A woman's world - Meghalaya, India; matrilineal culture

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1995 by Thomas Laird, Michael Victor

"The rise in frustration is due to unemployment. We need a firm policy from the government. Changing our culture will not make a difference in this area."

Judy Schullai agrees that the Khasi culture needs to protect itself from the plainsmen, but suggests that the issues of land ownership and immigration are being used by the KSU and the Societal Restructuring Association as means to gain power.

"There might be one or two bad cases where a man came up from the plains and cheated the system, but in most cases where these men have married Khasi women, they have settled and brought up their children here and looked after their wives well. And, you know, in our system the children are Khasi. It is the matrilineal system that has kept our society strong. You cannot always stop people from coming in, but when their children become Khasi, that shows the strength of our society, doesn't it?"

"If we were patrilineal, then every outsider coming in here to marry would have `polluted' our bloodline. In the current system, we simply absorb outsiders."

ON MY LAST NIGHT in Meghalaya, I went to a traditional dance outside of Shillong, in a village whose people are still strongly matrilineal. Many still subscribe to the pre-Christian faith. As the dance began, the endless rhythm of Khasi culture emerged. The unmarried women danced slowly in long lines, at the center of the circle; the young men and boys pranced around the edges, in a warrior protection dance. The men and women never touched. They clearly danced to different beats within the same melody: the two halves of life moving differently to the same rhythm.

Such dances are used for the women to display their wealth and attract potential husbands. Yet they are dances of Khasi life: the women sustaining and cultivating the center of life, of their universe, while the men fiercely guard the fount of life.

A priest described the basic tenets of the dance and Khasi culture.

"Our tradition has been like this since time immemorial. The mother is the source of life. God has bestowed upon her this power. We should respect that and follow her lineage. The mother is the source of everything and so we must follow this system."

Leaving the dance I pondered this and wondered about something that Roshan Lyngdoh, a young student, had told me: We can't change tradition.

"How can we change tradition that has been around thousands of years? Most probably we'd lose our culture."

His question goes to the heart of the matter. In this women's world, men face the same struggle for equality as women elsewhere in the world. What parallel can one draw when a traditional matrilineal society defends its advantages with the same arguments as those used by male-dominant societies to defend theirs? Perhaps the questions raised by Khasi culture are ones of human conditioning, rather than of gender.