Matrilineal is the tracing of descent through the female line. In a matrilineal tradition, the children take their mother’s last name.

Matrilineal family structure of Khasi tribe:-

• The Khasi family is known as a ling. A typical ling consists of a mother, her husband, her unmarried sons, her married daughters, their husbands and children.
• In matrilineal families, such as the Khasis, it is the husbands who come to stay with their wives. The male children leave upon their marriage to stay in the houses of their wives. This pattern is called matrilocal residence.
• The males contribute to the family income and their earnings to their mothers or to their sisters, and not to their own children, who belong to a different ling.
• The youngest daughter is the heiress, following the principle of ultimo geniture. She acts as the priestess of the family and leads all family rituals, including the post death ceremonies that include cremation of the dead and interring of the bones into the common sepulchre (a family tomb).
• The elder daughters of the family are dispatched to new places after their marriage. Usually, these new houses are in the same compound.
• Only the youngest daughter lives in the mother’s ling as custodian of the house and responsible for family worship. Thus, she receives a larger share in the family property. The extended group of interconnected lings is called a kur, a clan.
• Khasi women for instance carry their goods to the weekly markets, selling and shopping, and are entirely trusted by their men folk, a characteristic not peculiar in patrilineal societies like in the rest of India.
• Man controls his sister’s property and passes on control to his sister’s son. Thus, inheritance passes from mother to daughter whereas control passes from (maternal) uncle to nephew etc.

How this system does not favour men in khasi tribe:-

• Husbands need to move to wife’s house after marriage.
• Also children don’t bear father’s name but the mother’s name.
• Khasi matriliny generates intense role conflict for men. They are torn between their responsibilities to their natal house on the one hand, and to their wife and children on the other. In a way, the strain generated by such role conflict affects Khasi women more intensely etc.

Despite constraints men have significant power:-

• Man’s position in the family is an honoured one and as the bread-earner and as the protector of his mother, his sisters and young daughters and sons and his position as the exalted defender of his mother’s family. 
• Matriarchy is a social system in which females hold the primary power position in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property at the specific exclusion of man. But this is not true in case with the Khasi society which makes it matrilineal and not matriarchal.
• In fact, Khasis have matrilineal residence and material descent only. Though descent is traced through the mother, yet father is the head of the family. 
• It is the father who is expected to be the defender of the family and family’s property.
  1. In the Khasi system of asset management, the Khasi uncles (Kñi) of the household (usually under the authority of the eldest Kñi), are the managers of their sister’s property. No decision can be taken without their consent. In their wife’s household too, they provide for their children like a normal father would.