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08/03/2020

‘Kingdoms of women’: how modernity threatens Asia’s female-centric societies

Matriarchal and matrilineal communities centred around women have existed for centuries in China, India and Indonesia
But a recent influx of tourism, technology and mainstream patriarchal ideas is rapidly changing their way of life

Khasi women leave their village of Nongtraw in India’s northeastern Meghalaya state to collect herbs from the fields. Photo: AFP

While women’s rights may have become a major topic of discussion around the world in recent years, there are female-centric communities that for centuries have distinguished themselves by carving out their own feminist traditions in places such as China, India
and Indonesia.

But many of these matriarchal and matrilineal societies are now struggling to survive, amid threats posed by the modern world such as mass tourism, technology and the infiltration of ideas from mainstream patriarchal society.

In China, for instance, there is a small Mosuo tribe known as the “kingdom of women”.

“Key to the Mosuo culture is their matrilineal family structure, with a basic building block of only members sharing the same female bloodline making up the family … Any male bloodline is not taken into account,” says Choo Waihong, a former Singaporean corporate lawyer who has researched the community for the past decade.

Lugu Lake in China’s Yunnan province is home to the Mosuo tribe. Photo: hemis.fr

At the top of the hierarchy is the grandmother, who is the head of the household. “Her daughters run the home and look after all the children of the female siblings … The sons and grandsons are expected in their supporting role to shoulder the manual tasks required to maintain the farmstead,” Choo says.

Researchers say that there are about 30,000 to 40,000 Mosuo people – most of whom live in the far eastern foothills of the Himalayas in Yunnan, southwest China. This unique community has come together in a series of villages dotted around a mountain and Lugu Lake, while growing numbers have moved out to work in larger towns and cities elsewhere in the country.

According to Choo, author of the book The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains, the most distinctive facet of this community that sets it apart from mainstream society is the absence of formal marriage arrangements between men and women. Instead, they have “walking marriages”, where the man goes to the woman’s home, spends the night with her and then leaves the following morning.

The Kingdom of Women: China’s ‘lost tribe’ of matriarchs, the Mosuo

15 Mar 2017

The couple can choose to have a temporary or even a permanent arrangement as partners, but they are not bound by marriage ties. If they have children, the baby belongs to the woman’s household. “In fact, the man is not considered part of the matrilineal family and his ties to the baby do not determine the social place of the baby,” the researcher says.

Such a society, where women are not subjected to men and sexual freedom is an intrinsic part of their culture, is so radically different from mainstream patriarchal family structures that the Mosuo tribe has been examined and studied over time. More recently, its unique features have also become an eye-catching selling point for the local tourism industry.

TOURISM INDUSTRY

The Mosuo tribe used to live off the land by farming, herding and hunting. But many families now rely on tourism after the tribe’s culture and Lugu Lake became more popular and widely known.

“Tour buses on fancy freeways and planes arriving at a new airport bring more and more tourists daily to turn the whole area into a busy travel playground,” Choo says. “Every household around the lake is involved one way or another with the hotel, restaurant and tour guide industries.”

While the tourism industry has brought money and better food for most families as well more access to educational opportunities for their children, it is also posing a serious threat to their culture and traditional ways of life.

“The greatest challenge for the tribe is their rapid transition from living a rudimentary subsistence farming way of life right into a burgeoning modern middle-class existence within a short span of 20 or so years,” Choo says.

Mosuo people pictured at a wedding ceremony with an all-meat feast in 2013. Photo: Shutterstock

The Mosuo are now being bombarded not only by mainstream traditional Chinese values, but also by new economic values connected to money and the digital economy. “That is a lot to take in for people who had no writing to support their oral language … and only had primary schools for their children not so long ago,” she says.

Older Mosuo are now being pushed to learn Mandarin in order to keep up with the younger generations.

At the same time, the researcher says, “their long-held cultural beliefs and principles are evolving as the young generation gets exposed to the outside world and start to question the old ways of doing things.”

How life is changing for Thailand’s Karen tribe

17 Mar 2017

Walking marriages are not as common, with more youngsters getting married and forming nuclear families. “Large matrilineal families which were the norm are now breaking up into smaller nuclear families. All this dilutes the traditional matrilineal Mosuo family structure,” Choo says.

“The central place of the female in old Mosuo society is slowly being affected, as the male Mosuo are beginning to entertain some patriarchal outlook in the face of outside cultural influences.”

China may have radically reinvented itself in recent decades, but the changes to the Mosuo tribe have been nearly as dramatic. “The world of the Mosuo when I first ventured into their midst 12 years ago is a distant past as I look [today in 2020] at how they have changed,” Choo says.

PATRIARCHY IN DISGUISE

There are dozens of female-centric communities scattered around the world. The Garo and Khasi tribes, which are also traditionally matrilineal societies, can be found mostly in India.

In a Khasi family, the youngest daughter inherits the ancestral property, while in the Garo community, women also inherit property, but don’t necessarily have to be the youngest daughter of the family.

Caroline Marak, former head of the Garo Department at the North Eastern Hill University in India, says that the Garo are female-oriented, but not female-dominated. Women “have no part in the field of administration decision-making”, she wrote in an academic paper.

In recent years, the husbands of Garo women who are property owners have had a greater say over land deals, such as with government. “We are now trying to reclaim our rights from the males,” says Sume Sangma, secretary of the Garo Mothers Union NGO. “Women in the community are self-reliant and we are fighting for their real power.”

Khasi women wash leaves for cooking in the village of Nongtraw in India’s north-eastern Meghalaya state. Photo: AFP

Tiplut Nongbri, from the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research at the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, also says women don’t have much authority in Garo and Khasi societies. “Patriarchy is in disguise in both the communities. The societies are matrilineal only as far as descent, residence and inheritance of property are concerned,” she says. “Women are not allowed to take part in politics.”

RG Lyngdoh, former home minister of Meghalaya – the hilly state in north-eastern India where both communities are based – says inward migration and the presence of Christian missionaries in the state have affected traditional lifestyles. “The old practices of equity between males and females have eroded,” Lyngdoh says.

“This has led to a perception of inadequacy among the males, [creating] discord within the family, which found expression in many negative ways, such as domestic violence and abandonment of wives, which never existed within the Khasi community.”

Gertrude Lamare, a member of the Khasi-Jaintia community now pursuing her PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that “with families becoming more nuclear, women do have a huge role in the decision-making process”.

A Khasi woman walks in the rain with children past a paddy field along the Assam-Meghalaya state border in India. Photo: AP

Researchers have estimated that there are 1 million Garo in India and

Bangladesh

, and 1.7 million Khasi in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills.

Some of them have become increasingly wary of outsiders preying on their natural resources, which are dwindling, thanks to deforestation and climate change.

Another challenge these communities are facing has to do with the growing trend of mixed marriages. “In recent years, children of a Khasi or Garo mother and non-tribal father [have] not [been] welcomed. The males in the family want their women to marry within the tribal community,” researcher Nongbri says, noting that younger generations are going through an identity crisis.

STILL PROUD

The world’s largest known matrilineal society today is believed to be in Indonesia: the Minangkabau, also known as Minang. Their community of about 8 million is scattered around the world, but most are in Indonesia’s West Sumatra province. While traditionally animist, they were later influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, and most have since embraced Islam.

But much like the others, their community is also changing.

Nursyirwan Effendi, dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Andalas University, says that many of those who remain in villages and rural areas still hold tight to the tribe’s values.

“Women are central in the distribution of assets, such as rice fields, gardens and [houses], from their ancestors,” he says.

Dancers pose during the 2018 Minangkabau art and culture festival in Batusangkar, West Sumatra. Photo: AFP

Traditionally, Minangkabau women play an essential role in their children’s education and hold inheritance rights, while men are expected to take jobs elsewhere and occupy political and religious positions. When they do get married, the man moves to the woman’s house.

But Nursyirwan, who is of Minangkabau descent, notes that many have left for bigger cities, where they do not closely follow the community’s traditions.

An example of this is Afrianto Sikumbang, a 53-year-old businessman who was born to Minangkabau parents in West Sumatra province but now lives in the capital, Jakarta. Although he married a Minangkabau woman, he says they “don’t really apply” the tribe’s values in their daily life.

Sonya Anggraini, 35, who also works in the capital, has got used to city life, but remains proud of her ancestral roots and hopes that Minangkabau culture will persist for years to come.

“I am a member of my mother’s family, not of my father’s,” she says. ■

Source: SCMP

Posted in Andalas University, ‘Kingdoms of women’, “walking marriages”, Buddhism, capital, Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, centuries, China, Christian missionaries, Culture, culture and traditional ways of life, DISGUISE, distribution of assets, educational opportunities, Faculty of Social and Political Science, families, farming, female-centric, Food, freeways, gardens, Garo, Garo Mothers Union NGO, grandmother, herding, hierarchy, Himalayas, Hinduism, Household, houses, hunting, India, Indonesia, islam, Jamia Millia Islamia, Karen tribe, Khasi, London School of Economics and Political Science, Lugu Lake, mainstream, Matriarchal, matrilineal communities, Minang, Minangkabau, modernity, money, Mosuo tribe, new airport, New Delhi, North Eastern Hill University, patriarchal, planes, rice fields, serious threat, sexual freedom, societies, Technology, Thailand’s, The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains, threatens, Tourism, tourists, travel playground,, Uncategorized, West Sumatra, Yunnan Province | Leave a Comment »

12/05/2019

Chinese opera on legendary monk to debut in New York City

NEW YORK, May 11 (Xinhua) — An opera featuring the famous monk Jianzhen of China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) will be presented at New York City’s Lincoln Center next month, according to local theatrical sources.

Based on true history, “Voyage To The East – A Fearless Buddhist Master’s Mission To Japan” told the story of monk Jianzhen, who started sailing to Japan in 742 A.D., but only succeeded in 754 A.D. after five failed attempts. Apart from spreading Buddhism, he also introduced Chinese art, medicine and craftsmanship to Japan, thus becoming a highly respected figure in both nations.

Famous Chinese-American opera singer Tian Haojiang plays Jianzhen in the opera. Tian reportedly has had over 1,400 performances of some 50 roles in all major opera houses worldwide. In order to better depict the role, Tian lived with real monks for some time in Daming Temple of east China’s Yangzhou city, where Jianzhen had stayed before embarking on his journey to Japan.

Produced by China’s Jiangsu Performing Arts Group, the opera’s score is a fusion of modern opera with the original sound of the Japanese koto, the zither, the Chinese guzheng, temple blocks and Buddhist chants.

The opera will be staged on June 22 to 23 at the David H. Koch Theatre of the Lincoln Center.

Source: Xinhua

Posted in "Voyage To The East - A Fearless Buddhist Master's Mission To Japan", Buddhism, Buddhist chants, Chinese art, Chinese opera, Chinese-American opera singer, craftsmanship, Daming Temple, David H. Koch Theatre, debut, guzheng, Japan, Japanese koto, Jiangsu Performing Arts Group, Jianzhen, legendary monk, Lincoln Center, medicine, New York City, Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), temple blocks, Tian Haojiang, Uncategorized, Yangzhou, zither | Leave a Comment »

07/03/2019

The British woman who fought for India’s freedom

A portrait photo of Freda taken in Lahore in the early 1940 — Image captionFreda Bedi’s is a remarkable story

Freda Bedi lived an unusual life. Born in a small town in England, she moved to India for love and ended up joining the independence movement. Her biographer, Andrew Whitehead, writes about her remarkable story.

“There are things deeper than labels and colour and prejudice, and love is one of them.”

These were the words of Freda Bedi, an English woman who overcame prejudice to marry an Indian Sikh and went on to challenge Indian notions about the role of a woman and a wife.

Freda and her boyfriend, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi (his friends called him BPL), met at Oxford where both were students.

This was the early 1930s and romances across the racial divide were rare – almost as rare as a girl from Freda’s background securing a spot at a top university. She was born, quite literally, above the shop in the city of Derby in England’s East Midlands, where her father ran a jewellery and watch repair business.

Freda could barely remember her father. He enlisted during the First World War and served in the Machine Gun Corps, where casualties were so high it was known as the “suicide club”. He died in northern France when his daughter was just seven years old. “This death shadowed my whole childhood,” she recalled – it shaped her political loyalties and prompted her lifelong spiritual quest.

Her years at Oxford were “the opening of the gates of the world”, as Freda once put it. She was part of “the Depression generation” – those who were students at a time of global crisis, mass unemployment and the rise of fascism.

She made firm friends at her college with young women who were rebellious by nature, and went with them to meetings of the Labour Club and the communist October Club.

The engagement photo of Freda and BPL taken at Oxford in 1933 — Image captionFreda and BPL met as students at Oxford University

Driven by curiosity and by sympathy with those struggling against the Empire, she also went along to the weekly meetings of the Oxford Majlis, where radicals among the university’s small number of Indian students asserted their country’s case for nationhood. BPL Bedi, a handsome and cheerful Punjabi, was a regular there. A friendship developed into intellectual collaboration and, within months, Freda and BPL were a couple.

In the early 1930s, women’s colleges at Oxford were obsessed with sex or rather with preventing it. If a male student came to have tea in a female student’s room, a chaperone had to be present, the door left wide open and the bed had to be taken into the corridor. Freda’s college did its best to derail her relationship – she was disciplined for visiting BPL without a chaperone in what she was convinced was a case of racial discrimination.

But she was fortunate in her student friends. Barbara Castle, who later became a commanding British woman politician of her era, was thrilled when Freda confided that she intended to marry her boyfriend. “Well, thank goodness”, Barbara exclaimed. “Now at least you won’t become a suburban housewife!” Freda’s mother didn’t see things that way though. Her family were sternly disapproving, until BPL made a visit to Derby and managed to charm them.

Freda commented that the engagement caused “a minor sensation” in Oxford. That was an understatement. She believed she was the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student. Some didn’t hide their disapproval. The registrar who conducted the marriage ceremony pointedly refused to shake hands with the couple.

From the moment she married, Freda regarded herself as Indian and often wore Indian-style clothes. A year later, husband and wife and their four-month old baby, Ranga, set off by boat from Trieste, Italy, on the two-week journey to the western Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). “The nightmare was to get milk for myself to drink because I was feeding the baby”, Freda recalled. “And I remember the millions of cockroaches that used to come out at night in the ship’s kitchens – I used to go in and attempt to get milk.”

Read more stories by Andrew Whitehead

The couple had already been marked out by the British authorities as revolutionaries and potential trouble makers because of their student activism. When they disembarked in Bombay, their bags and cases were inspected for seven hours to check for left-wing propaganda. “Even Ranga’s little napkin was taken off and searched,” recalled Freda, “because they thought I might be carrying messages in it”.

The key test of Freda’s marriage was still to come – the first meeting with her Indian mother-in-law, a widow and matriarch known in the family as Bhabooji. From Bombay, the Bedis travelled non-stop for a couple of days to reach the small Punjabi city of Kapurthala, arriving at the family home close to midnight. Freda was wearing a white cotton sari – “not the ideal travelling dress, and nursing Ranga had not improved it”.

BPL bowed to touch his mother’s feet in the traditional expression of respect. “I copied him, feeling a little awkward,” Freda said, “but all my shyness disappeared when she smiled at us both with tears in her eyes, and embraced us and the child as if she could not hold us close enough.”

Although Freda was determined to fit in with her Indian extended family, her lifestyle was anything but conventional. BPL’s political stand extended to rejecting any share in his family’s wealth. They made their home in Lahore, one of the largest cities in Punjab, in a cluster of thatched huts without power or running water, keeping hens and a buffalo. It can’t have been the sort of life Freda had expected – nor would she have been used to the idea of sharing the household with her mother-in-law.

“Nowhere had I seen a white woman trying to be a typical Indian daughter-in-law”, commented Som Anand, a frequent visitor to the Bedis’ huts. “It surprised me to see Mrs Bedi coming to Bhabooji’s hut in the morning to touch her feet. In household matters she respected the old mother’s inhibitions. Her mother-in-law was an equally large hearted person; despite all her conservatism she had accepted a Christian into the family without a murmur.”

Freda with a rifle when she was living in Kashmir, probably 1948 - she is holding hr son, Kabir, while her older son, Ranga, is sitting on the family's pet dog. — Image captionFreda and BPL moved to Kashmir after 1947 and remained politically active

When World War Two broke out, both BPL and Freda were outraged that India was being dragged into supporting the British war effort. BPL was detained in a desert prison camp to stop him sabotaging military recruitment in Punjab. Freda decided to make her own stand against her motherland.

She volunteered as a satyagrahi, a seeker of truth, and was among those chosen by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to defy emergency wartime powers. She travelled to her husband’s home village of Dera Baba Nanak and announced that she would “break the law by asking the people not to support the military effort until India became democratic”. The authorities didn’t know how to respond to a white woman staging such a protest – they hurriedly sent an English police inspector to the village, deeming it inappropriate for an Indian policeman to arrest an Englishwoman.

Freda was brought before a visiting magistrate that same morning – she has left her own account of the trial:

It was finished in 15 minutes. The man on the other side of the table was quite young still, and looked as though he had been to Oxford. His face was red.

“I find this as unpleasant as you do,” he murmured.

“Don’t worry. I don’t find it unpleasant at all.”

“Do you want the privileges granted to an Englishwoman?”

“Treat me as an Indian woman and I shall be quite content.”

She was sentenced to six months in jail, which was fairly standard, and also to hard labour, which she regarded as vindictive.

That turned out to be no more onerous than supervising the prison gardens, where women imprisoned for criminal rather than political offences – many were locked up for killing their abusive husbands – did most of the work.

“It was my destiny to go to India,” Freda asserted. It was her destiny too to make history as an English woman who went willingly to jail in support of India’s demand for freedom.

The Bedis’ political prominence persisted after independence, when they moved to Kashmir – Freda joined a left-wing women’s militia and worked with the radical nationalists who gained power there. In the 1950s, her life changed utterly when, during a UN assignment in Burma, she encountered Buddhism for the first time and became an enthusiastic convert.

Freda as a nun, when she took the name Sister Palmo — Image captionFreda became a Buddhist nun in the 1950s

When thousands of Tibetans fled across the Himalayas in 1959 to escape Chinese oppression, Freda devoted herself to helping these “brave and wonderful” refugees. She became steeped in Tibetan spirituality. And once she felt that she had fulfilled her role as a mother (the film star Kabir Bedi is one of her three surviving children), she broke convention again by taking vows as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. In her sixties, she travelled relentlessly to spread the word about Buddhist teachings but never returned to live in the West.

“India is my womanhood and my wife-hood,” she once declared. “I too am ‘dust that England bore, shaped and made aware’. Yet I am living in an Indian way, with Indian clothes, with an Indian husband and child on Indian soil, and I cannot feel even the least barrier or difference in essentials between myself and the new country I have adopted.”

Throughout her life, Freda was determined not to be constrained by barriers of race, religion, nation or gender. She delighted in challenging convention and confounding expectations – that is what makes her story so beguiling.

Source: The BBC

Posted in 1959, Andrew Whitehead, Arrest, authorities, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi, Barbara Castle, Bhabooji, biographer, Bombay, BPL Bedi, break the law, British authorities, British woman, Buddhism, casualties, chaperone, Chinese oppression, Christian, communist October Club, convention, convert, curiosity, demand for freedom, democratic, Depression generation, Dera Baba Nanak, Derby, disembarked, East Midlands, emergency wartime powers, empire, England, English police inspector, Englishwoman, First World War, fought, Freda Bedi, global crisis, Himalayas, independence leader, independence movement, India alert, India's freedom, Indian policeman, Indian Sikh, Indian students, jewellery and watch repair business, Kabir Bedi, Kapurthala, Kashmir, Labour Club, left-wing propaganda, lifelong spiritual quest, Machine Gun Corps, mahatma gandhi, mass unemployment, midnight, mother-in-law, mumbai, northern France, Oxford, Oxford Majlis, prison gardens, privileges, Punjabi, racial discrimination, radicals, Ranga, revolutionaries, rise of fascism, satyagrahi, seeker of truth, student activism, suburban housewife, suicide club, sympathy, Tibetan Buddhist nun, Tibetans, trial, trouble makers, UN assignment in Burma, Uncategorized, woman politician, World War Two | Leave a Comment »

CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon

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