Gender Sexuality & Society in Northeast India - Contextual Studies of Tribal Communities

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The chapters in this book emanated from a seminar held at Martin Luther Christian University in Shillong. Meghalaya, held on November 21-27, 2017 the objectives of the seminar were to provide a historical and social context to gender issues in Northeast India, to examine contemporary issues in gender among tribal populations in the region and to engage in a dialogue with youth in addressing the gender issues of the region. Several themes were explored at the seminar, which also included an exhibition of paintings on Tribal Women in Art, presented by Careen Langstleh, who has also contributed the art work for the cover.

While the primary studies and stones are from Northeast India, these have been contested in the social milieu of tribal culture, colonialism and Christianity and the worldwide issues of patriarchy, women's rights and the LGBTQIA+ community.

It was decided at the seminar, that the primary deliverables would be a textbook and resource learning materials for college and university students, community professionals, and for government and civil society organisations. The exercises and activities that follow each chapter have been designed with appropriate cognitive concepts and we hope they are a useful addition.

We gratefully acknowledge our funders for the seminar which included the Voluntary Action Fund (Chief Minister's Fund) 2013-2014 through the office of the District Commissioner, East Khasi Hills, Shillong, the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research, North East Regional Centre, Shillong, State Resource Centre for Women, Social Welfare Department, Government of Meghalaya, and Federal Bank, Shillong.

To the original compilation, we have added six contributions. Samuel Meshack wrote on Dalit women and the church, which broadens the context of this book, and Govind Kelkar filled in a major gap by elaborating on landlessness among women. This Chapter was based on a talk she delivered at MLCU on June 4, 2019.

Gender and its subterranean implications, is a fairly recent topic for dialectics in the Northeast. We lived with the assumption that as tribes we inhabited an egalitarian world where the "community" (which assumes that men and women are part of the whole) had equal access to rights and resources such as land, forests, water and even the minerals buried under the ground. Until we woke up one fine day to realise that as tribes, we also had class, and that the rich had better negotiating power and better access to everything while the poor got alienated from the "community," and had to fend for themselves in an unequal world. And then came the gender discourse-a narrative set by the Western world since the 1960s but which came to India a little Later in the day and to the Northeast only as recent as the late 1980s.

It is instructive that a local university should take keen interest in addressing the gender concerns that actually ensnare the tribal societies of the Northeast, but which are pushed under the carpet on the pretext that flagging those concerns would destabilise the customary practices and traditions. And guess what those traditions prescribe! They prescribe strict gender norms where women are shown their place and men define those spaces that women are "allowed" to enter. Till now, none of the traditional institutions anywhere in the tribal dominated areas of the seven North-eastern states "allow" women to hold office in them. Women are considered incapable of understanding the depth and breadth of politics and its male-centric undercurrents. That this same discrimination applies even in a Khasi matrilineal society where women are ostensibly held in high esteem, is a telling effect of the strangle-hold that gender discriminatory practices continue to have on society. Even the gender division of labour within families is the same here as happens in other entrenched patriarchal societies.

**Contents and Sample Pages**