Leaving New Delhi for the ANSA-SAR project, I was aware that Abu Road, the block I had chosen to work from, was predominantly a tribal area with 80 percent tribal population. But I had no clue about the identity of the tribe.

I heard about the Garacias, one of the primitive tribes found in south Rajasthan, for the first time from Balkrishna Sharma of Azim Premji Foundation, an NGO that works in the field of education in Sirohi district. Having worked with the tribe for close to a decade, Sharma, I was told, was the best person to tell me more about the block and the tribal population that dominated it.

I wasn’t disappointed. The things he told me about the tribe were jaw-dropping. 

Although an extremely backward tribe, the Garacias are very progressive as far as some of their customs and traditions are concerned. For them, the young men and women have to choose their partners, leading to the wedding for which a reverse dowry system is at work. Pretty much unthinkable for people in most parts of patriarchal India.

“They chose their partners at a village fair,” Sharma told me. On this day, unmarried young men and women put on their best attire in an effort to attract attention of the opposite sex.

Visiting one of these fairs, I could see the enthusiasm among the crowd. While the young men were dressed in tight-fitting shirts and equally tight-fitting trousers, the women preferred traditional, colourful attire.

At the mela, a man can propose a woman and it is up to the latter to accept or reject it. If the proposal is accepted, according to Garacia customs they have to elope. Once the couple has eloped, the girl’s family along with the community members approach boy’s family and ask for settlement (read dowry).

Mind you, here the boy’s family has to pay dowry to the girl’s family! As per custom, the prospective groom’s family will host members of the woman’s family and negotiations will start.

Post-negotiation and agreement, the couple can come and stay at the boy’s house — her arrival there is deemed as good as marriage, and does not require any further stamp of ‘proper wedding’.

“If she is living in my house it is understood that we are married,” said Pinta Ram, my first Garacia acquaintance-turned-friend. There are families in hilly regions where a father and son have got married at the same time. “Weddings are an expensive proposition, so why waste money on it?” Pinta asked. 

But what happens when a man decides to leave his partner? That usually does not happen, I was told; and in any such exceptional circumstances the community deals with the situation.