Khasi & Jaintia Hills · Northeast Hill Massif
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
The history of Khasi & Jaintia Hills from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)