No state
The Garos, who call themselves A·chik, had no kingdom and no paramount chief. Authority rested with the nokma, the head of the village land-holding lineage — an office held through his wife, since land and descent were matrilineal, and exercised in consultation with the village.
This is what political anthropologists call an acephalous society, and it is the main reason the Garo hills appear as a blank in dynastic histories: there was nothing to conquer in the ordinary sense, and no throne to treat with.
The Garo religion, Songsarek, centred on sacrifice to a range of deities and on the annual Wangala harvest festival, which is still celebrated.
Annexation
The British moved into the hills through the nineteenth century and met resistance village by village. Pa Togan Nengminja Sangma led an attack on a British camp in 1872 and was killed; he is the Garo national hero.
American Baptist missionaries arrived in the 1860s and the population is now largely Christian. The Garo hills form a district of Meghalaya, and Garo customary institutions are recognised under the Sixth Schedule.
A census of Indian kingdoms has to include such societies or misrepresent the map: substantial populations governed themselves for centuries without producing a state, and their absence from dynastic lists is a fact about the lists rather than about them.
Further reading
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.