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up in the clouds Far away in the northeastern hills lies a land largely ignored by everyone but meteorologists, adventurers and, oh yes, hardcore rockers. Vivek Menezes explains why Meghalaya is India’s coolest new frontier. Photographs by Tom Parker !"# !"$ ‘He who has not trodden the rock bottom of these precipices can never claim he really knows his land’ —KYNPHAM SING NONGKYNRIH, KHASI POET hen the mist cleared at with geraniums and anthuriums and These are Meghalaya’s Khasi hills, Wdaybreak, I lost my heart to Laitkynsew. rows and rows of potted orchids. which came under British control after Nothing could be seen when we Enormous, slow-moving butter"ies a brutal three-year war, and were soon arrived the night before, nosing slowly wobbled through the clear morning rolled into colonial Assam along with through the murk. But sunrise revealed air. Soon, the mossy paths !lled the adjacent Garo and Jaintia hills (as we were poised on the knife-edge of with red-cheeked children in bright well as present-day Nagaland, Mizoram a breathtakingly narrow ridge. Far cardigans and matching tartan kilts, as and Arunachal Pradesh). This culturally below us, on one side, the waterlogged though they had walked out of a fairy distinct region was renamed Meghalaya plains of Bangladesh reached pale to tale. Then, a group of young mothers, when it became India’s 21st state in the horizon. On the other side, steep wearing shawls clasped at the shoulder 1972. The poetically named ‘abode of jungle gorges receded into the distance, and falling to their ankles, looked up to the clouds’ (in Sanskrit) is one part of studded with waterfalls that gushed us, agape, and chorused “Khublei!” the North-East where travel is now into the void. We found ourselves “Khublei,” we stammered back. unrestricted, albeit under a highly trans!xed. It felt like we had reached Then, the unspoken, irrepressible visible blanket of military security. The view from Mawshamok, the very end of the world. thought—could this still be India? More than 90 percent of Meghalaya’s 14km from Cherrapunjee, The rising sun’s warm glow brought Five thousand feet above Sylhet, citizens have tribal ancestry. Of these, looking into the flooded the rest of the village into view. We Bangladesh, Laitkynsew is just the Garos form a signi!cant minority plains of Bangladesh saw neat little tin-roofed houses with a dusting of small buildings that spill at about 35 percent of the population. Opposite: A Khasi man scrubbed façades, tidy gardens lined down a humpbacked mountain ridge. But it is the million-plus Khasis wearing a traditional hat !!% !!" who dominate the culture, economy and politics of the state. Even in the multicultural babel of the subcontinent, this tribe stands out as unique. When I visited this summer, the monsoon was of!cially still weeks away, but Laitkynsew had already totalled 5,500mm of precipitation. That’s 18 feet of ‘pre-monsoon showers’. In Cherrapunjee, 15km up the road, the resident meteorologist had registered a much higher total. Sohra, as Cherrapunjee is called in Meghalaya, is one of the wettest places on the planet. It often gets more rain in a single day than most other places total in a year. In June 1995, for example, the town was deluged with !ve feet of rain in just 24 hours. The annual totals are even more astonishing; Sohra copped 24,555mm of rain in 1974. That’s river- deep, at more than 80 feet. Speeding down the mountainside to IT IS THE MILLION-PLUS Sohra, with Khasi blues on the radio, KHASIS WHO DOMINATE we !nd the town bazaar seething with action. It’s a farmers’ market with THE CULTURE, ECONOMY hand-woven baskets, fresh bamboo AND POLITICS OF shoots wrapped in banana leaves, dried !sh, and bulbous urns of golden MEGHALAYA. EVEN IN Sohra honey. The entire back of the THE MULTICULTURAL market is a series of yards totally given up to betel nut, the essential staple of BABEL OF THE Khasi life and key ingredient of the SUBCONTINENT, THIS ubiquitous kwai, which reddens every mouth (and street corner) in view. TRIBE STANDS OUT Sohra arrays itself along the crest of a thickly forested canyon, in sight of a dozen surging, silver waterfalls. The dappled blue-grey expanse of the plains shimmers beyond like a becalmed ocean. The 18th-century English traveller, Robert Lindsay’s account of the landscape is a typical reaction of the time. “One of the most stupendous amphitheatres in the To p row : A Khasi villager sits and remained in that spot till light world. The mountain appears to rise outside his hut; sunset at began to fade. abruptly from the watery plain, and is Cherrapunjee; a church in Till Independence, the best Cherrapunjee covered with the most beautiful foliage way to approach this town, and all Centre row: Traditional Khasi and fruit-trees which seem to grow broth; the Mawsmai cave, just of the Khasi hills, was along the spontaneously from the crevices of the outside of Cherrapunjee waterways from Kolkata and Dhaka to lime-rock. A more romantic or more Lower row: The afternoon mist Pandua, a riverside training post now beautiful situation could not be found in Cherrapunjee; betel nuts in Bangladesh, just miles below from than the one before me.” on sale at Sohra market; where we were standing. It was this The vast mountain fell away at our a wayside waterfall on the way centuries-old route that witnessed the to Cherrapunjee feet in shades of green and blue. The Above: A priest stands on arrival of Thomas Jones, a carpenter’s air was !lled with the sound of water the porch of a Catholic church son from Wales who clambered up the gushing from cataracts to the valley in Laitkynsew mountain to Sohra on 22 June 1841, far below. We discovered that it was and promptly started off the central impossible to tear ourselves away, event in modern Khasi history. !!! !!& A Khasi woman stands on one of the famous living root bridges of Nongriat village !!' !!( ‘One of the most stupendous amphitheatres in the world. A more romantic or more beautiful situation could not be found than the one before me’ !HISTORIAN ROBERT LINDSAY ON SOHRA Tapti Barooah, manager of Rosavilla, enjoys a cup of tea on the guest-house porch ones remains a paradoxical promoting coal-!red kilns, sending couple of hours. A mistake, because the !gure—a missionary who didn’t Sohra roaring into the Industrial Age. area merits much closer inspection— convert anyone and was eventually Above all, Jones learned the Khasi ideally accompanied by a stay at the expelled from his own church. language, transcribed it into the Roman Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort in Yet, because of him, Khasi script, and published its !rst dictionary. Laitkynsew. Staffed by indefatigable Presbyterians now vastly outnumber Khasi is a language unique to the Khasi women, this minuscule hotel is an the original Welsh adherents. Jones subcontinent, the only one from the oasis of civilisation at the end of would have been amazed to learn that Mon-Khmer group, out of the more a long road through rugged wilderness. more than three lakh Khasis rallied than 450 languages spoken here. Until Its very existence is tribute to the in a single day to honour the 150th Jones intervened, Khasi did not have a perseverance of owners Dennis and anniversary of his arrival in Sohra in written script and had been designated Carmela Rayen, whose hard work 1991, while his ‘mother church’ back for extinction by the colonists. This is has created a unique opportunity for in Wales has dwindled to just about why all Khasis, regardless of religion, visitors to experience this destination. 30,000 members in total. credit Jones with creating the means to “Honestly, I felt in between heaven From his !rst days in the Khasi sustain their culture. Their success set and hell when we !rst started,” hills, Jones immediately distinguished off a cultural revolution in the region: Carmela Rayen says, shaking her head, himself—and aggravated colonial the Garos, Mizos and Nagas followed as we watch a slow beeline of taxis head and church authorities—by throwing the Khasi example one after the other. downhill from the resort. “I have had himself into the service of the Each is now dominated by a Christian to refuse so many customers today. But tribal community. He taught them majority, using the Roman script. unless you were here at the beginning, The majestic Nohkalikai accounting, ending a legacy of cheating Most of Sohra’s visitors check out you could never imagine how tough Falls, which are the by middlemen from the plains. He the view from designated tourist spots, it was. We found it hard to persuade fourth-highest in the world revolutionised their lime industry by and wheel in and out of town in a people to come to Laitkynsew.” !!) !!* that can extend across long distances. These are formed into improbably sophisticated suspension bridges, which hang high over the mountain rivulets that tear down the slopes with tremendous force. Over time, the roots reinforce each other into strong and durable spans; we tramped across and back, and marvelled. he indigenous people of the Khasi hills refer to themselves Tas Ki Hynniew Trep, or ‘the people of the seven huts’. Their own religion, Niam Khasi—still practised by 40 percent of modern Khasis— recounts a descent from heaven into their homeland via the Lum Sohpet Bneng peak, the very ‘navel of heaven’, created for their sole use by the divinity U Blei. It is interesting to note that 150 years of Christian evangelism has not at all shaken the integrity of their tribal ‘we found shillong identity, or diminished their reliance on a strictly matriarchal culture.

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