The Runaway Groom

Tribal communities in the country have had interesting and unique wedding customs, but most have gone extinct with time

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

MORE than a century ago, in a court in Tura in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, a Garo tribal man filed a petition seeking compensation from his prospective father-in-law. 

According to Garo customs of the time, when a local woman finalises a man for marriage, her uncles and brothers would abduct him. It was expected that the man would resist fiercely, yell and try to escape. This resistance was seen as a sign that he would be a strong and prosperous husband. If he offered little or weak resistance, it would not impress the woman’s family.

The man followed the tradition by resisting abduction, but was eventually confined to the prospective bride’s home. Tradition also dictated he should attempt to escape, which he did. If caught, he’d be brought back. However, a second escape would signal his unwillingness to marry, leading to the proposal being called off.

In this case, after the groom-elect escaped from confinement at the bride’s place, no one searched for him. The girl married another man who, according to Major Playfair, then deputy commissioner of Eastern Bengal and Assam, was “less strict in his ideas of Garo etiquette.” Feeling insulted, the original groom-elect petitioned the court, as recounted in Playfair’s 1909 book The Garos.

In Garo society, property is inherited by women. One can, therefore, understand why the wedding ball starts rolling after the girl or woman identifies a prospective groom. It was believed that the whole process spanned a few days to weeks, giving the man sufficient time to decide.

However, by the 1970s, this practice of ‘abduction marriage’, locally called chawarisikka, had become almost extinct, as Milton Sangma pointed out in his 1979 book History And Culture Of The Garos.