Garo (tribe)
Encyclopedia : G : GA : GAR : Garo (tribe)
The Garos are a tribe in Meghalaya, India, and Mymensingh, Bangladesh, who call themselves Achik. They are the second-largest tribe in Meghalaya after the Khasi and comprise about a third of the local population. The majority of Garos are Christian. There are a large number of Baptists and Roman Catholics. There is also a sprinkling of Seventh-day Adventists, Anglicans and others belonging to some new denominations. Much like the Mizos, there were very few Garos who still follow their traditional Animist-Hindu beliefs.
The Garo language belongs to the Bodo branch of the Bodo-Naga-Kachin family of the Sino-Tibetan phylum.
They are mainly distributed over the Kamrup, Goalpara and Karbi Anglong Districts of Assam, Garo Hills in Meghalaya, and substantial numbers, about 200,000 are found in Mymensingh district of Bangladesh.
The earliest written records about the Garo dates from around 1800. They "...were looked upon as bloodthirsty savages, who inhabited a tract of hills covered with almost impenetrable jungle, the climate of which was considered so deadly as to make it impossible for a white man to live there" (Playfair 1909: 76-77). The Garo had the reputation of being headhunters.
The Garos are one of the few remaining matrilineal societies in the world. The individuals take their clan titles from their mothers. The youngest daughter or nakma inherits the property from her mother. The male offspring leave the parents' house at puberty, and are trained in a common village Bachelor dormitory called a nokpante. After getting married the man lives in his wife's house.
External Links
The Garos themselves do not have a written script. Customs, tradations and beliefs were handed down orally. According to one such oral tradation concerning their migratory route into the present Garo Hills in Meghalaya, they had come about 400 years ago from Tibet and had crossed the mighty Brahmaputra and had tentatively settled in the valley but was driven up the hills by superior forces in and aroung the Brahmaputra river.Various records of the tribe by the Muslim invading force to Assam and the first British observers in the present Bangladesh had some interesting testimony to the brutality and bloodthirsty nature of the people who were feared by the Bengali Zamindars.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.