Tribe faces push for men's rights For thousands of years, Meghalaya has beeen a haven for female dominance. Photo: Ritesh Uttamchandani The one and only place in India where the birth of a baby girl is greeted with ecstasy is Meghalaya, where the mother's family, waiting in the corridor of the maternity ward, break into laughter, hugs and clap their hands for joy. "When a boy is born, the reaction is very different, subdued - 'Oh, OK, fine, whatever God gives us must be accepted," says Merle Gilford, a nurse at Nazareth Hospital in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, a picturesque state of wooded hills and mists in the north-east. This irrelevant and outdated tradition is destroying our men. Keith Pariat, president of the Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (SRT) In male-dominated, boy-fixated Indian society, Meghalaya is an aberration. It holds one of the world's last surviving matrilineal societies. The 1.2 million strong Khasi tribe invests all power in its women. For thousands of years, the Khasis have traced their descent, inheritance and lineage from mother to daughter. Meghalaya is one of the world's last surviving matrilineal societies. In Khasi society, children take their mother's surname, men move into their wife's home after marriage and when children are born only the girls inherit the family assets. The husband has little or no authority over his children. But this haven of female dominance is under threat from a group of men waging a battle for "men's liberation." Their leader is Keith Pariat, 60, a building contractor who first defied tradition 20 years ago when he gave his daughter his surname, a fact accepted by his wife, Wanphaity, after some initial hesitation. "It was a bit of a tug of war but she agreed in the end," says Pariat, who likes to joke about how his only function in the grocery store his wife owns is to "decorate the shop window at Christmas." But at least he lives in the same house as his wife. About 25 years ago, Khasi males had to seek permission before visiting their wives in their homes to exercise their conjugal rights. These days, they live in her house, but on sufferance. "This irrelevant and outdated tradition is destroying our men," says Pariat, president of the Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (SRT) which means "a new hearth." Pariat says Khasi men have become so accustomed to a life of no responsibility that they have no drive left and feel "useless." He challenges anyone to walk the streets of Shillong without stumbling over the slumped bodies of drug addicts and drunkards - men, he says, who have lost the will to live because they have been emasculated, stripped of all power, authority, status and function, save procreation. "Since they don't even have to look after their own children, they become wastrels, sleeping around and not working," Pariat says. The SRT has about 4000 members, including quite a few women, such as Radhika Lyngdoh, 29, who is not married yet. She works for an NGO that fights malaria. The typical Khasi male holds no attraction for her. Families are getting broken because men have no responsibility. They need to be head of the house to be respected," Lyngdoh says. She was won over to the SRT's campaign to end the Kashi matrilineal tradition after attending one of its many meetings, held in Kashi villages and towns. Members put up loudspeakers and hand out leaflets explaining its ideology. The SRT's fight for "equality" can sometimes sound more like a yearning for the ferocious patriarchy found throughout the rest of India. Rapes, dowry deaths, female foeticide and an ingrained misogyny make India one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, according to numerous surveys, so Meghalaya is a delightful anomaly. Meghalaya's sex ratio is healthy, compared with other parts of India, standing at 1035 females for every 1050 males, higher even than the global norm of 1000 women for every 1050 men. In the state of Haryana, adjacent to the Indian capital, the sex ratio is a grisly 877 females for every 1000 males, testimony to rampant female foeticide. The SRT website stresses the importance of the role of men in marriages: "As there cannot be two leaders in one group, the basic requirements and needs of the family should be assigned to the stronger shoulders of the father, with the close support and love of his wife, who would be more responsible for duties of the motherly kind." Patricia Mukhim, editor of the Shillong Times and an expert on Khasi culture, dismisses the SRT as having negligible influence. "They are only a tiny number of men who come from affluent backgrounds and who feel attracted to the patriarchal system in India," she said. Critics of the SRT, founded in 1990, say it has been slow in getting its message across.