A market run by women in Shillong

It is true that the Khasi Jaintia and Garo tribes of Meghalaya practice matriliny where lineage is taken from the mother’s clan. It is also true that property passes through the khatduh or the youngest daughter in case of the Khasis and Jaintias. There is, however, a distinction between inheritance which also bestows total rights over the property and complete freedom to administer it, in contrast to that of being a mere custodian. The khatduh inherits ancestral property and is expected to be its custodian. Ancestral property is kept as a sort of corpus on which all members of the family can fall back on in times of distress. Administration of the property is usually in the hands of the maternal uncle. In matriliny, the husband’s earning becomes part of the matrilineal property. Among the Garos, the matrilineal head or the youngest daughter is the nokna but the property is administered by her husband, the nokma, who also is recognised as the headman.

To say that Khasi-Jaintia and Garo women enjoy property rights in the legal sense of the term is, therefore, a fallacy. One of the established facts in gender studies is that those who own property also enjoy a certain amount of economic freedom. This in turn gives women added leverage for political bargaining. But is the Khasi woman truly the rightful owner of property? Traditionally, the Khasi woman is hardly legally empowered to buy and sell property the way she chooses.

There are several other inherent factors, which restrict that freedom. As the youngest daughter, the woman may inherit one homestead only or a house if in the urban area. She lives in that house because she has to care for her parents during their lifetime. Even her husband moves in to settle with her and her parents. As soon as daughters are born to the khatduh they, too, have some right over the property. Even in the most pecuniary of circumstances the khatduh would not be permitted to sell any part of the inherited property. If the khatduh has inherited more than one property and has several daughters, she is obligated to allocate property to her daughters as well, where they can subsequently construct their own homes. This has been the trend followed.

In rural areas where the concept of Ri Raij or community land still prevails, an individual is allotted land by the Dorbar. That individual can farm and reside there for as long as he/she desires. Once that land is allowed to lie fallow for more than three years, it is reclaimed as community land by the Dorbar or Raij (traditional institution). In recent times, the residents of different Raij have urged their syiems or sordars or rangbah shnong to allocate land only among the residents of that respective village and not to any “outsiders” or people who are not original inhabitants of the village. According to the syiem of Hima Khyrim, Balajied Sing Syiem, once land is distributed that way, it becomes privatised. No one can then restrict the owners of that property from doing whatever they choose to do with that land. In this manner, many who are poor or otherwise impoverished due to sickness, sell or mortgage their land to rich relatives or to any other buyer. From landed owners the individuals are reduced to landless tenants. This is a very disturbing trend in Khasi-Jaintia Hills. The same phenomenon was experienced during the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) project implementation in the West Khasi Hills. The programme is aimed at poverty alleviation through identification and proper utilisation of resources. But since the majority of poor people did not own land, the project was literally investing on land that belonged to some rich absentee landlord from the city.

In any given circumstance, when a family is poor, women are poorer because of the added burden of pitching in to the family coffer, often at the great cost to her health and that of her children. When a woman falls ill she generally puts off going to the doctor for that would mean that the family kitty is reduced by a few hundred rupees. That is something she can ill afford to do. Her husband by way of being the bread earner has the first right to healthcare. Her children, too, are more important to the mother. Often undernourished due to frequent child-births (on an average a women gives birth to eight children even in this day and age) and suffering from severe anaemia, a sick woman gives birth to weak, malnourished children who in turn require constant medical attention.

It is no exaggeration to say that 80 per cent of Meghalaya’s women survive that way. Health is the best economic indicator for any society. An unhealthy mother with several children clinging on to her, cannot be motivated to engage in livelihood activities. Her entire time is spent in the kitchen and at best in the kitchen garden from where she gets vegetables to sell and procure rice and other essential items in return.

Like in other patriarchal societies, a man does not need permission to buy his quota of cigarettes, drinks or even to gamble (archery is a common gambling game). He does not ask for his wife’s permission to buy shoes or clothes or a watch for himself. Men have access to the markets where they sell NTFP and other farm products, including livestock. They do not feel obliged to give the entire money to their wives. The poorer a family is, the greater the case of alcoholism among men and with it wife-beating or physical and mental harassment of women. In fact, in one of the gender sensitisation programmes at Nongstoin, West Khasi Hills, a young man literally stated that the reason why women give birth to so many children is because there is no other recreation but sex. If sex is a recreation and birth control not an issue, it is obvious that women will bear the brunt of it all. Early motherhood also results in more children. It is also the cause for brittle marriages resulting in frequent divorce. In fact, frequent divorce is the bane of Khasi-Jaintia society. Some attribute this high rate of divorce to matriliny and an identity crisis that men suffer from at not “owning” their children since they belong to the mother’s clan. Though such remarks do have some solid basis, not enough studies have been conducted to establish the veracity of the statement. In terms of social empowerment therefore, women in Meghalaya are still at the lowest rung of the ladder.

Financial power: Khasi-Jaintia women have been known to engage in commercial activities and to dominate the market place. It must be said to their credit that despite lack of sound commercial education they have a keen business sense. But a lack of bookkeeping skills has often reduced their businesses to failure. They tend to see all the return as profits quite forgetting that the returns from sale also constitute a portion of the capital investment. Most women have no guidance on the plus-point of reinvesting part of the profit to add to the working capital and hence rake in a bigger turnover. Eating into the working capital makes it difficult for women to repay bank loans if they do have access to it and if they have started their businesses by availing bank loans.

Women who are city dwellers are employed in the public and private sector if they are adequately educated. But this is a shrinking avenue and most educated women are moving away from their homes to join the private sector. Call centres are a thriving occupation, particularly for girls from this state.

The rural woman is, however, not so well placed, basically because of ignorance about health issues, about hygiene, about savings and the benefits of working together. While the government has implemented the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) scheme which envisages self-help groups working together to make viable co-operative ventures of their own, the groups are not integrated. That is, women are working separately from men in little homogeneous groups. This is because traditionally women have been debarred from taking part in decision-making institutions such as the Dorbar Shnong, which is the grassroots socio-political and quasi-judicial institution of the Khasi-Jaintia community.

There are issues that affect women specifically as a group. These need to be addressed first before we even brandish the word “development” to groups of deprived, impoverished, malnourished women in the hamlets. The feminisation of poverty is not just a rhetoric. It is a reality that stares us in the face.