Rural Settlements in North-East India

Abstract

Over 80 % of the population in North-East India lives in 40,000 villages. Over two-thirds of these villages are in Assam. The mean size of villages varies from one physical region to another and even from one state to another. The hilly states of Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have small villages. The size of a village in these states is constrained by the availability of flat agricultural land. A small patch of cultivable land on a river terrace or a structural bench along a sloping mountain front attracts a small settlement. The settlements do not grow by accretion because of the non-availability of additional land. In such situations, the young migrate to another site. The hilly states, like Arunachal Pradesh, have less than 10, often 3 or 4 villages per 100 km² of the area of the state. On the plateau of Meghalaya, villages are small, occupy small areas and yet are numerous. This is attributed to the clan structure of the society. By comparison, the villages in Nagaland are large in size. In fact, there are more large villages than small ones. A village of 5,000 people is a common site in Nagaland. These unusually large villages in the hilly Nagaland area are attributed to the offence as well as defence requirement of the Naga society. Interclan or intervillage conflicts were quite common in Naga society before the arrival of Christianity and the British administration. The mean size of a village ranges from 130 in the hills to 800 in Nagaland and over 2,000 in the plains of Manipur.

In Assam plain, the village houses are arranged in rows along a raised street, but in hilly areas of Mizoram, they cluster around a high point. A village in a hilly area is invariably a clan village, like an Angami or an Ao village, but in the plains of Assam, it is often a multi-clan, multi-caste or multireligious village, though dominance of a clan or a tribal group is quite common. In most villages, in Brahmaputra plain, there are people of different persuasions with a dominant group. In the villages with a large Hindu population, there is often a ‘Namghar’ in the centre of the village where people congregate for prayers in the evenings or on special occasions.