7 - Garos and Christianity

Summary

“I would say that because of Christianity, we manage to remain separate from the majority group of this country.”

This is how Semion, a student at Dhaka University, summarized the significance of Christianity for contemporary Garos in Bangladesh. Christianity does not only provide an important ethnic marker for Christian Garos, who comprise at least ninety per cent of the Garos, but in many ways also for Sangsarek and Hindu Garos. Other than this, it has a major impact on their socio-economic, psychological, cultural, and political situation; it influences their outlook on life and on the world, provides them with a sense of belonging to a world that extends far beyond the borders of Bangladesh, offers new educational and professional opportunities, and regulates relationships within their society and with others. This chapter explores the relation between (conversion to) Christianity and the (ethnic) identity of Garos. The central question is how Christianity has influenced their self-perception, sense of identity and group formation. How have missionaries, the Christian religion, and Christian institutions and organizations affected the (ethnic) identity of the Garos of Bangladesh?

The main purpose is not to write up yet another church history or missionary success story, or to present an elaborate theory about the susceptibility of Garos to Christianity, but to examine the social dimensions of conversion to Christianity vis-à-vis the process of ethnogenesis. The chapter is broadly divided into two sections. The first section deals with conversion. How and why has Christianity come to play such a prominent role for the Garos? What does the process of conversion, for example, tell us about how Garos have related to one another? The second section concentrates on the relation between the church and the organization of Garos. Here I touch on the relation between Garo identity and Christianity, and on how Christianity has influenced the self-perception of Garos and their ethnic identity. The central question is how Christianity has (re)organized the social, economic and political life of the Garos. First I shall briefly discuss how I define some relevant concepts to the chapter such as Christianity, conversion, and religious identity.