Return to Rengsanggri

Robbins Burling

University of Michigan

Technology, Work, and the Physical Village.

I first traveled to the Garo Hills in the western part the what is now the state of Meghalaya in 1954. I lived there for two years, for much of that time among the people of a village called Rengsanggri. This village lies about 20 kilometers northeast of the town of Tura, and it was there that I gathered the material that became the basis for my PhD dissertation in anthropology and, later, a book (Burling 1963). Living in the Garo Hills and coming to know the Garo people and their language was one of the most exciting adventures of my life, but in 1956 I returned to my home in the United States, and for almost two decades I hardly thought about the possibility of returning. When, in the 1970's, I finally did try to go back, unsettled conditions in northeastern India had made visits very difficult for foreigners, and I had to wait for two more decades until my opportunity finally came. Then, from the end of December 1996 through most of February 1997, more than forty years after I had finished my original field work, I was able to visit Rengsanggri once again. I could see that extensive changes had come to the village in the forty years that I had been away, but I was at least as impressed by the continuities that had persisted through all those years. I want to describe both the changes and the continuities that I found.

The Rengsanggri that I knew in the fifties was a relatively conservative village in a relatively conservative part of the Garo Hills. Indeed, it was its conservatism that led me to choose it as the site of my field work. Wet rice had already come to many parts of the district by the fifties, but in Rengsanggri and in the surrounding villages all the people still supported themselves entirely by slash and burn agriculture. Nor had Christianity or education made an appearance in Rengsanggri. Religious life centered on the ritual sacrifice of animals and no one living in the village had had a single day of formal schooling. A few people could, laboriously, write their names, but no one could do more. No one could read. Except for words that had been securely borrowed into the Garo language and accepted as Garo words, nobody in the village knew more than a dozen words from any language but Garo.

In all these respects, the Rengsanggri that I found in 1997 was a radically changed community. Wet rice, Christianity, education, literacy, and even other languages had all reached the village. At the same time, much remained familiar. In the forty years that I had been away, many people had died, of course, but some of my contemporaries still lived to welcome me back, and the older people who had died had been replaced by their children and grandchildren. These people dealt with me, and they seemed to deal with each other, in much the same way as they had forty years earlier. They organized their families much as they had when I first knew them, and in the essentials of life, they remained resiliently the same. I will begin this paper by describing the changes that have come to Rengsanggri, and that are certainly startling to a visitor who returns after forty years, but I will then turn to the continuities that I found just as impressive.

The most obvious change that had come to the village during my long absence was the dispersal of the households across its entire land area (a'king). Every one of the sixty households that constituted Rengsanggri in the 1950's was located in a single well defined central location. The village had taken its name from a tumbling stream that flows beside it and that is called the "Rengsanggri", and a mile of unsettled territory separated the settlement from the nearest village, Songmagri, to the south. In other directions, settlements lay even farther away. By 1997, the sixty households of the earlier village had multiplied to 105, but only twenty-six of them, about one quarter, were still found at the site of the old village. The other seventy-nine households were scattered over much of the village land. The villagers described these households as belonging to eight or nine named hamlets (git-im), and if a map of the village existed, it would show the houses to be partially grouped into clusters that corresponded to these hamlets. Many of the houses were grouped within calling distance of one another, but they were rarely as close as the houses of the old village had been forty years earlier, and a few outlying homesteads were quite isolated. Indeed, the houses were so scattered that the boundaries that separated the hamlets were not always obvious on the ground and not always unambiguous even in the descriptions of the villagers. Different villagers occasionally assigned a house near a hamlet boundary to different hamlets, and near the better defined border that is still recognized to divide Rengsanggri from Songmagri, the houses on both sides were so close that if people had not told me I would not have known where one village ended and the next began. One small cluster of households that was generally regarded as a part of a hamlet called "Wakagri" had even acquired a name of its own, and people sometimes talked as if it had become a separate hamlet.

Villagers told me that a few families had begun to move their homesteads away from the site of the old village about 20 years before my return visit, probably during the 1970's. It was then that a few of the more enterprising villagers began to construct permanent fields in low areas where wet rice could be grown. Some people also began to plant pineapple gardens and, a bit later, tea gardens. All these crops are grown on permanent fields. Villagers had always built temporary field houses on their slash and burn plots where, during the periods of most intense farming, they could live for a few days, and so avoid long daily walks back and forth from the main village. Their field houses were small and temporary, however, and they were never occupied for more than a week at a time. When villagers began to construct permanent fields, some of them moved to live permanently beside them. In the nineties, a few people looked back nostalgically to the days when everyone lived together. They remembered those times as more friendly, and they recalled with joy the village festivals that were once held in the old central village. Still, no one proposes that people should move back. The residential pattern of Rengsanggri has irrevocably changed.

Architectural style has also changed. By 1997, only one house in Rengsanggri was still built in the style that I remembered from my earlier trip. That one house, like the older ones, still had a central fire place in the main room, and a separate room at the front that would once have served as a barn for the cattle. Even in that house, people no longer cooked at the central fire place. Instead, they prepared their meals in the front room and kept their cattle in a separate building. The main room, moreover, had chairs, benches, and even a bedstead such as were never seen in the Rengsanggri of my memories, but the building itself was a perfect example of the old style. It belonged to one of the few remaining non-Christian families, and it seemed right that it was located within the site of the old village.

Other village houses had different plans. It had become fashionable to have the main door in the middle of a long wall of the house instead of at the narrow end where it had always been placed before. This required a more level plot than the older houses where only the narrow front end had to be at ground level. Most houses were still constructed from bamboo, and many were built with the same construction techniques as older houses, but some had new types of bamboo mat walls, some had tin roofs, and a few were built, in part or entirely, from wooden planks. In 1997, one man was building the walls for a new building from mud. There were even a half dozen very small masonry houses that, with government funding, had been built for widows

In the 1950's everyone cooked at the central fireplace in the main house. By 1997, most people had separate cook houses. Houses are more comfortable without the smoke of a fire, especially if people sit high on chairs and benches instead of on the floor or on low stools as they invariably did in the 1950's, but without the smoke of the cooking fires, houses also lose the protection that smoke gives against destructive insects. On cold winter mornings people still gathered companionably close to each other, close to a fire and close to the ground, just as they always had, but they gathered around the fires in their cook houses rather than around the central fireplaces of their main houses.

I was startled by the dispersal of the houses around the old village land, but this was only the most obvious reflection of the more fundamental changes that have been taking place in agriculture. When I took my census in 1956, 293 people lived in Rengsanggri. By January 1997, the population had climbed to 673. The land area of the village remained the same, of course, and the older slash and burn agriculture was incapable of yielding sufficient food to feed the growing population. New fields were needed each year, and this forced people to clear and burn scrub land before the forest cover had a chance to regenerate the soil's fertility. By 1997, hardly any real forest remained within the boundaries of Rengsanggri. Every family still cleared and burned a plot each year but, as everyone was all too grimly aware, their harvests had declined disastrously. The slash and burn fields no longer yielded enough rice to feed a family. The most important cash crop had once been cotton, but it did poorly by the nineties and was little grown. People told me that chili peppers and some tubers could still be grown successfully. Ginger does especially well, and much is sold to traders in the market, but the traditional agriculture can no longer support the village.

Rengsanggri has been saved from disaster by the new agriculture of permanent fields: wet rice, pineapples, tea, and some areca nuts, but permanent fields were less evenly distributed among the population than the fields of shifting cultivation once were. The people of a few enterprising households had been clever enough to seize a new opportunity and to invest the labor needed to construct rice fields and to plant gardens. Others have lagged behind. Villagers told me that only eight or ten households of the 105 in Rengsanggri had enough irrigated land to supply all the rice that their families needed. Another dozen or so had smaller amounts of irrigated land. Most had none. Only five households had tea gardens. More had pineapple gardens but even pineapples were grown by only a minority of the villagers. Government agencies have distributed seedlings for orange and cashew trees but these had not yet sufficiently matured to yield significant income to anyone in Rengsanggri. Many households had no permanent fields at all.

Several of the households that have adapted most successfully to the new agriculture had already been among the village's more prosperous households forty years earlier. Perhaps their relatively ample resources allowed them to invest, or to hire, the labor that was needed to level the fields, plant the crops, and wait out the years until their investment paid off. In 1997 many villagers told me that they were planting permanent gardens of one sort on another, or planning to do so. They could all see that permanent gardens offered the best agricultural opportunity for the future, but it is difficult to know how many of their plans will be carried out. Some of the plans seemed quite vague--little more than a wishful nod in the direction that they felt would be sensible.

Villagers were free to plant permanent crops on any land that was not already in use. Village men with title of "nokma" hold a kind of title to plots of village land, but they hold it in trust for the villagers, all of whom are free to use it even if that makes it unavailable for later shifting cultivation. By 1997 the amount of land that had been converted to permanent fields was not great, probably less than 5% of the total village property. The best spots for wet rice had already been claimed, however, and it is not clear whether terraces can be constructed that climb up the hill sides. Some families have already missed the best opportunities. Permanent land ownership has already given a decisive economic advantage to the households who have seized the chance. Their houses are larger, their food supply more certain, their possessions more numerous, and they have sufficient surplus to invest in their children's education.

When first constructed, ownership of permanent fields is not formally recognized by the government, but the villagers recognize planting as conferring effective rights to the land. Eventually, the district government was expected to send in a surveyor to map the plots and register them in the owner's name. This is a bit of a mixed blessing, since once the land is registered the owner must start to pay tax. Nevertheless, registration secures the right to use the land and people were generally quite willing to pay the tax in return for this official recognition of ownership. Most permanent land in Rengsanggri was not yet formally registered in the name of the cultivator, but people took it for granted that it eventually would be.

People with no permanent fields survived by cultivating their shifting plots, by working for their more fortunate neighbors, or by obtaining wage work outside the village. A very few were able to sharecrop on someone else's land, but most owners work their own fields and are unwilling to give it out on shares, so the opportunities for sharecropping were limited. More people were able to work for others as day laborers. My visit to Rengsanggri in 1997 was too short to give me a clear idea of the extent of wage work within the village, but many people told me that day labor was their main source of income. Even forty years earlier, people sometimes worked for a few days on the fields of their richer neighbors, but at that time laborers were more often paid in rice than in money. Working for others has certainly become more common.

Wage work outside the village constitutes a more radical change from earlier practice than working for fellow villagers. In 1997, one villager had a responsible job with the government's soil department. At least two had menial jobs in the neighboring settlement of Asonanggri where there are shops, schools, and government offices. I was told about a number of other people who had taken work in Asonanggri, Tura, or other places and who had moved permanently away from Rengsanggri. Among those who still count Rengsanggri as their home, a number of men have also had periods of work in the coal mines that have opened in the southern part of the Garo Hills. The men stay at the mines for as much as several months at a time, but then return home. Some have cut coal and some have worked as carriers. They are paid by the amount they cut or carry, and I was told that a carrier who works hard can earn as much as Rs. 100 per day. A skillful cutter can earn even more. This is high pay when compared with the Rs. 35 per day that is the government mandated wage for menial labor in the village.

Even in the 1950's Rengsanggri families differed in their wealth, but nobody had permanent rights to their fields so nobody had the security that is conferred by permanent land ownership. Everyone could hope that, with enough hard work, they could build up their resources and join the more prosperous families. By 1997, a minority of families had secure income from permanent fields. The poorest families seemed no poorer in 1997 than those I remembered from 1956, but the gap between rich and poor had certainly grown. That must give a sense of greater poverty to the poorest families.

The new forms of agriculture and the new pattern of settlement were the most dramatic of the visible changes that had come to Rengsanggri during my forty year absence, but modern technology had arrived in a number of other forms. First came the road. In the fifties, the closest motorable road passed through the market town of Rongram, a five kilometer walk to the northwest. During the years that I was there, however, a new road began to be cut that went right past the village. That road later became a part of the paved highway that connects Tura to the town of Williamnagar in the eastern part of the Garo Hills. In 1997, cars, trucks and busses passed just below the site of the old village. Villagers generally still walked to Rongram, but they occasionally took a bus, and the road brought many more outsiders to Rengsanggri than had ever came before it was built.

Other changes were more recent. In about 1991, a water supply system was built by a government department. From a collecting place on Arbela hill above the village, pipes, often leaking at the joints, brought water to a number of points around the old village, and even to many of the outlying hamlets. This greatly eased the burden on the women, who once had to carry all of their household water from one of the streams that flowed past the village. Water still had to be fetched from one of the taps, but these were generally much closer than a stream.

Three or four years before my 1997 visit, electric wires had followed the water pipes to Rengsanggri. Long distance wires could be seen crossing the hills, and local distribution wires were draped through the village bringing power for a few light bulbs into the majority of Rengsanggri homes. Some villagers received subsided electric connections, and some paid the installation charges. Still others told me that the installation charges were high enough to have discouraged them from seeking a connection. The idea that an electric motor might do the work of human muscle had not yet come to Rengsanggri, but seven households had TV sets, the only purpose, except for light bulbs, for which I saw electricity used. Early one morning, high on Arbela hill to the east of the old village, I was treated to American sports news, courtesy of CNN.

The Rongram river passes just below the site of the old village, and a concrete foot bridge was built to span it, probably in 1994. Almost half the villagers now live in hamlets that lie across the river from the old village. Lines of stepping stones at convenient points make it is easy to cross the river during the dry season, but during the rainy season the bridge must make it much easier to move from one part of the village to another. Narrow dirt roads that are motorable with care have also been built that join the scattered parts of the village more securely than before. In early 1996, a dirt road was cut all the way to the most remote hamlet of the village. No vehicle bridge crosses the river to connect this dirt road to the paved road on the other side, however, and I do not know how the single jeep that is reported to have reached the hamlet managed to make the crossing. In December 1996, twenty-five villagers were hired by a government department to work for five days at Rs. 35 per day to cut a road from the paved road up through the center of the old village. Until some future monsoon washes hopeless ruts into this road, a car will be able reach nearly to the top of the old village.

Other bits of new technology and new materials were easy to find. Most houses were still thatched, but a substantial number had tin roofs. Four families owned bicycles and many more owned transistor radios. All but the poorest families had chairs where they once had only low stools, and most had tables, long benches with backs and arms, and even bedsteads. Calendars adorned many walls and some, with their colorful pictures of flowers, mountain vistas, or chubby babies, were allowed to hang for several years after their time had passed. Many people cannot yet read a calendar, but they are hung for their pictures so an outdated calendar is as good as a new one. Some families had several identical calendars with pictures of a smiling Purno Sangma, the most successful of all Garo politicians, who was at the time the speaker of the lower house of the national parliament. A few displayed photographs of family members.

Recognizing the many technological changes, I was impressed by the absence of plastic and the absence of litter. Just how the garish plastic objects that are so common in many parts of South and Southeast Asia have been kept away from Rengsanggri, I do not know. Perhaps the villagers find them as ugly as I do. The villagers were also able to keep the village surprisingly free of the debris of modern materials. The wrappers and broken artifacts that refuse to rot, and that litter the towns and cities of India, were rarely seen in Rengsanggri. Most houses were still built of bamboo, and their unpainted natural color made them fit comfortably into the landscape. For all its changes, Rengsanggri still looked like a village.

Education.

Less visible than the changes in settlement pattern and agriculture, but at least as important in the lives of the people, have been the changes that have come in religion and in education. Christianity and formal education have come together in Rengsanggri, just as they have come together everywhere in the Garo Hills.

When I first arrived in Rengsanggri in the 1950's, no villager had had any formal education, and no one had adopted Christianity. Everyone in the village and everyone in the surrounding villages still practiced the traditional Songsarek religion. Change was soon to come, however, for the first school teacher was sent to Rengsanggri by the District government during the time I was working there. For an hour or so each morning, a few village children would assemble at the little rest house that villagers maintained for visitors. These children received the first introduction to the alphabet and had the first taste of literacy that had come to Rengsanggri. Like all educated Garos, the teacher was a Christian, and even though he had been sent by the government, he took it for granted that, along with the rest of the curriculum, one part of his job was to teach Christianity. No child of Rengsanggri could have been called literate by the time I left in 1956, but the first steps in that direction had been taken.

When I returned forty years later, a three room masonry school building had been constructed near the road at the bottom of the old village, and almost every village child received at least a few years of schooling. 149 adults had attended school, in some cases only briefly. 122 adults (not in every case those who had attended school) claimed to be able to read, and another twenty-five said that they could read "some". An additional 153 village children and young people were still enrolled. Sixty-nine of these attended the Rengsanggri school, and about forty attended schools in Asonanggri, just to the north. The rest found their way to a dozen other schools, some in neighboring villages, some in Tura, and a few even further away. Education in the Rengsanggri village school ended with class four, so any child who wanted to continue had to go elsewhere. Many of those who attended school in Asonanggri and most of those who were studying further away were in higher classes.

The table that follows shows the spread of education in Rengsanggri. The middle column gives the number of children who were reported to be studying at each class level in early 1997. The column on the right gives the number of people who had reached each class level but who were no longer in school. The figures must be taken as approximations. Parents were not always sure about which class their own children were enrolled in, and people were sometimes vague even about exactly how far they, or others, had gone in school. Nevertheless, the figures give a rough picture of the forty year advance of formal education that began from a starting point of nothing.

Highest . .Number . . Number who

class . . .in school, had finished

reached. . 1997 . . . school

. KG . . . . 36 . . . . 20

. 1 . . . . .17 . . . . 16

. 2 . . . . . 5 . . . . 15

. 3 . . . . .11 . . . . 17

. 4 . . . . .16 . . . . 22

. 5 . . . . .13 . . . . 16

. 6 . . . . .12 . . . . 12

. 7 . . . . . 7 . . . .. 8

. 8 . . . . . 2 . . . .. 5

. 9 . . . . . 9 . . . . 10

.10 . . . . . 5 . . . . 10

.11 . . . . . 1 . . . . --

.12 . . . . . 2 . . . . --

Total: 153 149

Education represents a considerable commitment of time and energy, and it was clear that education was regarded as important. It was something to be encouraged in children. The practical goals of education were not so clear, however. Most of those who claimed the ability to read were limited to the Garo language. Children received instruction in English from an early age and a few even attended schools that were described as "English medium". Classes at all the available high schools were conducted in English so everyone who advanced as far as high school (classes 7-10) had to control some English. Very few had learned to read English easily, however, and no more than one or two people in Rengsanggri could read it easily enough to do so for pleasure. On the other hand, not enough has been published in the Garo language to encourage people to gain a reading habit. Periodicals in Garo were limited to thin weekly newspapers, and neither newspapers nor magazines in any language had become a part of village life by 1997. Reading in order to expand general knowledge or to improve skills was rare. If their years of schooling were meant to teach people to read, then the skills they gained are put to remarkably little use. The place of reading may be summed up by one man's reply to the question of whether he was able to read. He said, "I'm not sure", but then, after a thoughtful pause, he added, "It is a long time since I tried".

Deeds to land are important bits of writing and a few other written legal documents were needed from time to time. The church secretary kept detailed records of baptisms and of church members who moved into or away from Rengsanggri. Occasionally he prepared tables of figures and cut a stencil so that he could duplicate it on the machine at the high school in Asonanggri, and then inform the congregation about collections and expenditures. Perhaps the arithmetic that people learn in school helped them to calculate prices and wages, though even in the fifties, nonliterate villagers could calculate prices with a skill I found surprising. I once saw several men scrutinizing the small print, in English, on a lottery ticket. Along the road stood kilometer posts that gave distances to a number of villages, and signs were hung outside some shops in Asonanggri and in other towns. Toward the end of December, I saw a sign placed on the wall of a small tea shop in Asonanggri informing the patrons in clear Garo that rice beer would not be available on New Year's day. No such sign would have been hung up without the presumption that some people can glean information from the written word.

By the standards of the West, this amounted only to marginal literacy, but people found the symbols of literacy to be very important. They preserved old school books almost as though they were sacred objects, sometimes displayed on a table in the main room of the house. Old copy books, filled with bits of language and arithmetic drawn in painful childish handwriting, were preserved long after the school years had passed. Many people had Garo hymn books and bibles. Some could certainly read the words of the hymns, but many knew them so well that the writing served, at most, as a crutch for their memory. I doubt if many people could really read their bibles. The few bibles that I saw did not look well thumbed.

Christianity.

For all the formal education that people in Rengsanggri had achieved, the village was not yet, in 1997, much dependent on written language, but education could claim one notable achievement: the introduction of Christianity. The connection between education and Christianity was clear to everyone. Men and women who become educated also become Christians.

The first baptisms took place in Rengsanggri during the 1960's, but Christianity progressed only slowly at first. Church records and people's memories suggest that only about fifteen villagers had become Christian by the end of the sixties. A decade later, another twenty-five had joined them. Baptisms picked up somewhat in the eighties but the real turning point came only in the early nineties when more than a hundred people were baptized within a brief two year period. All but small children and the most stubbornly resistant adults had by then been baptized, and with fewer remaining non-Christians, baptisms inevitably slowed once more. Rengsanggri had become a predominantly Christian village. Many of the remaining non-Christians were older people who had never had a chance for education.

In early 1997, 541 of the 673 people of Rengsanggri could be counted as Baptists. This number includes not only those who had been baptized but also their younger children, who will almost certainly be baptized once they are old enough. Thirty-four villagers were Catholic. One woman was married to a Nepal Hindu, and although they lived far from any other household, they did live within the boundaries of Rengsanggri, so her husband was included in my census as the only Hindu. One young woman had recently married a Bengali Muslim. It was not yet clear where this couple would finally decide to live, but they were in Rengsanggri at the time of my census, so this husband is also included, the only Muslim. The remaining ninety-six people of Rengsanggri still counted themselves as Songsareks, adherents of the traditional Garo religion.

Seventy-three of the 105 households in the village were entirely Baptist. Nine had at least one Catholic member, and five of these were entirely Catholic. Twenty-four households still included at least one Songsarek, but all except seven of these included Christians as well. Where households were divided it was almost always the younger members of the family who had become Christians while the older people remained Songsarek. I had been surprised in the fifties and I was surprised again in the nineties by the lack of resistance to Christianity even on the part of old people who had resisted conversion for themselves, but whose children had been baptized. Everyone seemed to regard it as only natural that, as their children became educated, they would also become Christians. With no sign of strife that I could detect, twenty-one households in the village included members who were affiliated with different religions. In one household four Baptists, one Catholic and one Songsarek lived together in ecumenical peace.

Many people told me that they had become Christian simply because everyone else was doing so. One older woman told me firmly, and with a touch of irritation, "I don't know what this Christianity is all about, but my children wanted me to be baptized, so I went along". A few suggested that they believed it was important to be baptized before they died and they seemed to fear that some dire fate awaited those who missed the chance for baptism. A number of people pointed out that I was getting old and that I had better hurry and be baptized before it was too late. From only a few did I hear any more thoughtful consideration of the values and ideals that some Christians elsewhere take to be the hallmark of their religion. It was clear, nevertheless, that becoming a Christian was a sign of becoming modern. By joining the church, people became a part of a larger community. Even those who had missed the chance for education could affiliate themselves with a movement that reached all the way to the far side of the world.

The Baptists had built a small bamboo church beside the Rengsanggri school house, and a few dozen people were attracted to the services that were held there every Sunday morning. The young people were particularly enthusiastic about church, and they took the lead in the singing and guitar playing. Catholics had no church in Rengsanggri, but they could attend services in Songmagri, a mile to the south. A few people had religious pictures on their walls along with their calendars. Many bowed their heads in prayer before eating, and most Baptists refrained from rice beer. A Baptist who slipped and drank beer, was more likely to do so in a wine shop than in his own home and village.

The changes in formal practice that had come with Christianity were clear, but I was not in the village long enough to feel confidant that the changes had penetrated very deeply. I attended the funerals of two old people during my visit in 1997. The ceremonies were largely Christian in form, but they seemed little different in spirit from Songsarek funerals. Parties of kinsmen from other villages came bearing food. Feasts were prepared and consumed, and then the bodies were carried to the graveyard beside the river where graves had already been dug. A number of people had told me carefully that while Songsareks had cremated their dead, Christians buried theirs. What I had not been told was that Christians placed little paper flags attached to small sticks on the grave. When I asked what these were, I was told that Songsareks had used feather fans to keep flies off the dead body until it was burned. Christians use paper fans instead of feathers, and it is these fans that are placed on the grave. Even these Christian women had their winnowing baskets and some clothes placed in their graves, symbols of their long lives and their work and, perhaps, objects to be used in the next life as well. Forms have changed, but old forms have found clear substitutes.

Christianity has come because teachers have taught the new religion in schools, because people have been encouraged to convert by friends and kinsmen, and because it has seemed to be a part of becoming modern. These are the positive attractions of the new religion. At the same time, several negative factors have undermined the older Songsarek religion. First, the Songsareks lacked any sort of institutionalized priesthood. Some men were regarded as particularly skillful at sacrifices, but no restrictions kept others from performing them as well. No group of specialized priests had a vested interest in defending their position or in persuading people to adhere to the old religion. There were no spokesmen for the Songsarek religion who urged people to hold to the older ways or who could reinterpret old beliefs so as to adapt them to a changing world. Quite apart from its teachings, the older religion could not compete with the superior organization of the Christian churches.

In addition, two cultural changes undermined the need for sacrifices. Songsareks sacrificed for two reasons: to persuade the spirits to stop making someone sick, and to mark important points of the agricultural cycle. As people began to use more drugs, sacrifices to cure disease became less necessary, and when the agricultural cycle changed the older ceremonies became less relevant. Both of these changes must have made it easier to abandon the old sacrifices in favor of Christian ceremonies.

Several people in Rengsanggri suggested to me that drugs had taken the place of sacrifices. Western medicines have become more readily available but so, it seems, have herbal medicines. Medicines brewed from the products of the forest had only a minor role in Rengsanggri in the fifties, but their increased popularity seems to have developed in parallel with western pills and injections. At least two men in Rengsanggri prepared and dispensed herbal medicines in 1997, and one of them denied that he had been taught his skills by an older practitioner. He said that he had taught himself about their use. It is not clear whether the availability of medicines undermined sacrifices or the loss of faith in sacrifices encouraged the used of medicines. The changes have certainly come together.

Continuity of Custom.

The changes that came to Rengsanggri in the four decades between my visits have been profound, but even more than the changes, I was impressed by the continuities, and these are nowhere more striking than in the practice of kinship. The matrilineal kinship system of the Garos has always been one of their most distinctive characteristics. It was, indeed, the trait that first persuaded me to work among them. Most people of India, even most hill people of the northeast, are patrilineal, tracing their decent from their fathers. The Garos trace descent through women, from a mother to her children, and they are well aware that this distinguishes them sharply from most of their neighbors. The matrilineal kinship system that I learned about in the fifties remained very much alive in Rengsanggri forty years later, and if, in the following pages, I emphasize the points where changes have taken place, it must be understood that the changes have occurred within a context that remains, in most ways, much as it was.

It did seem that a number of rules that were once quite strict have been somewhat relaxed. Most startling to me was a relaxation in the rules of exogamy. Garos divide themselves into several large named groups of which the Sangmas and the Maraks are by far the largest. In the 1950's everybody in Rengsanggri was either a Sangma or a Marak, and every single marriage united a Marak to a Sangma. Sangmas were not supposed to marry other Sangmas, nor Maraks to marry Maraks. I was told of one Marak-Marak marriage in the neighboring village of Songmagri, so even then, people who were sufficiently stubborn occasionally got away with a marriage within one's own group, but such marriages were rare and they were not really respectable. I was also told about cases of two Maraks or two Sangmas who were known to have had a sexual relationship outside of marriage. People did not approve of these affairs because the partners were not married, but their common kinship group made the matter even worse. Still, these relationships did not evoke the kind of horror that so many people show toward incest.

The Maraks and the Sangmas are both divided into dozens of smaller named groups or "lineages". In the 1950's everyone in Rengsanggri belonged to one of just four of these lineages. About half of the adults belonged to the Chambigong lineage of Maraks and the other half were divided among three lineages of Sangmas: A'gitok, Manda, and Ti'gite. Garos have been much more strongly opposed to either sexual relations or marriage between two members of the same named lineage than between two Sangmas or two Maraks who belonged to different lineages. Their attitude toward a relationship between lineage membership came closer to the feelings that incest often evokes. In the 1950's I never knew a couple who shared a lineage name, although people were able to report a few cases from other villages.

In 1997, I was astonished to find no fewer than eight Rengsanggri couples, both of whom were Chambigong Maraks but who nevertheless lived together and jointly cared for their common children. These couples had never been officially married because the Garo Baptist Church will not give its blessing to marriages between people who share a same lineage name, even when no literal kinship tie can be traced. Even without church blessing, these Chambigong-Chambigong relationships were regarded as marriages by their neighbors. The partners were easily referred to as "husband" and "wife", and their children were accepted as Chambigongs. People did seem mildly embarrassed by these relationships. I remember a few giggles when I showed my surprise the first time I realized that a husband and wife were both Chambigongs. Each person's lineage membership is so well known, however, that the impropriety cannot possibly be hidden.

I find it difficult to understand how villagers in this part of the Garo Hills could have enforced almost perfect exogamy of Sangmas and Maraks in the 1950's while, forty years later, they failed to prevent unions within the much smaller named lineage. A more modest break with tradition would have accepted marriages between Maraks or between Sangmas, while still forbidding marriage within the lineages. There are, to be sure, a great many Chambigongs in Rengsanggri, and the choice of spouses from other lineages may seem to be a bit limited. Most people marry outside the village, however, and an ample supply of appropriate spouses should have been available nearby. All these marriages were, I believe, initiated by the young people rather than by their parents, and most of the couples probably started living together without community or parental blessing. This is the kind of marriage that the Garos describe as "stolen". People who are willing to defy social disapproval have always been able to start a marriage in this way and eventually gain acceptance by their community. Once one or two stubborn couples set the pattern of Chambigong-Chambigong marriages, others probably found it easier to follow. All these couples are relatively young. Two or three may be in their early forties, but the rest are in their twenties or thirties. It should also be noted that the other 100 marriages in Rengsanggri united people from different lineages, and all except two or three of these united a Sangma to a Marak. Most people still followed the old rule.

In 1997, the great majority of married adults in Rengsanggri belonged to the same four lineages that were found there forty years earlier, but travel has become easier and more young people now have periods of residence away from home either for work or for education. This has allowed some of them to find spouses from more distant places than they had in earlier years. Nine men and three women in Rengsanggri belonged to eleven named lineages other than the four established ones. The composition of the village has become just a bit more cosmopolitan.

Some relaxation had also come to the rule that encourages marriages between men and the daughter of their real or classificatory mother's brother. Each couple has been expected to chose one daughter to be their "heiress" (nokna). This heiress daughter and her husband lived with her parents. They had the responsibility of caring for her parents in their old age, and they would eventually inherit all her parents' property. Other daughters and their husbands established new households, and neither they nor their brothers inherited anything.

The marriage arrangements for the heiress daughter were somewhat different from those for the non-heiresses. The father expected to take the main initiative in finding a young man to marry his heiress daughter. It would be this young man who would move to his uncle's home and become his heir (nokrom), and for this job the uncle would want a young man of his own lineage. His own sister's son would be the ideal choice, but men often had to be content with a somewhat more distant, classificatory, nephew. Daughters who were not selected as the heiress were much freer to take their own initiative in finding a husband, but both parents and young people had a part in making the selection in both kinds of marriages. Young people who were sufficiently insistent were always able to refuse a marriage. A few young couples, it is difficult to know how many, seem always to have reached their own understanding before the parents even became involved. Having agreed with a young man, the girl would suggest to her father that he arrange to have her choice brought to her as her husband. If her father and her other kinsmen approved, the marriage that followed would appear to have been arranged by the parents. The earlier understanding between the young people themselves would never need to become generally known. A few young people bypassed their parents entirely and embarked upon "stolen" marriages.

In 1997 it was still felt to be desirable for a man to find a sister's son, or at least a classificatory sister's son to marry his heiress daughter, but I found more exceptions to this rule than I had in 1956. A few men of entirely different named lineages than their fathers-in-laws were described as nokroms (heirs), something that I did not find in 1956. In 1997 I was also surprised to find one very old woman who was being cared for by her son and daughter-in-law, a startling departure from earlier practice when it was always daughters rather than sons who cared for their aged parents. I asked why the son was performing a job usually given to a daughter, but I learned no more than that the family found it convenient. All other dependent old people were still living with daughters.

In the 1950's the heir and heiress always lived with the wife's parents or with her widowed mother. A few large families built a separate building for the younger couple, but these buildings were always placed next to the main house of the family, and the two were counted as belonging to a single homestead. In 1997, when the homesteads had become much more scattered, five two-generation families had buildings in widely separate locations, most of them in different hamlets. The couple that had been designated as heir and heiress lived in one place and the young wife's parents or widowed mother lived somewhere else. People assured me that this was done simply as a matter of convenience and they said that whenever the widow or the older couple grew feeble enough to need help, the two parts of the family would move back together.

It may be that all of these changes--the violations of lineage exogamy, the lowered insistence upon a close genealogical tie between a father-in-law and his heir, the son's care for his aged mother, the occasional residential separation of the two couples of a household--have been made possible by a more subtle change: a shift in the balance of initiative in selecting spouses. The initiative in making marriage arrangements has always been divided. Parents, especially the bride's father, took the primary initiative in arranging the marriage of the heiress daughter, but it was always difficult to impose a marriage, even on an heiress, against a young woman's will. A non-heiress could take considerably more initiative than an heiress, but she might also find it difficult to defy the wishes of her parents. The balance of decision making seems to have shifted somewhat since the fifties, and the young people probably have more ability to make their own selection of spouses, or at least more power to influence the selection, than they did before. That may have allowed the marriages between Chambigongs and it may also have forced some men to accept heirs who were not their own nephews. Young people may have gained more freedom to maintain a house at some distance from the residence of the girl's parents.

Just why young people should have increased their ability to make their own selection is not so clear. Perhaps the spread of education has delayed marriage somewhat and perhaps older or more experienced young people can be more insistent about their own preferences. Perhaps a period of study away from home gives young people more opportunity and more willingness to make their own selections.

It is not impossible that Christianity has changed some people's attitudes about the selection of spouse, but I see no obvious signs of this. Indeed, as far as I can see, Christianity has been directly responsible for only two changes to the kinship system: it brought an abrupt end to polygyny, and the older practice of bridegroom capture was immediately abandoned. Neither change brought any radical upheaval. Polygyny, of course, is forbidden for Christians, but since polygyny was never common among the Garos, its prohibition did not effect most people. Almost all polygyny in the 1950's came when a second and younger wife was promised to a young man in order to persuade him to marry a somewhat older widow. When the older wife's daughter by her previous husband had grown old enough to marry, she would become the second wife of her mother's husband. With Christianity, this practice had to end.

Upon becoming Christians, a few men with two wives had to stop considering one of them as a wife. I asked one man who had been married to the daughter of his first wife, and who had children by both women, whether he had been obliged to divorce one of his wives when they all became Christians. Both the women were sitting with us when I asked the question, and everyone burst out laughing. They told me that, yes indeed, he and the older woman were no longer married. This woman, however, continued to live in the household with her daughter and her former husband, and except that she was no longer considered a "wife", she had much the same status as she had before. She continued to work as much as her advancing age permitted, and she could look forward to being cared for by her daughter and her son-in-law, formerly her husband, just as if she were still married. I presume that the man and the older woman no longer had a sexual relationship, but perhaps her age would have limited that even without Christianity.

Christianity may do more to change the way people talk about their families than to change their practice. Older women still live with their daughters and sons-in-law and they still play much the same role within their families. It is possible that the prohibition on polygyny will make it more difficult to find younger men who are willing to marry widows. That could make it more difficult to provide good care for some elderly women. In 1997, twenty-nine women lived in Rengsanggri who had been widowed or divorced but who had not remarried. Eighteen of these lived with a daughter and son-in-law, and one lived with a son and his wife. Six lived alone or with their unmarried children. Given the expansion of population this is not very different from the eleven widows who lived with a daughter and son-in-law and the three who lived alone with their unmarried children in 1956. Four widowed or divorced young women with small children lived with their parents in 1997, and three women who were no longer married lived with parents or other relatives in 1956. Again, this does not represent any great change.

In 1956, however, an additional nine women had remarried but were sharing their husband with a daughter, or expected to do so once the daughter was old enough. Unfortunately I did not obtain enough information to know how many widowed or divorced women had found new husbands in 1997. A few had, but none of them shared her husband with a daughter. It is possible that some of the widowed or divorced women would have been able to remarry had the option of promising their new husband a second wife still been available. The inability to do this may, in the future, make it more difficult to provide good family arrangements for widows and their children, but Christianity was too recent in Rengsanggri in 1997 for this to have yet become an acute problem.

The other change in kinship practices that Christianity brought was the end of bridegroom capture, but that has been even less disruptive than the end of polygyny. In 1956, marriage arrangements began when a girl and her parents reached an agreement about whom to select, but the wedding itself began when a half dozen unmarried youths, ideally the brothers and cousin-brothers of the young woman, were sent out to find the chosen bridegroom. They would surprise him at an unexpected moment and force him to come with them to the bride.

Bridegroom capture disappeared with Christianity, but the more important preliminary process of selection was little changed. One daughter was still chosen to care for her parents in their old age, and her father still tried to find a husband for her from among his classificatory nephews. The girl's parents, especially her father, still took formal initiative, but Christian young people, as much as their Songsarek predecessors, sometimes found their own ways to reach preliminary understandings. The only change was the abandonment of the rather stylized bridegroom capture itself. Among Christians, the marriage was supposed to be publicly agreed upon ahead of time, and the boy did not have to be captured.

Continuity of People.

I was impressed by the continuity of the kinship system, but I was equally impressed by the continuity of particular families. There had been sixty households in Rengsanggri in 1956. Forty years later, people who had been married adults in twenty-three of those households still lived in the village. Many of them had moved to a different hamlet, but their households were clearly recognized as the same as those I had known before. Even households where all the adults had died had not all just ceased to exist, for Garo households are, in principle, eternal. In each generation, a new heir and heiress should be appointed. They should maintain the household until they pass it on to still another generation. All of the adults of fifteen of the sixty households I had known in 1956 had died, but their households had survived, maintained by surviving heirs.

Another six of the 1956 households had moved to Asonanggri, just north of Rengsanggri. Asonanggri had been a tiny settlement in 1956, with no more than a half dozen houses. The area of that village, however, had been selected by the government as the site of a development block, and by 1997 it had shops, schools, and government offices and it must have had many more residents than Rengsanggri. Sometime between my visits, probably during the 1970's when wet rice was just beginning to reach the area, a sizable patch of land in Asonanggri was brought under irrigation. Asonanggri and Rengsanggri were regarded as sister villages, and for a family to move from Rengsanggri to Asonanggri was only marginally more disruptive than to move from the site of the old village to one of the new hamlets in Rengsanggri itself. In 1997, of the six households that had moved to Asonanggri, four had at least one adult who had survived from 1956 and the other two households were maintained by heirs. Adding the twenty-three Rengsanggri households with adults who had survived from 1956 to the fifteen that were maintained by heirs and the six that had moved to Asonanggri, a total of forty-four households, almost three quarters of the original sixty, could still be identified in 1997.

The remaining sixteen original households had varied fates. All the members of three of them had died and these households had come to an end. Eight others did not survive as identifiable households but they still had descendants who lived in either Rengsanggri, Asonanggri, or nearby Songmagri. The adults whom I had know in these households in the 1950's had died but some of their children or grandchildren had married into other households or formed new households of their own. Four of the original households, or their surviving members, had moved to places more distant than Asonanggri or Songmagri, though three remain within 25 kilometers. I failed to get information about the fate of the final household.

When one looks backward from 1997, the continuities are as impressive as when one looks forward from 1956. The village had grown, and of its 105 households, only 38 were identifiable as the "same" as households that were found in Rengsanggri in 1956: the twenty-three original households with surviving members, together with the fifteen that have surviving heirs. The great majority of the remaining sixty-seven households had at least one spouse who had grown up in Rengsanggri, but who had not been chosen as an heir. As non-heirs, their families did not continue earlier households but formed new ones instead.

In the years between my visits, very few people had moved to Rengsanggri for any reason except to marry a Rengsanggri man or woman. In the 1950's, more husbands than wives changed villages at marriage, and the same has been true more recently. There were 108 married couples in 1997. (Eight of the 105 households had no married couple at all, nine had two married couples, and one had three. All the rest had one each. All marriages were monogamous.) Seventy-two of the husbands, but only eleven of the wives, had moved from other villages to join Rengsanggri spouses.

Both spouses of most almost every other couple had grown up in Rengsanggri. I was unable to determine the genealogical connection of one couple to any of the people whom I had known in the fifties, but villagers insisted that the woman of the family had grown up in Rengsanggri. Only one couple had moved in whose members were really considered to be outsiders, and I was unable to learn how they had legitimized their move. Either the husband or the wife, or both, of every one of the other 107 couples living in Rengsanggri in 1997 had a genealogical claim to being a native of the village. One childless widow had moved from Songmagri just to the south, however. She supported herself from a pineapple garden that she had planted, and she explained to me that Songmagri (like Asonanggri) is a sister village to Rengsanggri. She did not feel that she had really changed villages.

Men sometimes leave home for a few months for work. A few people move to a neighboring village, and a few move further. More often, people move when they marry. Most Rengsanggri villagers, however, have remained, year after year, in the same village. This is a degree of stability that mobile Westerners find difficult to imagine. Rengsanggri had 248 adults who were married or who had been married in the past. More than half of them had lived there all their lives, and with a handful of exceptions, the rest had lived there since their marriage. People get to know each other very well after living in the same village for most or all of their lives. They know who is hard working, who is smart, who is trustworthy, who is helpful and friendly. And they know who lacks these qualities.

Of course they also know the people who live in the surrounding villages. They visit the weekly market in Rongram where they meet people from dozens of villages, and they meet Bengali and Nepali traders as well. Songsareks once visited other villages at the times of festivals and Christians now attend intervillage services and meetings. When people need help, and when they get married and die, kinsmen from other villages assemble. Almost everyone occasionally visits Tura, twenty-five kilometers away, although one woman did tell me that she had ridden a bus three times, become sick every time and resolved never to try again. She said she had never gone even as far as Tura. A number of villagers have been further, to distant parts of the Garo Hills, and a few to other cities in the north east. A handful have even been to Delhi or Bombay, most of them on government sponsored trips where they took part in multiethnic festivals. Government officials, vaccinators, and school teachers all pay visits to the village. Once, during my visit in 1997, the man who represents the district that includes Rengsanggri in the state Legislative Assembly paid a visit to the village, courting his constituents. Thousands of people pass in trucks and busses. Rengsanggri is far from isolated. Still, the villagers spend most of their hours within the boundaries of Rengsanggri, and they deal constantly with their fellow villagers. It would be difficult to hide much from their neighbors, and mostly they do not try.

Prospects for the Future.

What of the future? Are more extensive or more disruptive changes in store for the people of Rengsanggri? My suspicion is that the most important pressures for change will be economic. As long as the population continues to expand, less and less of people's subsistence can come from shifting cultivation. More people will probably have to find paid work away from the village. Families without permanent gardens or rice fields may become impoverished and forced to find menial work somewhere else, as a few already have. Others will gain enough education to claim more prestigious and better paying jobs in government service. Some day, perhaps, people will even find work with private concerns. It is difficult to predict the impact of employment on the traditional family system, but if, in the search for work, people become more residentially mobile, it may become more difficult to maintain the kind of mutual support that the members of an extended kinship network can provide when they live near to one another.

The greatest threat to the traditional family system, however, is likely to be the ownership of permanently cultivated fields. If fertilizer were to allow land to be used every year for other crops than wet rice, pineapples, tea, and fruit trees, shifting cultivation might be quickly abandoned. All cultivation might then be done on privately owned fields. The impact of permanent land ownership will depend on how it is inherited. If property continues to be inherited by a single daughter, some women will be much wealthier than their sisters, and wealth differences might rigidify. That, in turn, could increase the social inequality among households.

In a society where people have been accustomed to reasonable economic equality, however, serious inequality among siblings might cause considerable strain. The unequal inheritance of earlier days was seen as no more than fair compensation for the care of the old people. With enough hard work, even non-heirs could hope to improve their position. It is one thing to accept wealth differences that can be credited to hard work and cleverness, but quite another to endure differences that are due to nothing but the luck of inheritance. As permanent fields become more important, people may want to find ways of spreading the inheritance more evenly, to give some property to other daughters than their heiress, and even to leave some to their sons.

If property is given only to daughters, the disruption to the matrilineal system should not be great, but if couples feel that they would also like to give something to their sons, the present kinship system could be undermined. Young men might become less dependent upon the kinship groups of their wives. Sons who are lucky enough to inherit land from their parents might want to bring their wives to live near their fields, and wives might move to their husbands' villages more often than they do now. When it is usually men who move, women can often live near close female kinsmen even when they are not a part of the same household. If women move more often, the security that comes from living in a neighborhood among friendly parents, aunts, sisters, and cousins could be undermined.

By 1997, private land ownership was too recent in Rengsanggri to have had a dramatic effect on income inequality, inheritance, or residence patterns. People told me that the rule of inheritance remained unchanged: the heiress and her husband were supposed to inherit all the property of the older couple, including all their permanent fields. The few instances of inheritance of rice land that I heard about seem to have followed this rule. In most respects, the family system that I had learned about in the fifties remained intact in the nineties. The possible changes about which I have speculated are for the future.

Old Friends.

It was an extraordinary experience, to return to Rengsanggri after four decades and to find that its people remembered me as vividly as I remembered them. For forty years, I had been writing stories about them, and through all that period they had been telling stories about me. Many people had died, of course, but some of those I had known were still living, and others who had been children still remembered me. Some who had not yet been born in 1956 said that they had heard about me from their parents. I had almost become a legend. I was repeatedly reminded that I had carried my own basket hanging from a tump line across my head, and that I had once climbed onto a roof during a thatching party and helped the other young men to tie on the thatch. Far from having grown away from the villagers, I felt that I belonged with them more securely than I ever had. I remembered their parents and grandparents. We shared a history.

In December 1996, on the morning of my second day in Rengsanggri, when most people had not yet heard about my return, I climbed off the bus that had brought me from Tura and met a woman who looked at me for a moment and then said in astonishment "Raben Marak". Raben, a Garoized version of my first name, was the way they had always addressed me, and I acquired the "Marak" one day when I was sitting with some men, one of whom suggested in a joking way that since I was living in a village with so many Chambigong Maraks that I, too, should be a Chambigong Marak. People would refer occasionally to my membership in the Chambigongs and the Maraks, but always as a joke. People would laugh heartily at the idea, but they and I knew that there was no way in which a foreigner could really join a Garo kinship group. When I returned, the woman I met on the road was only the first of many who called me "Raben Marak" and, I noticed with surprise, they no longer laughed. During the forty years that I had been gone, they must have talked about me now and then, and after referring to me often enough as "Raben Marak" it stopped being just a joke. They began to think of it as my real name.

I found it easy to deal with these old friends and with their children. Their melting smiles reflected the joy that I felt. I had learned how to behave. I knew how to be courteous and how to joke. I needed no new learning to take on old habits. Everyone whom I remembered, of course, had grown forty years older, and so had I. We had all undergone the changes that forty years bring, and we seventy year-olds did not act like the thirty-year olds we once were. But the community in 1997, like the community in 1956, included both thirty year-olds and seventy year-olds, and young and old alike continued to play the familiar roles of their ages. Young and old, men and women still divided the work in the same way. As far as I could see, they still behaved toward one another in the same way, and they accepted me with the same curiosity and tolerant good will that I remembered so well.

Garos are a wonderfully pragmatic people. Things that Westerners gloss over are faced with no nonsense. I remember with delight the man, somewhat older than I, who asked if I would ever make another trip to the Garo Hills. He thought about his question briefly and then, with a matter of fact good cheer, he answered it himself, "No, probably not. You are old and you will probably die soon".

Garos are less concerned with status and less worried about their own dignity than many of the people of the subcontinent. No caste differences divide them, and they treat each other, and even outsiders, with a kind of symmetry that Westerners miss in their dealings with many Indians. Garos can laugh at each other because they can so easily laugh at themselves. I can tease them because they can tease me, and some of my happiest memories of the people of Rengsanggri are times when they laughed with great good nature at my expense, or when I was able to laugh at them. On my last day in Rengsanggri in 1997, I passed a woman on a path who asked me the same question as the older man had asked. "Will you ever come back again?" She too answered her own question but she answered it a bit differently: "If you do come back you will probably come like this", and she held up her hand with her index finger tightly crooked, in a gesture they use to suggest the bent backs of old people. She burst into gales of laughter, and so did I.

After my return in 1997, but when I had made only two short visits to Rengsanggri, a man in the district headquarters at Tura asked me whether the villagers were happier or less happy than they had been forty years earlier. I replied that I did not know "yet", but even then I realized that I would never be able to answer that question. Happiness is much too subtle and subjective for a visitor to measure. Does it make any sense to ask whether life had improved in those forty years or become worse, or to ask in what ways it had improved and in what ways grown worse?

In some material ways, life had unquestionably improved. Women's clothing had become more colorful and more varied, and everyone's clothing was much less ragged. If happiness comes from wearing sandals then everyone was surely much happier. Water pipes and electric wires made life a bit easier. Many people had furniture that no one could even have imagined earlier.

The most important single measure of improvement that I can point to is in the ability of people to keep their children alive. In both 1956 and 1997, I asked as many adult women as I could find, how many children they had borne and how many had died. Their answers have too many ambiguities to inspire much confidence. I cannot confidently separate late abortions, still births, and early infant deaths, for example. Nevertheless, it seems clear that people had become considerably more successful at keeping their children alive by 1997 than they had been in 1956. More than half of the women in 1956 reported that at least as many of their children had died as were still living. In 1997, I asked 110 women who had ever borne children how many of them were living and how many had died. "Only" 19 of these 110 women reported that as many or more had died as were alive. They reported a total of 567 births, 407 still living and 160 dead. Most of those who had died had done so as babies or very small children. This is still an appalling infant mortality, but it is a marked improvement on the earlier level.

So life has, in some ways improved, but in other ways, people looked back upon the earlier years as better. Some felt that the scattering of the houses away from the old village had brought a loss of a sense of community. They missed the old village festivals, and some Christians admitted to missing the joy that rice beer once brought. Permanent land ownership has widened the difference between rich and poor. As the tempo of change accelerates it may become more difficult for parents and children to understand each other's worlds. But, Rengsanggri survives, still beloved by its permanent residents, and still beloved by me.

Source.

Burling, Robbins. 1963. Rengsanggri: Family and Kinship in a Garo Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.