MEGHALAYA, India (RNS) — Eight days earlier than Christmas final 12 months, Senseful Dkhar, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, led her fellow Catholics in prayer at a small village church within the northeastern nook of India, the place the terrain adjustments from the luxurious Garo Hills to the highland meadows of the West Khasi Hills.
It’s commonplace for ladies to guide prayers on this district, dwelling to the Indigenous Khasi neighborhood, one of many world’s few remaining matrilineal societies. Ladies are the first custodians of their households, properties and wealth among the many Khasi, although they’ve traditionally been shut out of public life.
However lately Khasi girls, together with girls of different native cultures, have taken on new obligations in Catholic church buildings within the area, appearing as catechists, main parish councils and shaping pastoral life as non secular counselors.
“Ladies are now not confined to their houses,” mentioned Dkhar. “They’re main church companies, guiding the trustworthy and sensitizing individuals about our faith and tradition.”
The prominence of girls is consistent with Pope Francis’ ceaselessly said need to place girls in additional management roles within the church. After admitting girls as voting members to the lately accomplished Synod on Synodality, Francis appointed a nun final month to go a division overseeing non secular and consecrated life. Final October Francis advised a gathering of Jesuits in Brussels that he was attempting “an increasing number of to carry girls into the Vatican with roles of upper and better duty.”
Senseful Dkhar, proper, practices Khasi songs with others earlier than the pre-Christmas Novena Mass on the Queen of the Holy Rosary Church in Mawlait village, on Dec. 18, 2024. (Photograph by Priyadarshini Sen)
These developments have discovered resonance on this distant district. “If the Catholic Church allowed it, I’d have opened up governing roles to girls as effectively,” mentioned Bishop Wilbert Marwein, who heads the Diocese of Nongstoin, within the middle of the state, the place there are greater than 2.2 million Christians.
Below Marwein, who belongs to the Khasi tribe, girls have been despatched to evangelize in villages and advocate for social justice on the grassroots stage. “Now girls are main on many fronts past their clan,” mentioned Marwein. “They’re heading youth and social teams and taking over new obligations throughout the church.”
The Khasi individuals take into account their matrilineal clan lineage a sacred custom that predates organized faith. Central to the clan id are moms, protected by maternal uncles who’re chargeable for upholding the household’s honor.
Khasis imagine within the ideology expressed within the phrase “Lengthy jaitna ka kynthei”: “From the lady sprang the clan.”
Regardless of embodying the clan, girls weren’t put in control of village affairs, which had been dealt with by councils of headmen. Solely with the arrival of Christian missionaries within the late nineteenth century did conventional gender roles start to loosen, unshackling girls from family chores as they had been uncovered to Western training and concepts.
Meghalaya state, purple, in northeast India. (Map courtesy of Wikimedia/Inventive Commons)
Marwein’s encouragement is a part of an evolution wherein girls are asserting themselves. Within the Nongstoin Diocese, a girls’s fee with some 22,000 members oversees the functioning of twenty-two parishes comprising 30 to 40 villages every. Final 12 months, a nun was appointed as head of a social work group from the world’s 23 congregations of nuns.
Earlier than they are often elected to the fee, girls immerse themselves in non secular packages together with evangelization work, adoration songs, prayers and readings at church. They go to villages to type deeper ties with the neighborhood and participate in Catholic retreats.
Geographical challenges on this hilly area with restricted infrastructure don’t deter them. “We love going to the remotest villages to evangelise the gospel,” says Esther Thyrniang, a 46-year-old nurse who’s a member of the diocese’s household fee. “Ladies ought to be concerned in each discipline of labor and never be confined to their houses.”
Of their villages, girls are studying to show their conventional roles to public functions, standing by Indigenous individuals throughout household crises and instructing them concerning the hostile results of drug abuse, mass media and early marriage.
Their efforts bore fruit in 2022 when the Convention of Catholic Bishops of India gave Nongstoin’s girls’s fee a nationwide award for its work within the diocese.
But, one of many greatest challenges for ladies stays the matrilineal society itself — and male insecurity.
“Males subtly need to put girls of their place,” mentioned Amena Passah, a Khasi historian who teaches on the North-Japanese Hill College in Shillong. “Ladies are asserting themselves outdoors their houses, which has stirred the inferiority complicated of males.”
Passah mentioned the discontent dates to 1961, when a Khasi cultural group started advocating for patriarchal descent, succession and inheritance. That effort and subsequent makes an attempt to dislodge matrilineity failed.
Senseful Dkhar, left, the vp of the Nongstoin Diocese’s girls’s fee, and Icylda Nongrum, its president, outdoors the Bishop’s Home in Nongstoin, Meghalaya, India, December 2024. (Photograph by Priyadarshini Sen)
“Males can’t determine with out our consent in all areas of labor since we’re leaders of the clan,” says Icylda Nongrum, the president of the ladies’s fee. “Ladies are actually even asserting themselves in village councils, which had been historically male-dominated.”
However the Rev. George Jarain, a priest who has been related to the Nongstoin Diocese for practically a decade, believes girls’s dominance in society has led to lack of duty amongst males. “There ought to be limits to all freedom,” mentioned Jarain. “Whereas girls’s gentleness and persistence in non secular and social issues are essential, males’s lack of duty in direction of their work and households has affected the stability in Khasi society.”
The opposite menace, based on Jarain, is marriage outdoors the clan. He fears Khasi society’s historical non secular rites and ceremonies are extra weak to being worn out. “That’s why a few of us non secular leaders have began consciousness packages in villages to empower males,” he mentioned. “They need to step up as protectors and never permit outsiders in.”
Bishop Wilbert Marwein, the bishop of the Nongstoin Diocese in Meghalaya, India, celebrates a Mass on the Queen of the Holy Rosary Church in Mawlait village on Dec. 18, 2024. (Photograph by Priyadarshini Sen)
However Marwein, who’s traveled extensively in Europe to know girls’s function in faith, mentioned girls’s qualities permit them to guide church companies, packages and prayers. “Our Khasi tradition anyway prefers girls to males,” he mentioned. “It’s a bonus we will leverage in a world the place even in the present day feminine infanticide is practiced.”
Dkhar, who plans to work with the bishop to solidify girls’s place in society and church, believes it could additional gender equality outdoors the Khasi clan.
“Although girls nonetheless don’t have a definitive voice within the village durbars led by headmen,” she mentioned, “we will use the non secular platform to carry optimistic change in society.”
