[ Witches of Arunachal ]

It’s almost the time of the year when a memory resurfaces unfailingly – the uneasy feeling that something is not right. The body often remembers before the mind does.

Five years ago, in July 2021, when the Arunachal Pradesh Women’s Marriage and Inheritance of Property Bill entered public discourse, many women in Arunachal witnessed something that fundamentally altered how they understood their relationship with society. The reactions to the draft bill were not merely disagreements over policy. They exposed something deeper.

Misogyny that lay quietly beneath the language of performative liberalism suddenly exploded in its rawest form. Women were trolled, threatened, ridiculed massively and accused of threatening tribal identity for merely asserting economic and social rights.

Social media became an archive of resentment towards women who dared to imagine themselves as equal political and social beings. For many educated Arunachali women, that moment became a painful realisation that education and cosmopolitanism had not erased patriarchy. They had merely concealed it more elegantly.

Now, as July nears, another public discourse emerges in the state.

And once again, APST woman is an issue – more specifically, the woman who chooses.

The woman as the site of tribal anxiety

The ST Bachao Andolan movement raises genuine concerns about illegal migration, demographic change, and the strengthening of the Inner Line Permit system – concerns that indigenous communities understandably carry in a state like Arunachal. Questions of land, migration, and indigenous protection are deep political realities across the Northeast.

In these discussions, however, the discourse repeatedly circles back to one figure: the Arunachali woman who marries a non-tribal man.

Why does the protection of tribal identity so often become inseparable from controlling women’s choices?

One of the demands insists that an Arunachali woman marrying a non-tribal should surrender her Scheduled Tribe certificate. But an ST certificate is not a temporary privilege granted through marriage. It is a birthright tied to ancestry, history, and community belonging as enshrined in the Constitution of India and often reiterated through many Supreme Court rulings.

A woman does not stop being a tribal because she marries. So, what exactly is the fear driving such demands? The answer perhaps lies less in legal reasoning and more in patriarchal anxiety.

Because if indigeneity can continue through women independent of male control, then the patriarchal structure of society becomes unstable. The fear is not simply about outsiders entering the community. It is also about women possessing equal authority in transmitting identity, inheritance, and belonging.

The tribal woman is imagined not as an equal political subject, but as a potential gateway through which the outsider enters. Meanwhile, tribal men marrying non-tribal women rarely provoke equivalent public panic.

Beyond questions of culture and indigeneity, these debates also reveal something deeper about patriarchy: the desire to control women’s sexuality and choices. Beneath much of the outrage lies an expectation that women must choose partners only within boundaries set and approved by the communities.

A woman’s autonomy becomes a threat the moment her choices move beyond what is considered acceptable by patriarchal structures. This is also why APST women who choose non-tribal men as partners are often publicly shamed on social media, their photographs circulated in groups, christened as ‘haring lovers’ and subjected to degrading comments that portray non-tribal men as ‘impure’, ‘dirty’, or somehow inferior.

This raises an uncomfortable question: when conversations move beyond concerns about land or identity and begin reducing people to humiliating stereotypes, does it not violate racial and gender justice?

Then, the discourse is no longer only about protecting culture; it also becomes about policing a tribal women’s choices through shame, intimidation, and the dehumanisation of those they choose to love. Women are expected to adhere to male-defined expectations even in their most personal and intimate sphere, transgressing their agency to choose who they love, marry, and procreate with.

There is a price she is expected to pay as a result of that choice for the betterment of her community; give up her constitutionally enshrined rights.

This asymmetry exposes the gendered foundation of the discourse. Tribal identity is imagined as something men carry naturally, while women merely reproduce it conditionally.

And this is where misogyny reveals itself most clearly, not always through open hatred, but through quiet insistence that women remain secondary citizens within their own tribal life worlds.

Property, labour and the suspicion of women

Another argument repeatedly made is that Arunachali women married to non-tribals should not acquire property in the state because such property may eventually be transferred outside the tribal community, causing ‘economic loss’ to Arunachal.

This is a valid concern, but this argument also reveals its contradictions.

The 2021 draft Marriage and Inheritance of Property Bill had proposed a clause which drew much ire that allowed APST women married to non-APST men to retain property rights during their lifetime, while requiring that the property eventually be disposed off to an ‘indigenous heir’.

If an Arunachali woman earns wealth, builds businesses, land, creates employment, and contributes economically to society, how does her labour suddenly become a threat simply because of whom she marries? She has equal rights as a citizen, as a tribal woman from the state to enjoy property rights in her lifetime.

Why does her economic participation become problematic only when her autonomy extends beyond socially approved boundaries?

Underlying these arguments is a deeply patriarchal assumption: that an Arunachali woman is somehow less trustworthy, less responsible, and less capable of safeguarding indigenous interests than an Arunachali man. Her belonging becomes conditional. Her indigeneity becomes negotiable.

It is also often reiterated that, once a woman marries a non-Arunachali man, she should naturally leave Arunachal altogether; leave her home, her career, her community, and the land she was born into.

The fear is that if such women continue working and earning in Arunachal, their income may eventually benefit non-tribal families or be invested outside the state. But by that logic, an Arunachali woman ceases to exist as an individual tribal citizen, with her own relationship to labour, land, and identity. She is viewed only through the man she marries.

Even more troubling is the implication that because of unemployment, opportunities should go only to ‘our own people’, as though women married to outsiders somehow stop belonging within that category.

Does an Arunachali woman become less Arunachali after marriage?

A tribal man’s indigeneity is treated as permanent and unquestionable. A tribal woman’s indigeneity, however, appears conditional, dependent on whether her personal choices remain acceptable to patriarchal society.

The issue, then, is not merely marriage. The issue is that women are still not seen as complete political and social beings in themselves. Their legitimacy continues to be mediated through men first through fathers and clans, and later through husbands.

The refusal of nuance

Tribal communities in Arunachal are patrilineal, and they understandably fear exploitative misuse of tribal protections. The question of granting Scheduled Tribe status to children born from marriages between APST women and non-APST men is undeniably complex and cannot simply be dismissed.

But this complexity demands that nuances and social context also be discussed that does not discriminate against tribal women. There are situations rigid political positioning fails to acknowledge. What about an Arunachali woman who returns home after widowhood or divorce and raises her child alone within her community? What about a woman abandoned during pregnancy whose clan accepts both her and her child?

In many communities here, kinship and belonging are negotiated through lived relationships, not simply through bureaucratic absolutism. There are cases where children of APST women married to APST men, upon divorce or abandonment, are accepted into the mother’s clan and raised within that social world.

If a clan willingly accepts a child into its lineage, if the child grows up speaking the language, participating in rituals, and belonging emotionally and socially to that world, then surely such realities cannot simply be erased.

The tragedy of these debates is that women are flattened into symbols rather than recognised as human beings, equal citizens, equal tribals navigating complicated emotional and social realities.

And once these conversations become centred around rigid notions of bloodline and authenticity, the implications also extend far beyond marriage.

What happens to single women who wish to adopt children? What happens to even APST couples who choose IVF or other forms of assisted reproduction? What happens when kinship and family do not follow neatly patriarchal and biological structures?

Who then becomes ‘authentically tribal’?

These questions matter because many contemporary identity debates regarding ‘tribal’ increasingly reduce indigeneity into simplistic biological or visual categories. Identity slowly becomes tied to appearance and blood purity, rather than lived belonging, language, kinship, history, and community acceptance. And once identity is reduced to rigid binaries, many other vulnerable communities inevitably get pulled into suspicion.

Communities in regions like Lekang, for instance, continue to face complicated questions of documentation and recognition despite generations of lived presence in Arunachal. These are not simple black-and-white questions.

Identities are layered. Histories are complex. Communities evolve. Belonging is emotional, social, historical, and relational not merely bureaucratic.

All these raise an uncomfortable question: are these debates truly emerging from a careful attempt to address indigenous concerns, or are they increasingly being driven by patriarchal anxiety and simplified notions of purity that cannot accommodate the complexities of real human lives?

Because when discussions lose nuance, the most vulnerable people almost always become the first casualties.

Selective modernity and the Mizoram example

Many people defending such demands often point towards Mizoram as a model, arguing that Arunachal should enact laws similar to those passed regarding Mizo women marrying non-Mizos.

Mizoram recently passed a legislation that included provisions affecting the status of Mizo women marrying non-Mizos. And significantly, a Mizo woman, Lalsangliani Colney, has challenged the law in the Supreme Court, arguing that it discriminates against Mizo women marrying non-Mizo men by stripping them and their descendants of Mizo identity and Scheduled Tribe status.

But there is another aspect of the Mizoram legislation that is conveniently ignored here while invoking it as an example: the same law has also banned polygamy and bigamy.

If Mizoram is truly the model Arunachal should emulate, then why is this aspect almost never discussed with equal enthusiasm?

Why do demands regulating women’s marriages travel quickly across state borders, while demands challenging male privilege disappear from public imagination?

This selective borrowing reveals something important: The collective wish to modernise selectively, embracing reforms that discipline women while resisting reforms that challenge patriarchal authority.

A woman marrying outside the tribe becomes framed as a threat to civilisation. But patriarchal practices within the tribe are defended as culture and tradition.

The silence around polygamy is telling precisely because it reveals whose freedoms remain negotiable and whose remain protected.

Who really controls power in Arunachal?

What is also troubling about these debates is how the burden of protecting Arunachal from demographic change, migration, and economic exploitation is repeatedly projected onto the bodies and choices of women. As though the primary reason outsiders gain influence in Arunachal is because an Arunachali woman married one.

But is that really true?

Far more uncomfortable questions need to be asked.

Who controls economic power in Arunachal today? Who owns the market networks? Who receives trading licences and contracts? Who facilitates corporate entry and private capital into the state? Who transforms migrant labour into political vote banks during elections? Certainly not ordinary tribal women.

If one studies the economy of Arunachal carefully, it becomes evident that the most significant transfers of economic power have rarely occurred through women marrying outsiders. They have occurred through alliances between political elites, contractors, business networks, and economically powerful non-tribal actors.

Market systems here already depend heavily on non-tribal capital and labour. Trading licences, construction economies, and corporate access do not emerge accidentally. They emerge through patronage, bureaucracy, and elite collaboration.

Yet public anger rarely centres these structures with the same emotional intensity reserved for women’s marriages.

Why are we not discussing the increasing number of registered non-tribal voters in Arunachal? Why are we not interrogating the relationship between political elites and economically powerful non-tribal networks? Perhaps because these questions implicate structures of male power. It is easier to regulate women than confront political and economic systems.

So, the discourse shifts downwards, away from those holding structural power and towards those more vulnerable: women, migrants without protection, and ordinary people without political influence.

The irony is painful.

The same society that often ignores exploitative economic arrangements suddenly becomes intensely protective when a woman chooses whom to love.

What actually threatens indigeneity?

At the heart of these debates lies a difficult truth: conversations around culture and indigeneity in Arunachal are deeply emotional, politically sensitive, and frequently displaced onto women because confronting larger structural realities is far more difficult.

The concerns around migration, land, and indigenous protection are real. But preventing non-tribals from settling in Arunachal alone cannot guarantee the survival of indigeneity.

Indigenous cultures today face multiple crises: language loss, urbanisation, assimilation, weakening oral traditions, generational disconnection, and the erosion of community knowledge systems.

Many young people can no longer fluently speak their mother tongues. Traditional practices are disappearing within a generation. Yet these issues rarely generate the same collective urgency.

Why does the discourse around ‘saving culture’ focus so heavily on women marrying outsiders while conversations around language preservation, archives, literature, cultural education, and intergenerational transmission remain weak?

Because regulating women is easier than rebuilding culture. It is easier to police women’s choices than to revive endangered languages, document oral histories, or invest in indigenous institutions and knowledge systems. But indigeneity cannot survive through fear alone.

A culture survives when people speak it, practice it, teach it, archive it, and consciously carry it forward across generations.

Otherwise, we risk reducing something as vast as indigenous identity into a narrow politics of exclusion where the burden of preserving an entire civilisation falls disproportionately upon women.

A question for women’s organisations

Perhaps this is also a moment for introspection, especially for women’s organizations across Arunachal.

For decades, women have been told to wait: wait for society to become progressive, for customary institutions to evolve, for political leaders to become sympathetic, for ‘the right time’ to arrive.

The Arunachal Pradesh Women’s Welfare Society (APWWS) has since 1979 actively opposed polygamy and demanded legislation protecting women’s inheritance rights and dignity.

But history shows that structural change rarely arrives voluntarily from systems that benefit from inequality. Rights are demanded, organised, challenged, litigated, and fought for.

A contradiction many Arunachali women grew up with is that women are encouraged to become educated, modern, and successful, but only within controlled limits. The moment women demand structural rights instead of symbolic respect, resistance emerges almost immediately.

Women are celebrated as achievers but distrusted as autonomous citizens.

The experiences of Naga and Mizo women reveal an important lesson. In both societies, women confronting discrimination around political participation, marriage, and identity eventually turned towards constitutional and legal mechanisms because patriarchal systems rarely reform themselves voluntarily.

In Nagaland, women demanding reservation and political participation in urban local bodies faced immense hostility under the shadow of customary law and Article 371A. Women who asserted these rights were accused of threatening Naga tradition itself.

Yet Naga women pursued the legal route. And despite severe backlash, history moved.

Eventually, Nagaland elected its first two women MLAs in 2023. Similarly, women in Mizoram challenging discriminatory provisions around marriage and tribal identity have approached the judiciary through constitutional mechanisms.

They understood something important: patriarchy often survives by making women wait indefinitely through negotiation, delay, guilt, and the language of culture.

Dialogue matters. But when dialogue becomes a mechanism to endlessly postpone justice, waiting itself becomes a form of control.

Arunachali women have waited for far too long. So perhaps the question is no longer whether change is necessary, but how long women must continue politely asking for rights that already belong to them under the Constitution of India.

The burden women are asked to carry

This is why feminist critique becomes necessary. Feminist politics do not deny indigenous anxieties. It instead questions who is blamed and who escapes accountability.

Patriarchy has always functioned by redirecting structural anxieties towards women. Economic failures become women’s failures. Cultural insecurities become women’s responsibilities. Demographic fears become women’s burden to carry.

Meanwhile, those already holding political and economic power remain largely undisturbed.

Perhaps that is why the current discourse increasingly feels like an attempt to regulate the terms under which women are allowed to belong. Because if women were truly seen as equal custodians of indigeneity, then nuance would not disappear so quickly from these debates.

And perhaps that is the burden of being a feminist woman in Arunachal: to love one’s society deeply while refusing to romanticise its violence.

Because memory is political.

Many Arunachali women still remember the humiliation of the social media vitriol that reduced them to second-class citizens. We remember the indifference of customary bodies. The misogyny of many men and women, our families, relatives, friends; people we thought were allies. We remember how quickly empathy disappeared when women demanded structural rights instead of symbolic respect.

Women’s body continues to be an archive of patriarchal burden. And every year, the memory returns.

Like an anniversary trauma. (Witches of Arunachal is a feminist digital and literary platform from Arunachal that documents the intersections of gender, indigeneity, memory, culture, and politics in the Northeast through essays, visual archives, and public discourse)