The Return of the Ancients:
Garos
Celebrate Wanna
After Seventy Years
Mustafa
Zaman
PHOTO: Sayed Zakir Hossain
What
the Garos lost with the advent of missionary efforts in Christianisation
are now seeing a revival. After a seventy year long slumber,
the community woke up with the thumping of drums and stepping
of feet belonging to the contingents of dancers in consort with
the rhythm. The celebration of the Wanna, the Garo thanksgiving
on December 29, 2003, in Askipara at the foot of the Garo hills
in Haluaghat, over 200 kilometres northeast of Dhaka, marked
a cultural rebirth.
Kendua of
Netrokona used to be a strong outpost of the Garos, an indigenous
group of people who has a history that goes back more than a
thousand years. There is this Chiran union of Kendua that is
a strong reminder of a subgroup of the Garo people named Chiran
who used to reside in the area. The Garos of Bangladesh are
the last remaining factions of the indigenous people who made
Bengal their home. They are also the last few tribes with a
social system based on matriarchy. The distinct cultural characteristic
that stemmed from Garo life and beliefs are now at crossroads.
The consequences of conversion to Christianity and modernisation
left in its wake a community in cultural crisis. Now the wild
and the pristine has risen again, the Garos are out to reclaim
their past.
We want
a resurrection, we want to see the Garos together with their
long lost culture," said a Garo activist to a Daily Star
journalist. With the complete lack of understanding of Garos
and their culture, the Christian missionaries simply wanted
to turn them into faithful in their own fashion. Remodeled through
conversion, the Garos had long been forced to live in absence
of Garo sensibility.
With
the 98 percent Christians among them, the bond and the fellow
feeling that found its expressions both in community living
and rituals have long been in the road to erosion. Their songs
and dances were taken over by Rabindra sangeet, Nazrulgeety
and even pollee-geety, claims Shubhash Changchum, who
wrote an article on Garo culture in the booklet published to
mark the occasion of Wanna. But he also provide the examples
of practices that covertly went on side by side; though any
such activities often aroused the Missionaries’ scourge upon
discovery. "The last Wanna too was trampled by the then
British rulers," remembers Haripada Marak, a Garo who is
way past his 90.
December
29 was altogether a new beginning. As the Garos flocked to the
freshly harvested paddy field turned open-air ceremonial ground
to sing and dance, and to offer fruits, vegetables, rice and
of course, chu, their home-made distilled beverage, to the deity,
the ritual returns as does the belief that it will bring rain
and goodness.