like many Northeastern women who leave their homeland, has been subject to discrimination. Kong Pat explains to me that the economies of Northeastern states like Meghalaya are struggling and job opportunities are nearly non-existent, so young people look for jobs in the mainland where they are coveted since they speak English well and are well-turned-out. When they arrive on the Indian mainland, Northeastern women act like they do back home, freely and openly interacting with men, conducting sexual affairs, and this often leads to teasing and harassment. There is a strong prejudice against women from the Northeast in many parts of the mainland leading to a lot of strife, and in some extreme situations like Dana, even suicide.
In Shillong too, the free mixing of the sexes in Khasi society has led to problems recently. Teenage pregnancy has soared, and maternal mortality and abortion rates are higher than they have ever been. Kong Pat fears that the Khasis are becoming increasingly licentious and that Khasi youth are abusing the ‘freeness’ of the traditional culture by having too many sexual partners.
I ponder over my conversation with Kong Pat as I walk to my next meeting. In Shillong I have been walking everywhere, trading in the flats that I normally walk in for a pair of unfashionable but comfortable sneakers, which I need to navigate the precarious traffic and to trudge up the exhausting winding roads. I realize that there is a certain amount of truth to what Kong Pat said about society here being open. I notice that young people mingle freely, men and women hold hands in public, and this seems to be the norm. As I walk, I am surrounded by many young people, men and women in equal numbers, dressed in the latest fashions, skinny jeans, tight, brightly coloured t-shirts, and high heels. In my linen pants and kurta, I feel like a troll in front of these fashionistas. I am also fascinated by how these young people traverse the steep streets with alarming dexterity in their trendy, inexpensive and more likely than not, ergonomically incorrect shoes.
I think back to my extensive travels, from Kashmir, the northern-most state of India, to Kanyakumari, the southern-most tip, and I realize that I have never felt as safe, or as comfortable walking around as I do here in Shillong. There are no men bumping into me, groping my behind, or brushing past me and ‘accidentally’ touching me. There are no prying stares, looks that are often more threatening than touches, even though I look distinctly different from anyone on the streets, standing a foot above most here. They don’t need to segregate men and women for fear of violence or harassment, because that culture of fear and segregation which is entrenched in so many Indian cities, simply does not exist.
On a recent trip to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, I was shocked because I didn’t see women anywhere. I calculated that the ratio of men to women on the streets was something like thirty-five men for one woman. I had stopped to buy a bottle of water and asked the man behind the counter where the women were. He looked at me as if I were dim-witted and replied, ‘At home, where they should be. Where else would they be?’
♦
Mervin’s features are strikingly different from most Northeasterners. He is Kong Pat’s son with her third husband, the Tamil pilot, and he looks more South Indian than Northeastern. The feature that sets most people from this region apart is their almond-shaped eyes, but Mervin’s are round as saucers. Kong Pat has sent me across to meet her thirty-year-old son to find out more about how young Khasis deal with their relationships. I meet him on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, a newly set up branch of the premier Indian business school, where Mervin is the head of Public Relations.
The term has not yet started, and the campus is deserted. It has just rained, and the lush campus is a dazzling emerald green. Mervin is a warm young man, and he talks to me about his relationship. His wife is a khadduh, the youngest daughter, so after he started dating her four years ago, he moved into her family home. Th
ey had a daughter two years later, and only formally married six months ago. I ask him if moving in with his in-laws into a joint family, where his wife’s siblings lived under the same roof, was problematic for him. Mervin tells me that it was, but he had little choice in this matter, as this is an age-old tradition. He adds that marrying the youngest daughter is a major responsibility since she is expected to take care of her parents and the well-being of her home and family, unlike the rest of India where the woman moves into the man’s home to take care of his family.
I ask Mervin what young people from his community and peer group think about love, marriage and sex. Mervin estimates that close to 50 per cent of the people he knows are living together with their partners and children, though they are not formally married. In his own case too, he was married only after the birth of his first child. He explains that the single biggest problem in the area is sex education. Like the rest of the country, there is no sex education here, but unlike the rest of the country, there is no stigma attached to sex. This has led to major problems of unplanned pregnancy. The church is trying to launch sex education programmes, but they are sporadic and ill-planned.
Mervin suggests that we visit Father Cella, who runs the Don Bosco Youth Centre, the largest youth centre in the area, to find out more. Mervin and I navigate the narrow winding streets and the traffic of Shillong, and fetch up at the youth centre, which sits in the heart of town and is a hub of Shillong’s social and spiritual activity.
Father Cella came to India from Malta in 1956 as a member of the Catholic Church with a mission to convert tribal Khasis following their indigenous Seng Khasi religion to Catholicism. He started the youth centre twenty years ago. Here he offers everything from Sunday church service to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, to music classes. To counter the burgeoning problem of teenage pregnancy, Father Cella has recently started sex education classes. He immediately hands me a pile of flimsy safe sex brochures, which he keeps handy to give to all young people.
‘We are taking the worst of the West,’ says Father Cella.’ I am not sure where we are heading, but at the moment the situation is looking grimmer than in my fifty-six years in this country,’ adds the eighty-five-year-old pastor. ‘The last time this sort of change happened was when the British came and conversion happened, but that change was gentle compared to this one.’
Father Cella explains to me with a defeated look in his old eyes that there has been a steady deterioration of Khasi culture over the past decade, especially in the past five years. Alcohol and premarital sex are the two biggest problems, leading to teenage pregnancies and depression. According to Meren Lonkumer et al., the internet and mobile phones have worsened the situation by providing easy access to pornography and sex-related material. The lethal brew of unhindered and unrestrained access to alcohol and women (since mixing between the two sexes is not taboo) is such a heady concoction that teenage or premarital sex is a natural progression, often with disastrous consequences.263
Father Cella tells me that according to the Khasi tradition, the clan would take responsibility for orphans, the destitute and old people. Today, babies are being abandoned and orphanages have sprung up, there are old age homes because people have migrated, leaving their elderly parents behind. These are problems that were never meant to exist in the Khasi culture, but they have become endemic today.
The repercussions of modernity have been dire for the Khasis, and Mervin tells me that to understand the thrust of the problems I must speak with a member of the SRT or Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (Association for New Hearths), an organization formed in 1990 whose main objective is to change the Khasi system from a matrilineal to a patrilineal one, something that a few tribes in India, like the Nairs of Kerala have done to cope with the challenges of modern times.
♦
On a blistering hot day, I set out to meet with a senior member of the SRT who has chosen to remain anonymous.
‘Do you wonder why the men here drink here so much—why alcoholism is such a problem?’ says the squat, rubicund man with a fiery attitude. I say yes, this was something that I had indeed wondered about. Alcoholism is a major problem in Shillong, and much of the Northeast, where levels of alcohol consumption are some of the highest in the country.
He flutters his hands like two birds in flight, spits out the betel that he has been chewing and inserts another leaf into his mouth. ‘The men feel useless. We don’t have any dignity in this culture,’ he says.
‘That’s why our society has become so screwed up. Our great Khasi race, and the women (sic) have been through its heyday. Earlier Khasi men were hunters, they were often killed in the jungles, so it made sense to leave everything to a woman. We aren’t hunters no more, so we want our rights back!’
The main complaint of the SRT is that there is no centre of real authority in the modern Khasi family and that the father is not respected since he is not related by flesh and blood to his wife’s clan. The SRT argues that the role of the father is crucial because he gives not only his personality and dignity to his children, but also his flesh and blood through procreation. The issue of property succession too has become an important one since, according to Khasi law, only a woman is allowed to inherit property. If a family does not have a daughter, they either adopt a girl, or pass on the property to the youngest daughter of the mother’s sister.
He launches into a fiery diatribe. ‘The Indian government shouldn’t be imposing any laws on us Khasis. What do they know? We are not the same as the Indians. We are totally different, our origin is different, we think differently. They call us chinky, those Indians. We are more like the Chinese, or maybe the Koreans. The Korean culture is really popular amongst the youth here.’
I ask him, because I cannot resist the question, if he has met any Chinese or Korean people.
He croaks out a ‘No’ and then adds, ‘But I don’t really care. We are like them.’
Before I leave, hurrying, because this man seems to be in a violent mood, he says to me with an angry look on his face.
‘Times have changed. Meghalaya has changed, and we Khasis must change with the times.’
SOULMATE
Growing up, Tipriti didn’t know she was beautiful. As a recalcitrant student in Shillong and later at boarding school at Kalimpong, Darjeeling, she thought she was ugly, so ugly that she pretended to be a boy. She dressed in loose jeans and muscle shirts. Her hair was cropped to the skull, and she sported a skinny rat-tail. At nineteen, when she met Rudy Wallang at his recording studio to record a hymn for a pastor, her life took an unexpected turn. From a gospel singer at church, she became a back-up singer in Rudy’s band Mojo, and in less than a year she was the lead vocalist for Soulmate, the Blues band she formed with her own soulmate, mentor, lover, best friend, and father-figure, Rudy Wallang.
Tipriti ‘Tips’ Kharbangar is a well-known face of the Indian music scene. She is the face of Blues band Soulmate, the poster child of Shillong. Tips’s beauty stuns me. Her long hair is dark golden-brown, the colour of a bay mare’s glossy coat, a relic of her Scottish ancestry. Her skin is fairer than the Khasi ivory, and her strawberry shaped mouth is stained a deep red from the betel that she chews. Her most magnificent features though are her eyes. They are large, a deep chocolate brown, and lined with thick, dark kohl. The look in her eyes is wild. I can’t figure out what it is—unbridled hope, fear, or grief. I am intrigued by this young Khasi woman, a role model for all the other young Khasi women around, and want to understand her perspective on relationships. As I spend time with Tips, in her home, in the cafes she frequents, during Soulmate practice sessions, and with her friends and family, I realize that it isn’t easy or joyful being a woman in Khasi society. On the surface it may seem like a lovely, free place where young people, especially women, can do as they like in their relationships, but underneath the shiny veneer lurks a different story.
‘I’ve got the blues real bad,’ Tips tells me with an acerbic laugh. She adds, ‘I had a traumatic childho
od, that’s where I get my blues from, and they are deeper than anyone else’s I know.’
As her parents’ only daughter, Tips is the khadduh. She tells me that being a khadduh doesn’t mean that you are brought up like a princess. Instead, she was brought up like a boy and was expected to take care of her family, which she does today. She has built the small hilltop house with her earnings from music, where she lives with her family.
‘We didn’t have a normal childhood. While other kids were playing, my brother and I were bleeding in a corner,’ she says talking about the abuse from her alcoholic father.
‘I was a tomboy because it was easier going through what I did being a boy. Being a girl, I couldn’t handle it. In school, all the boys were scared of me. I felt that I was ugly, that no one liked me. When I met Rudy, I was still a boy. It’s only after I met him, after he told me that I was beautiful that I became interested in myself, in doing up my face before gigs, in looking like a girl. Now I can say that I’m a woman,’ says Tips with a fierce expression in her eyes.
However ‘modern’ Shillong appeared to be, relationships in Khasi society weren’t simple. The first thing that Tips tells me about Rudy is that he is a wonderful father, and that she is envious of the way he treats his children, the eldest of whom is just a few years younger than her. Her own childhood is scarred by memories of her drunken father, and she is fascinated by Rudy’s love for his children. She doesn’t blame her father for what he did. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know how to be a father, or how to treat her because he had never had a father. Her father never met the Scottish army man who gave his mother three children and then left in 1947 when the British left India, never to come back again