The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The companion contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas. A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this companion fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning, and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of Garo hill farmers, and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book reveals the inadequacy of the all too often assumed characterization of upland societies as culturally homogenous, internally cohesive, and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book focuses on a rural area where land constitutes the most important resource, and where a substantial number of people practise traditional Garo animism. The book explores how people create and continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, to the spirits, and to the land. These relationships are embedded in normative frameworks that call for compliance, yet leave room for ambiguity and negotiation. Far from being immutable, these need to be constantly expressed, (re-)interpreted, and enacted. The book thus shows how Garo traditions, referred to as niam, are continuously revised and reworked in response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape.

An investigation into the category of tribes in South Asia. It focuses on one so-called tribal community, the Garos of Bangladesh. It deals with the evolution of Garo identity/ethnicity and with the progressive making of cultural characteristics that support a sense of Garo-ness, in the context of the complex historical developments.

This is the first specialised volume with a holistic approach dealing with the most vulnerable and neglected section of workers in unorganised sector of agriculture. Tracing women's role and status in the historical perspective, existing situational analysis and making future projections are the main sub-themes discussed threadbare. Women workers in different agro-ecological and types of farming have been analysed by various scholars. Papers on technology and women bring out, among other things, a situational analysis, work conditions in home and farm, wages, bearing on her farm employment and participation. Prospective role and status have been projected in the changing techno-economic context that warrants about the displacement of women workers in developing agriculture. In the series, this volume focusses on the issues of educational problems of the rural women in general and specialised training needs, facilities available and utilization of these in particular for providing them appropriate place in the prospective agriculture. Training needs of different groups in different agroclimatic and cultural contexts have been compiled at one place. Multiplicity of institutions has certainly benefited women fold but mushrooming of voluntary agencies is not desirable in spite of the best performance of voluntary agencies. What role different institutional structures have played in the education and training of women is discussed at length and future course of involvements is debated. Different agricultural development strategies adopted since independence have been critically examined for assessing the place of women in them and urgent action needed to meet the future challenges.

Food and eating has always been endowed with meanings. It is one of the most visible and important symbols of identity and difference, uniting the members of a community and segregating them from other communities. This inclusion and exclusion can be observed not only in what they eat or what they are known to eat, but also how they eat, how they prepare and serve their food, and what happens after food is taken. The study of food politics and questions of identity and difference can, therefore, be a means of understanding the underlying social relations in any culture and its quiescent philosophy. This ethnographic work discusses the politics inherent in food among the Garos of Assam (India) and Bangladesh. In these two areas, they live as a minority, and with and in the peripheries of a dominant non-Garo culture. Thus, this book examines the ways in which Garos conceptualize themselves and the ‘other’ world through the microcosm of food – the most important need of all. It discusses, among other topics, how the concepts of Garo food versus non-Garo food find fruition in social reality and collective memory, as an identity marker.

No detailed description available for "Garo and Khasi".

Social life and customs of Lalungs (Indic people) of Assam.