Eyingbeni Hümtsoe-Nienu
The second Sunday of May is observed as Mother’s Day in almost all churches in Nagaland. The church I attended that morning was comprised of a small congregation. The message of the male preacher that day struck me. Not only that but it has stuck with me all this while. Interestingly, the coming Sunday, June 18, is Father’s Day. Churches will again observe the day with as much celebrative mood as they did Mother’s Day.
The connection between the preacher’s thought, on the day of celebrating motherhood and the imminent Sunday event of celebrating fatherhood, deserves serious introspection by all Nagas. The preacher boldly pointed out that we call our land as motherland but contradict ourselves by not letting our mothers (or women in general) to inherit land. They are landless in that sense, he said. His catchphrase was “there is no land for mothers in our motherland”.
Needless to say, there are few families in urban settings that have apportioned private landed properties to their valued daughters. Few professional women, with financial resources, buy land for themselves. But those are exceptions of rare nature. The norm in Naga society is to limit land inheritance to the sons or male relatives of the father. Single women, unmarried or otherwise, allotted land for agricultural and live-in purposes do not count as inheritance, since it is transitory and they have no decision making authority over the plot. In majority of instances, the rights of single parent-mother’s right to landed properties, especially residential houses, are packaged with restrictive unwritten rules such as forfeiture of the right once they decide to be married, denial to sell off the property at their discretion, and automatic termination of the entitlement upon their death. In some cases, divorcees and widows are forced out of family homes after the tragic event and left to fend for themselves despite their vulnerable situations.
Access to land rights by women remains a critical challenge in the village context. The topic itself is a Pandora box that should not even come close to discussion. The Indian Village Directory reports that Nagaland has 243.48sqkm of urban area as compared to rural area of 16,335.52sqkm. This directly translates to the larger portion of land remaining inaccessible to mothers and daughters as of now. Any modification to the customary land holding practices by the Legislative Assembly will probably face even tougher and rougher opposition than they did on 33% reservation of seats in the Urban Local Bodies. But it is ironic that in a time when privatization of ancestral land by male members of clan and villages is becoming common, women, by customary practice, are largely deprived of land rights. I believe it is high time for Nagas to openly discuss land rights to its female citizens on the legislative level from justice perspective, within both traditional and modern set-ups.
In the meantime, it appears like women’s prospect of inheriting land rests entirely on the positive attitude of the family patriarch towards his female relations. The most crucial question being, “If some fathers can give landed assets to female relations, why can’t all fathers?” Even in the Bible, a history of a people deeply entrenched in patriarchal culture, Zelophehad gave land to five of his daughters (Numbers 36) and so did Job: “…Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers” (Job 42:15). After all, does not land belong to God (Ps 24:1-2) and humans merely guardians of God’s property?
This Sunday, as churches and families around the world celebrate Fathers’ Day, wouldn’t it make sense for fathers to remember to do justice to their task of providing a secure future to their appropriate female relatives by their willful sharing of landed properties? For only then will our motherland be truly a land of our mothers too.
This is part of a series of ‘Guest Editorials’ run by The Morung Express. The author is faculty at Clark Theological College and teaches Christian doctrines and gender theologies. Comments can be sent to eyingtsoe@rediffmail.com.
