Khasi & Jaintia Hills · Northeast Hill Massif

The small things

The wettest place on earth runs out of waterSohra averages nearly twelve metres of rain a year and has a real dry-season shortage. The plateau cap is sandstone over gneiss with thin soil and, around Sohra, very little forest left; the water arrives faster than anything can hold it, runs off the escarpment within hours, and is gone. Villages here have historically piped water from springs kilometres away, in the wettest inhabited landscape in the world.
A bridge that is stronger every yearA timber footbridge in this climate rots in a few seasons and is taken out by the first serious spate. A jingkieng jri does the opposite — the Ficus elastica roots trained across the stream keep growing, self-graft where they cross, and thicken indefinitely, so the structure's load capacity rises with its age. The cost is paid in time rather than material, which is why the person who starts a bridge is rarely the person who uses it.
Matrilineal is not matriarchalClan name, ancestral house and ancestral property descend through women, and the youngest daughter holds them. But the ancestral property is a custodianship carrying obligations to house and care for the family, individual earnings are separate and freely disposable, and public office — syiem, rangbah shnong, the seats in the dorbar — is overwhelmingly held by men, who exercise it as mother's brothers in the houses they were born into rather than as husbands in the houses they live in. Descent and authority are routed through different people on purpose.
A forest law with no policemanThe Mawphlang grove has stood for centuries under a single rule — take nothing out — enforced by nothing but belief and the disapproval of neighbours. It works because the sanction is social and immediate rather than legal and distant, and because the grove belongs to the clan that lives beside it. Over a hundred such groves survive in the hills, and they are the best-preserved fragments of the original plateau forest.
The eight-day weekThe traditional Khasi week ran to eight days, structured around the market cycle rather than around a lunar or solar count. Sohra's market still runs on an eight-day rotation, which means a market day walks steadily through the Gregorian week and never settles on a Sunday.
Two thousand years of ironSlag from Nongkrem has been radiocarbon-dated to the last centuries BC, and in the early nineteenth century these hills were exporting on the order of two thousand tonnes of iron a year to Bengal, much of it for boat-building. The furnaces were charged with titaniferous magnetite washed out of weathered granite, and old slag was recharged into the furnace to raise the yield — a refinement not reported elsewhere in India. The industry vanished from the export returns between 1858 and 1876, undercut by imported industrial iron.
A language with no script of its own, and no relatives nearbyKhasi and Pnar are Austroasiatic. Their closest relatives are the Palaungic languages of Myanmar and Yunnan and, further off, Khmer and Mon — none of them within two thousand kilometres. Everything immediately around them is Tibeto-Burman or Indo-Aryan. And since 1841 Khasi has been written in Roman script and nothing else, which makes a hill vernacular of the Northeast readable at sight by anyone literate in English.
Kwai at the start and at the endAreca nut with betel leaf and lime is handed to a visitor before conversation begins, shared at every dorbar and every gathering, and placed with the dead. The Khasi euphemism for dying is leit bam kwai — to have gone to eat kwai in the house of God. The same object marks the opening of hospitality and its final instance.
The word for rice is the word for a mealJa is cooked rice; bam ja, to eat rice, is simply to eat. Every major dish name in the cuisine is built from it — jadoh is rice-and-meat, ja stem is rice cooked with meat and turmeric. The grammar of the menu tells you what the plate is organised around.
An archery lottery with a hill sport underneath itTeer is a betting game settled by archery — clubs shoot arrows at a target in two rounds each afternoon at the Shillong Polo Ground, and the last two digits of the arrow count decide the winning number. Bets are placed at small licensed counters across the hills. It is one of the very few gambling systems anywhere whose outcome is produced by a traditional sport rather than by a machine.
Names that are whistledAt Kongthong a mother composes a short tune at a child's birth, and that tune is the name — used to call across valleys where a whistle carries and a spoken name does not. Each person has a long form and a short form, and the tune dies with them. Fewer than a thousand people still carry one.
A cuisine with almost no spice mix in itThere is no garam masala here, no ground-spice base, and usually no frying stage. The complexity comes from roasted black sesame, fermented soybean, fermented fish and rendered pork fat — flavours produced by microbes and by heat applied to seeds, not by a spice cabinet. It is the clearest culinary boundary in India, and it sits about a hundred kilometres from Guwahati.

Small local details of Khasi & Jaintia Hills — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)