Tier 2 · Cultural region · Northeast Hill Massif
Ri Khasi & Ri Pnar
The wettest inhabited ground on earth, farmed and governed by clans that count descent through their mothers and protect their forests with taboo rather than law.
A plateau that does three unusual things at once. It catches more rain than anywhere else people live, because its southern cliff is the first obstacle the Bay of Bengal monsoon meets. It is matrilineal — clan name, ancestral house and ancestral property pass through women, with the youngest daughter as custodian and the mother's brother as the clan's formal voice. And it speaks Austroasiatic, a family whose other members are in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, which makes Khasi and Pnar the westernmost outpost of a language stock with no other representative anywhere near them. Everything else — the root bridges grown across flood-prone streams, the groves protected by prohibition, the standing stones, the black-sesame and blood cookery, the areca nut handed to every visitor — follows from those three facts and the terrain that produced them.
The Khasi and Jaintia hills are best read as a set of answers to a single physical fact. The plateau’s southern cliff is the first high ground the Bay of Bengal monsoon meets, and it takes the whole load — close to twelve metres of rain a year at Mawsynram and Sohra, arriving in weeks-long spells rather than in showers. Everything distinctive here is downstream of that. Bridges are grown rather than built because built ones rot. Meat is smoked because it cannot be sun-dried. Soybeans and fish are fermented because a wet hearth is the only reliable processing environment. Loads are carried in a conical basket on a headstrap because a slope this steep and this slippery does not permit a shoulder load.
The social architecture is not weather-driven, and it is the more remarkable half. Descent runs through women, and authority runs through their brothers; the youngest daughter holds the ancestral house as a duty rather than a prize; a village governs itself in an open assembly; a clan protects a patch of forest with a rule that has no enforcement mechanism beyond the neighbours. And the language in which all of this is conducted belongs to a family whose other members are in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, written in an alphabet a Welshman brought in 1841.
There is no single monument that explains the region. The nearest thing to one is a grove at Mawphlang where the rule has been “take nothing out” for longer than anyone can date, and the forest is still there.
Subtropical highland on the plateau and wet tropical below the rim, with the sharpest rainfall gradient in India. Mawsynram averages about 11,873 mm a year and Sohra about 11,777 mm, while Shillong, roughly fifty kilometres inland and only a few hundred metres higher, gets around a fifth of that. Sohra holds the standing twelve-month world record of 26,461 mm, measured between 1 August 1860 and 31 July 1861, and 9,300 mm of it fell in July 1861 alone. Almost all of that water runs off south within hours, which is why the wettest place on earth has a genuine dry-season water problem.
Landforms
Rivers and waters
Through the year
| Season | Months | Typical | What it is like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winter | November–February | 4–20 °C | Dry, clear and cold on the plateau, with frost on the Shillong grasslands. The Nongkrem dance falls in November, oranges come in from the War slope, and the escarpment views open up for the only time in the year. |
| Spring | March–April | 10–24 °C | Pre-monsoon thunderstorms and the first heavy showers. Shad Suk Mynsiem is danced in April, and jhum plots on the lower slopes are fired and sown. |
| Monsoon | May–September | 15–24 °C | Continuous rather than intermittent rain, for weeks at a time. Landslips close roads on the War slope, streams that are ankle-deep in March become impassable, and this is precisely the season the living root bridges exist for. Behdienkhlam is observed in July. |
| Post-monsoon | October | 12–23 °C | The rain breaks, the plateau is at its greenest, and the harvest and festival calendar starts. |
Best time to visitOctober to April for walking, waterfalls with the cloud lifted, and the festival calendar. Anyone who wants to understand why the place is built the way it is should come in July instead, accept that they will see nothing, and watch the water move.
The Khasi and Jaintia hills hold two different constitutions in one small territory, and only one of them produces the kind of king list most Indian regions have. Khasi country was never a single state. It was a set of himas — roughly twenty-five of them at the time the British arrived — each headed by a Syiem who was chosen by the heads of the electing clans, advised by a council of myntris, and answerable to a dorbar that could set him aside. Authority was held as an office, not owned as property. Because descent and land run through women, a Syiem was succeeded not by his son but by his sister's son, and the senior woman of the ruling clan held the ritual office on which his standing rested. Some himas are not Syiemships at all but Lyngdohships, headed by a priestly office. The Jaintia or Sutnga kingdom in the east is the exception that makes the contrast legible — it had a dynasty, a Sanskritised court, a capital down on the Sylhet plain and a place in the diplomacy of the Ahoms and of Bengal. So the region's periodisation turns on the lowland rather than on the plateau. Almost every hinge date here is a date on which somebody below the cliff wanted something — limestone, cane, iron, a road — that had to cross these hills to get it.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The plateau has no dynastic record before the Jaintia kings, and almost nothing here can be fixed to a year. What can be said is structural. Khasi and Pnar belong to the Khasian branch of Austroasiatic, whose nearest relatives are in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, which makes the plateau the westernmost outpost of that family by a very long distance; when and by what route it got here is not recoverable. The material record is neolithic stone tools, iron working, and standing stones raised for the dead and for memory, none of them individually datable. The absence of a chronology is not a gap in the evidence so much as a property of the society that produced it — authority sat in clans and villages, and clans keep genealogies rather than annals.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| undated | Khasian separates from the rest of the Austroasiatic family. No migration route is documented and no date can be assigned; the isolation of the plateau's speech from every neighbouring language is the only evidence of it. |
| neolithic | Shouldered stone celts and other neolithic tools are recovered across the Khasi and Jaintia hills, placing settled cultivation on the plateau well before any written record mentions it. |
| undated, continuing into the colonial period | Iron is smelted on the plateau from ore washed out of the local rock. By the eighteenth century Khasi iron and iron implements are a recorded export to the Sylhet plain and the Brahmaputra valley. |
| undated, added to over centuries | The mawbynna tradition of raising standing stones is practised across the hills. Individual monoliths are almost never datable; the largest field, at Nartiang, was added to over a long period and its earliest stones are attributed only by tradition. |
This is the period in which one part of the region becomes a kingdom and the rest does not. In the east, the Sutnga line takes Sanskritic titles, fixes a capital at Jaintiapur on the Sylhet plain and keeps a hill seat at Nartiang, which places it inside the politics of Bengal, of Koch Behar, of the Kacharis and of the Ahoms. In the west and centre, the himas stay small and elective and deal with the plains as traders rather than as subjects, sending limestone, iron, oranges, honey and bay leaf down the escarpment and taking back salt, dried fish and rice. The duars — the gateways where the hills meet the northern plain — are the standing point of friction, because a hima's claim to a duar and a plains zamindar's claim to the same ground were both real and could not both be enforced. When the East India Company acquired the revenues of Bengal in 1765 it inherited every one of those disputes at once.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1500 | The Jaintia rulers adopt Sanskritic titles and a capital at Jaintiapur on the plain, with Nartiang as a hill seat. The Nartiang Durga temple is attributed to this period by tradition rather than by inscription. |
| 1548–1564 | Jaintia is brought for a period under the Koch king, and later in the century under Kachari pressure. |
| 1605 | Jaintia's independence is restored with Ahom assistance, beginning a long and uneven relationship with the Ahom court. |
| 1669–1697 | The reign of Lakshmi Narayan, from which the brick building at Jaintiapur dates. |
| 1707–1708 | After the Jaintia raja Ram Singh seizes the Kachari raja, the Ahom king Rudra Singha campaigns against Jaintia. Jaintiapur is taken and Ram Singh dies in Ahom custody. Ahom control does not hold and the kingdom recovers under his successor. |
| 1765 | The East India Company acquires the Diwani of Bengal, including Sylhet. The Jaintia raja's plains territory and every Khasi trade route down the escarpment now face a single revenue administration rather than a scatter of zamindars. |
The modern period begins with a road. After the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 the Company held both Assam and Sylhet and wanted a direct route between them, and the shortest line ran over the Khasi plateau. David Scott obtained U Tirot Sing's agreement for it in durbar; within two years the agreement had collapsed over the duars on the northern foot, and the attack on the Nongkhlaw post in April 1829 opened four years of fighting across the hills. Annexation followed in stages — Jaintia in 1835, the Khasi states brought under a system of engagements rather than outright absorption — and what changed the plateau most after that was not conquest but three quieter things. Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionaries reduced Khasi to the Roman alphabet at Sohra from 1841, which is why the language is written as it is today. Shillong was made the capital of the new Assam province in 1874 and rebuilt after the earthquake of 12 June 1897, which put an administrative city on top of a hima. And taxation reached the Jaintia hills in 1860, which produced the second of the region's two risings. Khasi men served in a labour corps in France in the First World War. The last change was the boundary of 1947, which cut the southern trade routes to Sylhet that had been the plateau's main outlet for centuries and turned Sohra from a rim market into a cul-de-sac.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1826 | The Treaty of Yandabo ends the First Anglo-Burmese War. The Company now holds both Assam and Sylhet and wants a road between them across the plateau. |
| 1827 | David Scott obtains the agreement of U Tirot Sing, Syiem of Nongkhlaw, in durbar, for a road through his hima. |
| 4 April 1829 | Khasi forces attack the British post at Nongkhlaw. Lieutenants Bedingfield and Burlton are killed. Four years of fighting across the plateau follow. |
| January 1833 | Tirot Sing is taken after his position is disclosed. He is deported to Dhaka and dies there on 17 July 1835. |
| 15 March 1835 | The Jaintia kingdom is annexed and Raja Rajendra Singh deposed and pensioned. The grounds are given differently in different records — a dispute over criminal jurisdiction in the plains in some, the Company's interest in the Sylhet limestone and cane trade in others. |
| 22 June 1841 | Thomas Jones of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist mission arrives at Sohra and writes Khasi in the Roman alphabet. The orthography he fixed is the one in use today. |
| 1860–1863 | A house tax and an income tax extended to the Jaintia hills are refused. The rising that follows is led by U Kiang Nangbah, who is publicly hanged at Iawmusiang in Jowai on 30 December 1862. |
Rulers and commanders
Agreed in durbar to the Company's road through his hima and then fought it. After the attack on the Nongkhlaw post in April 1829 he conducted four years of fighting in country that suited defenders, was taken in January 1833, deported to Dhaka and died there.
Dynasty: Syiemship of Hima Nongkhlaw. Seat: Nongkhlaw
The senior woman of the ruling clan, in whom the ritual office of the hima is vested and through whom the Syiemship descends. The Syiem exercises the executive authority; she holds the standing on which it rests, and the Nongkrem rites at Smit are performed in her house.
Seat: Smit
Not every Khasi state was a Syiemship. Mawphlang is headed by a Lyngdoh, a priestly office, and the sacred grove above the village is in his custody — evidence that the plateau had more than one workable constitution running side by side.
Seat: Mawphlang
The reign from which the brick building at Jaintiapur dates, and the point at which the Jaintia court is at its most settled.
Dynasty: Jaintia (Sutnga). Seat: Jaintiapur
Seized the Kachari raja and brought on the Ahom campaign of 1707–1708. Jaintiapur was taken and he died in Ahom custody, but Ahom control did not outlast him.
Dynasty: Jaintia (Sutnga). Seat: Jaintiapur
The last Jaintia raja. Refused the Company's demands in a jurisdiction dispute and was deposed on 15 March 1835 and pensioned; the kingdom was absorbed and its hill territory administered from Sylhet.
Dynasty: Jaintia (Sutnga). Seat: Jaintiapur
Pnar leader of the refusal of the house tax and income tax in the Jaintia hills from 1860. He was taken and publicly hanged at Iawmusiang in Jowai, the market square, in December 1862.
Seat: Jowai
Made Cherrapunji his headquarters and negotiated the road across the plateau that led to the war of 1829–33. His method — engagements with individual Syiems rather than annexation — is why the Khasi states kept their internal constitutions under British rule when the Jaintia kingdom did not keep its.
Seat: Cherrapunji
A kitchen built on pork, rice and controlled fermentation, with almost no masala in it. There is no onion-tomato-ginger-garlic base, no ground spice blend, and no frying stage in most dishes — meat and rice are simmered together, and the flavour is carried by fat, salt, black sesame and fermented soybean rather than by heat. Chilli is present but used as an item on the plate, not as a seasoning worked into the pot. The most important single ingredient is not a spice at all — it is pork fat, and after it, blood, which is treated as a cooking liquid rather than as an offal. The whole system is legible as a response to the rain: there is no reliable sun-drying season here, so preservation runs through fermentation and hearth-smoke instead.
Primary cooking medium
Dominant sour agents
Spice register
Toasted and ground black sesame — nei iong — is the signature aroma, and it is what makes a Khasi pork gravy black rather than brown. Beyond it, the working set is ginger, garlic, onion, black pepper, bay leaf and the local chilli, u sohmynken, used whole and often set aside on the plate. Turmeric appears mainly in the Jaintia hills, where the Lakadong variety is grown. Cinnamon and bay grow abundantly around Sohra and are largely exported rather than used at home. There is no garam masala, and a Khasi cook asked for one will name it as something Assamese or Bengali.
Staple grains and carbs
Preservation methods
Signature techniques
Pork blood is caught at slaughter, kept liquid with salt, and used as the cooking liquid for rice along with chopped meat, fat, ginger and onion. The rice absorbs it completely and turns dark; it is a method of using the whole animal in a place where meat cannot be stored, and it produces jadoh, the region's defining dish.
Also found in: Garo Hills, Naga Hills, Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills
Soybeans are boiled soft, drained, wrapped in leaves and left in the warmth beside the hearth for three to five days until a bacterial ferment takes hold and the beans go sticky and strongly aromatic. The result, tungrymbai, is then pounded with ginger, garlic and black sesame and cooked with pork fat. The same ferment appears across the eastern hills under different names and with different textures.
Also found in: Naga Hills, Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills, Brahmaputra Valley, Garo Hills
Black sesame is dry-roasted until it pops, then ground to a coarse paste that thickens and darkens the gravy. It supplies both the fat and the aroma that a spice paste would supply elsewhere, which is why dohneiiong tastes complex without containing a single ground spice.
Also found in: Brahmaputra Valley, Garo Hills
Rice is soaked, pounded to a damp powder, and steamed in a perforated conical earthen vessel, the khiew ranei, set over a pot of boiling water. It comes out as a warm crumb rather than as grains — pumaloi — and is eaten with meat gravy. The technique is a dry-steam one, so nothing leaches out and the rice keeps its own flavour.
Also found in: Brahmaputra Valley, Garo Hills
A rack sits permanently above the fire and meat lives on it. In a climate with 11,000 mm of rain and no dependable sun, smoke is not a flavouring choice but the only working preservative, and the resulting hardened, smoke-cured pork is then rehydrated into stews months later.
Also found in: Naga Hills, Garo Hills, Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills
Cooked rice is inoculated with a yeast-and-herb starter cake, fermented in a covered pot to a beer, and then run through an earthen or metal still to make kiad um — a clear spirit far stronger than the beer it comes from. The brewing is domestic and the distilling is often a village specialism.
Also found in: Garo Hills, Naga Hills, Brahmaputra Valley
Two overlapping registers. The everyday one is rice, a broth, a meat or fish preparation and a chilli, eaten twice a day and cooked in one pot. The other is the jadoh stall — a small counter, usually run by a woman, serving a fixed short menu of rice-with-meat plates from morning until the pot is finished. Shillong's jadoh stalls are the most public form Khasi food takes, and they are cheap, fast and entirely unromantic about it.
Rice cooked in pork blood with chopped pork, fat, ginger, onion, bay and black pepper until every grain has taken the colour. Served as a plate on its own with a broth and a chilli beside it. It is the dish the region is identified by, and the version made with the blood left out is a different and much plainer thing.
Where to try: The jadoh stalls around Ïewduh and Police Bazar in Shillong, from mid-morning.
Boiled pork, classically from the head, chopped fine and tossed while still warm with raw onion, ginger, green chilli and lime. It is served cool, has no cooking fat added, and works as the sharp counterweight to everything else on the plate.
Where to try: Any jadoh stall; also on most Shillong restaurant menus.
Pork simmered with onion, ginger and a coarse paste of toasted black sesame until the gravy is black and thick. No ground spice mix, no tomato, and no chilli heat to speak of — the flavour is sesame oil released by roasting.
Where to try: Trattoria in Shillong, and jadoh stalls across the hills.
Fermented soybean pounded with ginger, garlic, black sesame and chilli and cooked down with pork fat and often pork belly. Assertive, and the single dish most likely to divide a table of visitors.
Rice cooked together with meat, turmeric and aromatics but without blood — the yellow counterpart to jadoh, and the usual choice at feasts where blood is not being used.
Powdered soaked rice steamed in a conical earthen pot to a soft warm crumb, eaten in place of boiled rice alongside meat. It is the ceremonial rice form as well as an everyday one.
A soft, pale, slightly sour pancake of fermented ground rice, cooked on a griddle. Eaten with pork gravy, or with sweetened cream as a snack.
Rice flour and jaggery worked to a batter and deep-fried into a dark, chewy disc. The standard tea-time and market sweet, and the one a Khasi household is most likely to make at home.
The tuber of Flemingia vestita, scraped clean, sliced and eaten raw with a dressing of mustard paste and sometimes dried fish. Crisp, faintly sweet, and sold by the basket in winter markets.
Small fish salted and fermented to a dark paste, then pounded with chilli, onion and mustard oil. Used a teaspoon at a time; it carries a whole meal.
The thin clear broths that accompany a rice plate — syrwa doh from meat bones, and lighter versions from vegetables. They are served in a separate bowl and drunk rather than poured over the rice.
Chicken cooked in the same black sesame gravy as pork, and the usual substitute where pork is not eaten.
Local greens — jamyrdoh, mustard leaf and wild ferns — quickly boiled or lightly fried with sesame. The vegetable side of the plate is deliberately plain, and there is a lot of it.
Smoke-cured meat taken off the rack above the fire, soaked, and simmered with local greens. Increasingly rare as fresh meat became reliable, but still the winter cooking of the higher villages.
In the Jaintia hills the local turmeric is used fresh and in quantity, in broths and with meat. Its curcumin content is unusually high, which is what earned it a geographical indication in 2024.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
Khasi dress is built from lengths of cloth pinned or knotted rather than stitched to shape, which is why the same garment reads as workwear in a field and as formal dress at a dance with only a change of fabric. The ceremonial version at Shad Suk Mynsiem and Nongkrem is heavy silk, a metal crown and solid gold and coral, and it is worn by unmarried girls who move slowly in the middle of the ground while the men circle them at speed — the costume and the choreography make the same statement about who is being protected and by whom.
What is worn
Two lengths of cloth, each knotted or pinned over one shoulder so that the fabric hangs from both shoulders and falls to the ankle. Worn over a blouse, and layered up or down with the weather.
Worn for: Everyday and formal
A single length of cloth pinned at both shoulders and worn over the jainsem, usually in mulberry or eri silk. The dressier of the two, and the one worn to church, to weddings and to dance.
Worn for: Formal and ceremonial
A checked cotton cloth tied at the waist as an apron over the jainsem while cooking, farming or carrying. The check is the everyday visual signature of the hills, and it is the garment you actually see most often.
Worn for: Work
A long sleeveless collarless coat fastened at the front with thongs, worn with a turban and a sash. Retained mainly for dance and for formal dorbar occasions.
Worn for: Ceremonial
The checked woven cloth of the Pnar, worn as a wrap and as a shawl. Jaintia dress runs to bolder checks and stripes than the Khasi plateau's.
Worn for: Everyday and festival
A shawl of hand-spun eri silk, undyed cream or coloured with lac, turmeric and tree bark. Warm, matte, and heavier than mulberry silk — the working cold-weather cloth of the plateau.
Worn for: Everyday and ceremonial
Weaves and textiles
Eri silk spun from cocoons the moth has already left, hand-spun and handwoven, and dyed with lac, turmeric, iron-rich mud and bark. Umden–Diwon in Ri Bhoi was designated Meghalaya's first eri silk village in 2021, and Ryndia was granted a geographical indication in 2025.
The wider handwoven output of Khasi, Bhoi and Jaintia weavers — shawls, jainsem and dhara lengths, and the checked cottons — granted a geographical indication in 2025.
The Jaintia loom tradition, worked in stronger colour and larger check than the Khasi plateau's, and used for both everyday wrap cloth and Behdienkhlam dress.
Jewellery
Dance
A thanksgiving and propitiation dance held at the ceremonial house of the Khyrim chieftaincy at Smit, south of Shillong. Pomblang means the beheading of goats, and the goat sacrifice is the formal core of it. The Syiem holds the political office and the Ka Syiem Sad, the high priestess through whom the line runs, holds the religious one — the two roles together are the clearest working illustration of how Khasi matriliny and Khasi office-holding fit each other. Unmarried women dance in the inner ground in crown and silk; men dance outside them with sword and yak-hair whisk.
Performed by: The Syiem of Hima Khyrim, the Ka Syiem Sad, and the people of the hima. Occasion: Five days in November, at Smit
The dance of the joyful heart, held after sowing as a thanksgiving. The same spatial grammar as Nongkrem — women in the centre moving with small steps and downcast eyes, men circling outside at speed — and the occasion at which the indigenous Niam Khasi community is most publicly visible in a majority-Christian city.
Performed by: Unmarried men and women of the Seng Khasi. Occasion: Three days in April, at Weiking ground, Shillong
A woman between two men, arms linked, the three of them stepping together to a chanted phawar rather than to drums. It is one of the very few dances in the hills where men and women dance linked, and it is danced for enjoyment rather than as a rite.
Performed by: Pnar men and women, in threes. Occasion: Behdienkhlam, in July
The men's dance vocabulary is built around the waitlam sword in one hand and the symphiah whisk in the other, with a shield in some forms. It is danced on the outside of the circle and at a different tempo from the women's, and the two are never merged.
Performed by: Men. Occasion: Festival grounds and hima occasions
Music
A four-stringed plucked lute with a wooden body and a hide face, played with a bamboo or bone plectrum. It is the accompaniment for narrative song and for phawar, and it is the instrument Khasi music is identified by.
The tangmuri is a double-reed shawm with a flared bell, and it leads the Nongkrem and Shad Suk Mynsiem grounds. It is played over ksing drums — bom, padiah and nakra — and the whole ensemble is loud, outdoor and designed to be heard across a hillside.
Extempore rhymed couplets, called out rather than sung, in a high carrying voice with a response from the crowd. Used at festivals, at archery matches, at weddings and at funerals — the form is fixed, the content is improvised on the spot, and skill at it is a recognised social accomplishment.
Welsh Presbyterian and Catholic missions put hymn singing in parts into ordinary village life from the mid-nineteenth century, and the result is that choral sight-singing is a common domestic skill here in a way it is nowhere else in India. Shillong's guitar, gospel and rock culture grew out of that training rather than out of imported records, and the Shillong Chamber Choir, founded by Neil Nongkynrih in the early 2000s, is its best-known institutional expression.
The maryngod is a bowed string instrument of the Jaintia hills, played with the drums at Behdienkhlam. The Pnar instrumental repertoire is drum-led where the Khasi one is reed-led.
Theatre
A twentieth-century Shillong tradition of written plays in Khasi, staged by amateur companies and church and school groups. It is one of the few places where Khasi is used as a literary rather than a spoken language, alongside poetry.
The storytelling that carries the clan histories, the ancestress narratives and the origin accounts. Because Khasi had no script before the nineteenth century, the entire pre-colonial record of the hills is a spoken one, and the monoliths function as its punctuation.
Crafts
Baskets, mats, stools, fish traps and the umbrella-like knup rain shield worn over the back while working in the rain. Almost every household object here was bamboo before it was plastic.
Material: Cane, bamboo. Technique: Split-cane coiling and plaiting. The signature object is the khoh, a deep conical carrying basket slung from a headstrap so the load bears on the forehead and spine rather than on the shoulders — the only workable way to carry weight up a forty-degree slope.
Eri is spun rather than reeled, because the moth is allowed to emerge and break the filament — which is why the cloth is matte and slightly slubbed rather than lustrous. Granted a geographical indication in 2025.
Material: Eri silk, lac, turmeric, bark and iron mud dyes. Technique: Hand-reeling of open-ended cocoons, hand-spinning, and loin or frame loom weaving.
Granted a geographical indication in 2025, covering the woven output of Khasi, Bhoi and Jaintia weavers.
Material: Cotton, eri and mulberry silk. Technique: Frame-loom weaving of check, stripe and plain grounds for jainsem, dhara and shawls.
A single Pnar village that has supplied cooking and storage pots to the Jaintia hills for generations, granted a geographical indication in 2024 as Lyrnai pottery.
Material: Local clay and serpentinite temper. Technique: Hand-built without a wheel, shaped on a flat stone, burnished, and open-fired, then blackened. The clay and the temper both come from within walking distance of the village.
A structural technology rather than a decorative craft. A dead timber bridge in this climate rots in a few years and is torn out by monsoon spate; a living one gets stronger, because it is still growing. The jingkieng jri landscapes entered UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list in 2022.
Material: Ficus elastica aerial roots, bamboo and areca scaffolding. Technique: Pliable secondary roots of the rubber fig are guided across a stream on a hollow areca-trunk or bamboo scaffold; over fifteen to thirty years they thicken, self-graft where they touch, and take the load, at which point the scaffold is discarded. Stone and earth are packed into the deck as it widens.
A landrace with an unusually high curcumin content, grown around Lakadong village in the Jaintia hills and granted a geographical indication in 2024.
Material: Turmeric rhizome. Technique: Grown on hill slopes without synthetic input, boiled, sun- and smoke-dried, and ground.
The plateau's commercial orange, known locally as soh niamtra, holding a registered geographical indication. It is the fruit that comes up the escarpment road in winter, and the sweet counterpart to the wild Citrus indica protected in the Garo Hills.
Material: Citrus reticulata. Technique: Grown on terraced slopes in the mid-altitude belt, often interplanted with betel and areca.
An extinct industry, and the region's most under-told one. Radiocarbon dates from slag at Nongkrem put iron production here at over two thousand years, and in the early nineteenth century the hills were exporting on the order of a couple of thousand tonnes of iron a year down to Bengal, much of it for boat-building. It disappeared from the export returns between 1858 and 1876 once imported industrial iron undercut it.
Material: Titaniferous magnetite sand washed from weathered granite. Technique: Above-ground bloomery furnaces of about half a cubic metre, charged in alternating layers of washed ore and charcoal and blown through kaolin clay tuyeres, with earlier slag recharged into the furnace to raise the yield.
The southern slope grows cinnamon and bay in quantity and produces a distinctive orange-blossom honey, most of which leaves the hills unbranded.
Material: Apis cerana honey, cinnamon and bay from the escarpment forests. Technique: Log and box hives kept in orange and betel gardens; bark and leaf stripped and shade-dried.
Whatever is in front of the singer. A phawar is a couplet improvised on the spot and shouted rather than sung, answered by the crowd; it can praise, mock, mourn or make an argument, and the same performer will do all four in an afternoon.
Sung at: Festivals, archery grounds, weddings and funerals. The nearest thing the hills have to a universal poetic form, and it needs no instrument.
A mother composes a short whistled tune for each newborn, and that tune is the child's name for life — used to call them across the slopes, where a whistle carries and a shouted name does not. The practice is explained locally as an act of respect towards the clan's first ancestress, the iawbei.
Sung at: Naming, and everyday calling across a valley. Concentrated in Kongthong in the East Khasi Hills, with a few neighbouring villages; each person has a long form and a short form of their tune.
The dance-ground repertoire carried by tangmuri and drums rather than by voice — the melodies are named and fixed, and the dancers' steps are cued by them.
Sung at: Nongkrem and Shad Suk Mynsiem.
Calls sung while the rot structures are carried and while the logs are driven into the Aitnar pool, addressed to the ancestors and to the sickness being driven out.
Sung at: Behdienkhlam, in July.
The Presbyterian and Catholic hymn corpus translated into and then composed in Khasi from the mid-nineteenth century. It is quantitatively the largest body of Khasi song, it is sung in four parts by ordinary congregations, and it is where most Khasi speakers encounter their language in print.
Sung at: Sunday worship, funerals, Christmas.
The long narrative songs and recitations attached to clan origin accounts and to the ancestress figures — the material that stood in for written history before Roman script arrived.
Sung at: Storytelling evenings.
Exchange songs between the two families, negotiating and teasing. Because residence is with the wife's house, the departure being sung about is the groom's.
Sung at: Weddings in the Jaintia hills.
Two facts make this region's language situation unlike anywhere else in India. First, Khasi and Pnar are Austroasiatic — the same stock as Khmer, Mon and the Palaungic languages of Myanmar and Yunnan — and they are separated from their nearest relatives by roughly two thousand kilometres of Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan country. They are the only Austroasiatic languages of the Northeast, and the westernmost of the family apart from the Munda group. Second, they are written in Roman script and nothing else. The Welsh Presbyterian missionary Thomas Jones fixed Khasi to the Latin alphabet in 1841, using the Sohra dialect, and that choice made Sohra Khasi the standard and left the hills with a literacy that is legible to anyone who reads English but carries no Indic script at all. Khasi also runs subject-verb-object, against the subject-object-verb order of every neighbouring language, and it marks nouns with gendered articles — u masculine, ka feminine, i diminutive, ki plural — which is why so much written Khasi begins with a small standalone particle.
Speech varieties
The dialect Thomas Jones committed to Roman script in 1841, and therefore the school, church and newspaper standard, though Shillong speech has drifted from it.
Speakers: Over 14 lakh Khasi in Meghalaya at the 2011 Census, with about 35,000 in Assam
The language of the Jaintia uplands around Jowai and Nartiang. Mutually intelligible with Khasi only partially, with its own vocabulary and a distinct verbal system; speakers generally regard it as a separate language rather than a dialect.
Spoken on the southern escarpment below the plateau rim and continuing down into Bangladesh. The root-bridge villages are War-speaking, and War is the most divergent of the Khasic varieties on the Indian side.
The northern lowland variety, in contact with Karbi, Bodo and Assamese and carrying loans from all three.
The western varieties, spoken where the Khasi hills meet A·chik country. Lyngngam speakers sit on the linguistic seam between two unrelated language families, and their vocabulary shows it.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Kur | The matrilineal clan, all of whose members descend from one named first ancestress. Marriage within the kur is prohibited absolutely, and the prohibition is the strongest rule in Khasi social life. |
| Ka Iawbei | The first ancestress of a clan — the founding woman from whom descent is counted, and the figure invoked in clan ritual and in the naming practice at Kongthong. |
| Ka khadduh | The youngest daughter, who inherits the ancestral property. It is a custodianship rather than a windfall — she holds the ancestral house, keeps the clan's ritual objects, performs the ceremonies, and is expected to house and care for her parents and any unmarried or returning siblings. Property acquired by an individual is separate and can be disposed of freely; it is the ancestral share that follows this rule. |
| U kni | The mother's brother — the formal male authority in the matrilineal house. He speaks for the clan in the dorbar, is consulted on marriage and property, and has ritual duties in his sister's household rather than in his wife's. A man's institutional role is therefore in the house he was born into, not the one he lives in. |
| Iing | The house, and by extension the household as a unit of descent. The iing seng or ancestral house is the one the khadduh keeps. |
| Hima and Syiem | The hima is the old Khasi state — a confederation of villages; the syiem is its elected chief, chosen from a designated clan and through the female line, and constrained by a council. Around twenty-five himas existed before the colonial period, and several still hold ceremonial authority. |
| Dorbar shnong | The village assembly, headed by a rangbah shnong. It is the working unit of Khasi governance, meets in the open, and settles land use, disputes and village works. |
| Law kyntang / law lyngdoh | Sacred grove. Law is forest; kyntang marks it as consecrated; a law lyngdoh is a grove in the charge of the priestly Lyngdoh clan. Nothing may be taken out — not timber, not fruit, in the strictest groves not even a fallen leaf. |
| Mawbynna | A memorial stone. Maw is stone; the upright menhirs are maw shynrang, understood as male, and the flat table stones laid before them are maw kynthei, understood as female and associated with the maternal line. |
| Jingkieng jri | A bridge of the jri, the rubber fig — the living root bridge. Jingkieng is bridge; the name specifies the species rather than the shape. |
| Kwai | Areca nut, taken with betel leaf and slaked lime. It is offered to every visitor before conversation begins, shared at every gathering, and placed with the dead. Declining it is possible but noticed. |
| Knup | The full-body rain shield of bamboo and plastic sheeting or leaf, shaped like a boat and worn over the back so that both hands stay free. In this rainfall an umbrella is useless and a knup is not. |
| Nei iong | Black sesame — the seed whose roasted paste gives Khasi pork gravies their colour and their aroma. |
| Niam Khasi and Niamtre | The indigenous religion of the Khasi and of the Pnar respectively, organised in the modern period through bodies such as the Seng Khasi. Around a sixth of the population follows it; most of the rest are Christian, and the two calendars run alongside each other without much friction. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Tip briew tip Blei | Know man, know God | The first of the three tenets of Niam Khasi — that knowledge of God is reached through right conduct towards other people, not around them. |
| Tip kur tip kha | Know your mother's kin, know your father's kin | The second tenet, and the practical instruction that holds a clan system together — you are obliged to both lines even though you belong by descent to only one. |
| Kamai ia ka hok | Earn righteousness | The third tenet. Earning is meant literally — livelihood and moral conduct are treated as the same activity, not as separate accounts to be balanced against each other. |
| Leit bam kwai | Gone to eat kwai | A euphemism for dying — to have gone to the house of God to share areca nut. The everyday hospitality object and the last one are deliberately the same. |
A dense, mossy, closed-canopy forest kept intact for centuries by the Lyngdoh clan of Hima Mawphlang under a prohibition on removing anything from it — no firewood, no fruit, in the strict account not even a dead leaf carried out. The result is a standing control sample of what the plateau looked like before the grass hills were made, ringed by open monolith fields where the sacrifices were performed. It is protected by taboo and community sanction rather than by forest law, and there are over a hundred such groves across the hills.
Best time: October–April.
Two jingkieng jri stacked one above the other across the same stream below Sohra, reached by a descent of roughly three thousand steps from Tyrna. The stacking is functional — the lower deck is unusable when the stream is in spate, so a second was grown above it. Bridges like these take fifteen to thirty years to become load-bearing and then last for generations, which makes them the opposite investment from a built bridge.
Best time: October–March. Getting there: Road from Sohra to Tyrna, then a steep stepped descent of about two hours each way.
A War Khasi village on the southern slope with its own root bridge at nearby Riwai, known nationally after a travel magazine described it as Asia's cleanest village in the early 2000s — a claim that is a media artefact rather than a survey result, but which reflects a real and organised village practice of communal cleaning directed by the dorbar.
The rim town that gave its name to the rainfall record, and the waterfall that drops off the escarpment beside it in a single plunge of over three hundred metres into a green pool. Sohra's tableland is bare and lateritic — a reminder that extreme rainfall on a deforested sandstone cap strips soil rather than building it.
Best time: October–March for views; June–August to understand the place.
The village that holds the highest recorded annual average rainfall of any inhabited place, and a limestone cave above it in which a stalagmite has weathered into a form worshipped as a Shiva lingam. The two facts sit a few hundred metres apart and are visited together.
The largest single concentration of standing stones in the hills — upright maw shynrang and flat maw kynthei in a grove at Nartiang, raised between roughly 1500 and 1835 by clans of the village and by lieutenants of the Jaintia rulers, including U Mar Phalyngki, to whom the tallest is attributed. They are memorials and markers of events rather than tombs, and they are the physical record of a society that did not write.
Best time: October–April.
A Durga temple of long standing at Nartiang, maintained by a Brahmin priestly line and counted locally among the shakti peethas. It stands a short walk from the monolith field, and the two together show the Jaintia court's absorption of plains Hindu practice alongside indigenous rite.
At around thirty-four kilometres of surveyed passage, Krem Liat Prah is the longest cave in South Asia, and it is one of roughly a hundred and fifty known caves in the same limestone ridge. Its main trunk passage is large enough to have been named the Aircraft Hangar. The surveyed length keeps rising as adjacent systems are connected.
The two lit and walkable limestone caves near Sohra, the second with visible fossils in its walls — the accessible end of a cave landscape that otherwise requires rope.
The river that runs off the escarpment onto the plain, so clear in the dry months that boats appear suspended above the bed. It is also the working land crossing to Bangladesh, and the point where the hill economy and the plain economy physically meet.
Best time: November–March, when the water clears.
A reservoir created by damming the Umiam in 1965 for the region's first large hydro scheme, now the standing view on the road up from the plains to Shillong.
One of the largest traditional markets in the Northeast, and overwhelmingly run by women — vegetables, betel, dried fish, meat, cloth and cane goods across a warren of lanes. The Khasi week traditionally ran to eight days and was named around the market cycle, which tells you where the market sat in the calendar.
The ceremonial seat of Hima Khyrim, with the Iing Sad — the thatched ancestral house where the Nongkrem dance is held each November. Quiet for the rest of the year, and worth seeing empty.
A grassland edge where the plateau falls away into a set of deep valleys, with a stepped footpath descending to Rasong village — the clearest single view of how abruptly this landscape ends.
The village where each person's name is a tune whistled by their mother at birth. It was India's nomination to the UN World Tourism Organization's best-village programme in 2021, and the practice survives among only a few hundred people.
Jowai is the Pnar town where Behdienkhlam is held; Thadlaskein, nearby, is a man-made tank attached in local account to a sixteenth-century Jaintia general and his followers, who are said to have dug it with the ends of their bows.
| Festival | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Ka Pomblang Nongkrem | Five days in November, at Smit | The thanksgiving and propitiation rite of Hima Khyrim, held at the Iing Sad at Smit. Goats are offered, the Syiem and the Ka Syiem Sad perform their respective parts, and unmarried women dance in the inner ground while the men circle outside. It is the largest ritual occasion of the Niam Khasi year. |
| Ka Shad Suk Mynsiem | Three days in April, at Weiking ground, Shillong | The dance of the joyful heart — a post-sowing thanksgiving organised by the Seng Khasi, and the most visible indigenous-religion occasion in the city. |
| Behdienkhlam | July, after sowing, at Jowai and Tuber | The Pnar festival whose name means driving out disease — behdien, to drive away, khlam, plague. Men beat the roofs of houses with bamboo poles to expel sickness, tall decorated rot structures are carried through the town, teams push a heavy log into the muddy Aitnar pool, and the wooden-ball game dad-lawakor is played between the two halves of the town. It is the biggest Niamtre occasion of the year and it is emphatically a public event rather than a private rite. |
| Wangala at the western fringe | October–November | The Garo harvest festival is observed in the Lyngngam and western villages where A·chik and Khasi settlement interleave — the one point in the Khasi calendar that belongs to a neighbouring culture. |
| Christmas and the carol season | December | With most of the population Christian, December is the loudest month in the hills. Village and church choirs sing in four parts, carol groups move between houses, and Shillong's music scene turns almost entirely to gospel and choral repertoire for a fortnight. |
| Autumn festival season and the harvest dances | October–November | Village-level thanksgiving dances across the plateau and the Jaintia uplands, most of them tied to a particular hima or clan and not advertised outside it. |
| Shad Beh Sier and the archery meets | Through the dry season | Archery is a formal club activity in the Khasi hills, with daily shoots at the Shillong Polo Ground and matches between village clubs; the shooting is accompanied by phawar and, on formal occasions, by dance. |
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| U Tirot Sing Syiem | died 1835 | Syiem of Hima Nongkhlaw | Granted the British permission to build a road from the Brahmaputra plain to Sylhet through his territory, withdrew it when the terms proved to be occupation rather than transit, and fought a four-year guerrilla campaign from 1829. Captured in 1833 and deported to Dhaka, where he died. He is the central figure of Khasi political memory. |
| U Kiang Nangbah | c. 1835–1862 | Jaintia leader | Led the Jaintia rising of 1860–62 against taxation and interference with Pnar rite, was betrayed, tried and publicly hanged at Jowai on 30 December 1862. The date is observed annually in the Jaintia hills. |
| Ka Phan Nonglait | — | Resistance figure | Remembered in Khasi oral tradition for her part in the resistance of the 1820s and 1830s alongside Tirot Sing. She is the woman most often named in Khasi historical memory, and a Shillong women's institution carries her name. |
| Thomas Jones | 1810–1849 | Missionary and linguist | A Welsh Presbyterian who arrived at Sohra in 1841 and fixed the Khasi language to the Roman alphabet, using the Sohra dialect. The consequence is a hill society with high literacy in its own language and no Indic script — and a standard dialect chosen by a foreigner working with a few informants. |
| U Soso Tham | 1873–1940 | Poet | The founding figure of written Khasi poetry, whose long work Ki Sngi Barim U Hynñiew Trep set the origin narrative of the seven clans into verse and demonstrated that the newly written language could carry a literature of its own rather than only translation. |
| Homiwell Lyngdoh | 1877–1956 | Historian | Wrote in Khasi on the himas, the syiemships and Khasi religious practice at a point when the oral record was still intact, producing some of the earliest indigenous historical writing from the hills. |
| Lou Majaw | born 1947 | Musician | Shillong's longest-running performer, who has staged a Bob Dylan birthday concert in the city every May since the early 1970s — the event around which the city's guitar culture organised itself. |
| Neil Nongkynrih | 1970–2022 | Pianist and conductor | Trained in London, returned to Shillong and founded the Shillong Chamber Choir in the early 2000s, building it out of the region's existing four-part congregational singing rather than importing a technique. |
| Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih | — | Poet and novelist | Writes in both Khasi and English, and has done more than anyone to put Khasi oral material — phawar, clan narrative, the sacred grove — into English-language literature without flattening it into folklore. |
| Desmond L. Kharmawphlang | — | Poet and folklorist | A folklorist at North-Eastern Hill University and a poet, whose fieldwork and teaching established the academic study of Khasi oral tradition inside the region rather than from outside it. |
| Patricia Mukhim | — | Journalist | Editor of The Shillong Times and a long-standing commentator on the hills, awarded the Padma Shri in 2000. |
The region's two risings are thirty years apart, are fought by two different peoples over two different grievances, and have no organisational connection at all. The first is Khasi and is about a road; the second is Pnar and is about a tax. Both were fought by the standing institutions of the hills rather than by any movement — a Syiem with his dorbar behind him, and a body of Jaintia villages refusing an assessment — which is why neither produced a party or a successor organisation. The twentieth-century all-India movement reached the plateau mainly as constitutional argument about how the hills would be represented, conducted in legislatures rather than in the field.
Risings and revolts
Opened by the attack on the British post at Nongkhlaw on 4 April 1829, in which Lieutenants Bedingfield and Burlton were killed, after the agreement for a road across the plateau broke down over the duars on the northern foot. U Tirot Sing fought a dispersed campaign across broken country for four years; several himas joined and others stood out.
Outcome: Tirot Sing was taken in January 1833 and died in confinement at Dhaka in 1835. The Khasi states were brought under British authority through separate engagements with individual Syiems rather than by annexation, which is why their internal constitutions survived.
Jaintia villages refused a house tax and an income tax newly extended to the hills. U Kiang Nangbah organised the refusal across the Pnar country around Jowai, and the fighting ran for roughly three years.
Outcome: Kiang Nangbah was taken and publicly hanged at Iawmusiang in Jowai on 30 December 1862; resistance continued into 1863 before the assessment was enforced.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| U Tirot SingNongkhlaw, Khasi Hills | died 17 July 1835 | Anglo-Khasi War, 1829–1833 | Syiem of Hima Nongkhlaw; led the resistance to the Company's road across the plateau and the four years of fighting that followed.Captured in January 1833, deported to Dhaka and died there on 17 July 1835. |
| Ka Phan NonglaitRymmai, Hima Nongkhlaw | c. 1799 – c. 1850 | Anglo-Khasi War, 1829–1833 | Remembered in Khasi oral tradition as having taken part in the resistance alongside Tirot Sing, by an account in which she disarmed a party of soldiers at Langstiehrim. The account is transmitted orally and in later Khasi writing rather than in the contemporary records, and should be read as tradition. |
| U Kiang NangbahJowai, Jaintia Hills | died 30 December 1862 | Jaintia Rebellion, 1860–1863 | Pnar leader of the refusal of the house tax and income tax imposed on the Jaintia hills.Publicly hanged at Iawmusiang in Jowai on 30 December 1862. |
| Raja Rajendra SinghJaintiapur | reigned 1832–1835 | Resistance to the annexation of 1835 | Refused the Company's demands in the jurisdiction dispute that preceded the annexation of the Jaintia kingdom.Deposed on 15 March 1835 and pensioned; the kingdom was absorbed into British Bengal. |
| James Joy Mohon Nichols-RoyShillong | 1884–1959 | Constitutional politics in Assam | Khasi member of the Assam Legislative Council from 1921 and a minister in the Assam government from 1937, who argued the hill districts' case for a distinct constitutional footing, and sat in the Constituent Assembly of India from 1946. |
Jadoh, dohneiiong, tungrymbai and doh khlieh
A small counter restaurant that has been the default answer to "where do I eat Khasi food in Shillong" for decades. Lunch only, in practice, and it empties fast.
Jadoh and ja stem plates
Not one shop but a row of them, mostly run by women, serving a fixed short menu until the pot is finished. This is the everyday form the cuisine actually takes.
Betel and areca, dried fish, sohphlang, cane baskets, local greens and eri cloth
Large, dense and overwhelmingly traded by women. Go early, and go for the produce section rather than the manufactured goods.
Coffee, and the city's Bob Dylan habit
A local institution rather than a food destination — useful for understanding Shillong's music culture.
Eri and cotton handloom, cane and bamboo, Larnai pottery
State-run, fixed price, and the simplest place to see the range before buying from a village.
Eri silk yarn and Ryndia cloth bought from the Umden weavers
One of a small number of ventures that buy directly from the eri villages; worth knowing about because most handloom here reaches the buyer through several intermediaries.
Sohra honey, cinnamon and bay, oranges and pineapple from the War slope
An eight-day-cycle market rather than a weekly one, and the point where slope produce reaches the plateau.
By air
By rail
By road
By water
Getting around
Shared taxis are the system — black-and-yellow cabs picking up multiple fares within Shillong, and Sumo counters running fixed routes to Sohra, Jowai, Dawki and Mawsynram. Anything on the War slope below the rim is reached on foot, often by long stepped descents, and the last village on a motorable road is frequently an hour's walk above the one you want.
Traditions that continue past an administrative line. Written once at the corridor level and referenced from every region it crosses, never duplicated.
War Khasi and Pnar settlement continues off the southern escarpment onto the Sylhet slopes, where roughly 85,000 Khasi live in hill hamlets called punjis and grow betel leaf on the same terraced garden system used above the rim. The paan itself travels — Khasi paan from the Sylhet punjis has long supplied markets on both sides — as do the language, the clan names and the matrilineal rule.
How it diverges: On the Indian side the himas and the dorbar survived as recognised institutions and Christianity is the majority religion; on the Bangladeshi side the punjis are leaseholders on land they do not own, the community is a small minority, and the betel economy rather than the village council is what holds it together. The border sits across the middle of a single speech community and closed the old foot routes down the cliff.
The Khasic branch of Austroasiatic itself — Khasi, Pnar, War, Lyngngam and their neighbours — separated from the rest of the family by around two thousand kilometres of unrelated languages. Its nearest kin are the Palaungic languages of the Myanmar–Yunnan borderlands; further along the same family are Khmer, Mon and Vietnamese. The shared inheritance shows in structure rather than in obvious vocabulary: subject-verb-object order, a rich set of derivational prefixes and infixes, and no case marking of the Indo-Aryan kind.
How it diverges: The Southeast Asian branches of the family acquired Indic and then Latin scripts, tonal systems in several cases, and large Sanskrit and Pali vocabularies through Buddhism. Khasi acquired none of that; it stayed unwritten until 1841, took Roman script from Welsh missionaries, and drew its loanwords from Bengali, Assamese and English instead.
Community forest protected by religious prohibition rather than by statute — the law kyntang and law lyngdoh of the Khasi and Jaintia hills, the than groves of Assam, the umang lai groves of the Manipur valley, and village forest reserves across the Naga and Mizo hills. The mechanism travels intact: a defined patch, a resident deity or ancestor, an absolute rule against extraction, and enforcement by the community that lives beside it.
How it diverges: Meghalaya's groves are clan property administered by a named priestly lineage, which has kept both the ownership and the rule stable. Elsewhere in the Northeast the groves are more often attached to a village than to a clan, and where the associated religion has changed the protection has usually weakened with it.
The practice of raising undressed stone to mark an event, a death or a lineage — Khasi and Pnar mawbynna, Nagaland's memorial and feast-of-merit stones, Karbi and Dimasa stone rows. Upright stones stand for men, flat table stones for the maternal line in the Khasi system, and the fields at Nartiang and around Mawphlang are the densest surviving examples.
How it diverges: In the Khasi and Jaintia hills the stones commemorate clans and ancestresses and are still occasionally raised; in the Naga hills they were tied to the feast-of-merit system, in which a man earned the right to erect one by giving away his wealth, and that practice largely ended with conversion.
A two-way trade older than any road here. Down go oranges, betel leaf and areca, honey, bay, cinnamon, potatoes and, for two millennia, iron. Up come dried and fermented fish, salt, and cotton cloth. The fermented fish relish tungtap exists because a landlocked hill kitchen bought its glutamate from the plain.
How it diverges: The northern leg to Guwahati is a modern highway economy; the southern leg to Sylhet, which was the shorter and older route, was cut by the 1947 boundary and now runs through two formal crossings instead of a hundred footpaths. Sohra's decline from a major trading rim town dates from that closure as much as from anything else.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30