Beyond Kshaid, the road into the center of the Umrew gorge winds at a comparably gentle slope over the ridges and saddles of a region called the Katarshnong, or Twelve Villages. Like the Sixteen Villages in the valley of the Umiam, the Katarshnong has been a distinct ethnic/political unit since before the reach of written history. Also like its counterpart to the west, the number of villages found in the Katarshnong is not what the name would suggest. There are said to be around forty distinct settlements in the ‘Twelve Villages,’ the name being a holdover from a less densely populated era.
The region is exceedingly remote. Even to this day, large parts of it remain a walk of three or four hours from the nearest roadhead. The village in the Katarshnong which is most well-known to the outside world is Kongthong, and even here, electricity only arrived around 2000. A rough road followed, though it took until the late 2010s for it to be paved. But Kongthong is only a tiny part of the Katarshnong. For most of the villages in the region, a road is still years away.
After the trek down to the hybrid and back up to Kshaid, the idea of spending the rest of the afternoon walking on a flat surface, i.e., a road, was welcome. The objective for the night was Kongthong, a village I knew well, having visited twice before, once in 2015 and again in 2016. The local tourism society there had constructed a rather ambitious visitor’s facility, the “Kongthong Travelers Nest,” complete with indoor plumbing, a small restaurant, and spacious semi-traditional cottages.
The Katarshnong road was eerily quiet in the middle of the afternoon. As I rounded a bend and emerged onto a windy broom-grass covered saddle between the hills, I could make out the dark line of the high eastern wall of the Umrew gorge north of Pynursla. Turning the other way, I could see far back to the other side of the Sohra River valley. Across all the misty ridges and deep hollows, there was not another human being in sight. It felt as though I had the whole vast labyrinth of the Umrew gorge to myself.
But then a sound came softly on the breeze, rising out of a deep valley to the north. It was a pleasant, whistled tune which faded and gained strength with slight changes in the wind. At first it was quiet enough that I could barely be sure that I was hearing it at all, but as I walked further out towards the middle of the saddle, it grew more definite, though it still had the uncertain quality of a sound that had carried a tremendous distance. The tune lasted for only about twenty seconds, but it repeated many times.
From somewhere down the slope to the north came another whistled song, slightly longer and more complex, as if in answer to the first. The tunes met each other in the ether, and then were answered by a whole chorus of songs, some emanating from the fields only a few hundred meters away, others rising from far off valleys, the tunes mixing in the sky and filling the valley with a cloud of music.
And then, as quickly as the ghostly chorus had begun, it fell silent, and once again the Umrew Gorge seemed empty and lonesome.
These otherworldly tunes were much more than little songs the people of the region sang while they worked in the fields. They were names, not spoken, but sung. In Kongthong, Khrang, Mawshuit, Mawmang, and several other villages in the center of the Umrew gorge, mothers assign their children not only a typical, spoken, name, but a unique personal tune as well. The mother then can use this tune to call out to her offspring, the acoustics of the hills and valleys of the area allowing the name-song to waft far into the surrounding countryside.
This is a practice known as Jingwrai Iawbei, which translates roughly to “Song for the Ancestress.” In this context, the word “Iawbei” refers to the ancient female progenitor of a clan, and the songs are said to be sung in her honor.
An entirely new tune must be composed for each child, a fact which makes the musical names of Jingwrai Iawbei more creatively intensive than coming up with typical spoken names. Every child’s theme song must constitute an instantly recognizable, catchy, tune. Yet it must also be unique. Two people cannot be referred to by the same music. It’s also important that the song-name be beautiful; if you’re going to refer to your kid by a tune, and whistle that tune loudly enough to make it heard over hills and valleys for the rest of your life, then it had better be one that you’re not going to get tired of.
Whenever I’ve had the rare privilege of hearing the song-names of the Twelve Villages rising from distant slopes, the impression they’ve given me is of compositions meant, more than anything else, to musically express a mother’s love for her child. And since many people must learn the song-names to communicate, the tender music can survive as a sung memorial to the mother long after she has passed away.
This tenderness creates a practical issue: How do you refer to your child by a sweet loving song-name when you’re mad at them? According to my sources in the area, when a child (or adult, for that matter) has been bad, their parents will only use the child’s verbal name to get their attention. So, if you hear someone calling out your spoken name from afar, you can be pretty sure that you’re in trouble.
In a way, the origin of the musical names of the Umrew gorge is even more mysterious than that of the region’s living architecture. However paltry they might be, there are historical records of root bridges in the 19th century. But I have never read anything more than a few decades old that discussed Jingwrai Iawbei. A few brief mentions of villages in the Katarshnong are made in Gurdon, but he seems unaware of the name-songs and is mostly concerned with the area’s sophisticated honey harvesting, which I’m sure is fascinating to a specialist but doesn’t seem to be culturally unprecedented. Likewise, Hamlet Bareah makes occasional references to the greater political history of the region, and he, too, mentions the area’s advanced bee keeping. But Bareah also seems to be unaware of Jingwrai Iawbei. In his time, even more so than today, Kongthong and its surrounding villages would have been like little remote islands of the old Khasi world, and immensely difficult to visit and report upon.
As for what the locals say about the origins of Jingwrai Iawbei, on previous trips I pressed them as much as was appropriate on the subject, and as you may have guessed, learned little enough. The standard answer was simply that everyone’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother christened their children with musical names. It seems perfectly likely that the tradition goes back far into the pre-history of the region, but at this point, with little in the way of academic study of the practice, exactly how far is anybody’s guess.
After a few hours of relatively easy walking, I came to the large village of Khrang, the primary transport hub of the inner-Umrew gorge, where several trails from the still-roadless villages to the south intersect. A few smaller roads also extend out from Khrang, including the one that leads to Kongthong.
Following a very brief tea stop, I got on the Kongthong bound road which led up and up a few hundred meters at a moderate slope towards a saddle in a ridge east of Khrang. There was no traffic, and the center of the gorge was once again silent but for the occasional name-song carried on the wind. These became more frequent as I ascended; now that I was above so many of the countless folds of the Katarshnong, it was possible to hear the songs rising out of the many separate valleys that opened below me.
It was not long before I reached the saddle. From here the road plunges down the opposite side of the slope to Kongthong, which occupies a spur overlooking the deep valley of the Umrew proper. The village is instantly recognizable by its football field, a large flat square made up of the region’s bright orange soil. This is precariously situated at the eastern end of the village on a shelf above a sheer broom-grass covered slope which descends precipitously to the river.
The road ends at Kongthong. The land beyond, where the ridges of the Umrew gorge make their final brutally steep ascent from the deepest cuttings of the Umrew to the cool, cloudy, limestone flatlands of the next great mesa of the Khasi Hills, is simply too rugged for a connecting motorway. Undoubtedly this will change some day in the not-too-distant future, but as it stands, a vehicle starting out in Kongthong takes several hours to reach the town of Pynursla, even though it’s less than 8 ½ kilometers away as the crow flies.
Now I walked down from the saddle to the village. Surprisingly, this last stretch of the road to Kongthong was recently, and smoothly, paved. The final kilometers to the village were the best infrastructure in the whole of the inner-Umrew gorge.
This is because Kongthong, unlike Kshaid, Khrang, or the villages of the Sohra river valley, has found itself firmly on the tourism map, a fact which is largely due to the efforts of the village’s “Indigenous Agro Tourism Society Cooperative.” The society’s accomplishment is no small feat. Given how completely unknown the area was as little as fifteen years ago, Kongthong has come to be celebrated over the whole of India, and, increasingly, the world, because of Jingwrai Iawbei. And as well it should be: Jingwrai Iawbei seems to be a practice found nowhere else, even if there are other customs that have certain parallels to it.
One such similar practice can be observed nearby. All through the Khasi Hills, it’s quite common to hear people send out short, sharp, yipping noises, which echo far into the forests and through the valleys. These act as a kind of jungle-sonar, the idea being that if another person hears your yip, they’ll confirm it with a yip of their own. As far as I can discern, the point of this is mostly just to announce that you’re in the area. I suspect it’s also a way of beating loneliness and boredom while working in the jungle for hours on end.
This yipping serves a similar purpose to Jingwrai Iawbei, though it’s far less complex and does not include the maternal element. Still, given how widespread the yipping is across the Khasi Hills, it seems plausible to me that the tradition of Jingwrai Iawbei could have grown out of it.
It’s also worth pointing out that whistled languages, while rare, are not unheard of. In the village of Kuskoy in Northern Turkey, the locals found that no matter how loud they shouted, their whistles carried further than words due to the acoustics of the area’s rugged terrain. Thus, they devised an entire language where musical notes were used for long-range communication. The current practice is thought to be a descendant of a whistled language reported in the region by the ancient Greek Historian/Soldier/Philosopher Xenophon roughly 2400 years ago. While today this tradition is dying (cellphones have rendered it, like so much in the world, obsolete), it’s still practiced by several thousand people.
Both the ubiquitous Khasi yipping and the ancient whistled languages of Turkey demonstrate that the idea of using non-verbal sounds to communicate over long distances in hilly terrain is by no means unique to the Umrew gorge. However, what’s truly remarkable about Jingwrai Iawbei is the fact that it uses music, rather than words, to symbolize individuals.
One doesn’t whistle a person’s full name song in a normal conversation using Jingwrai Iawbei. Instead, you only produce the opening seconds of the tune; just enough to cue in the listener as to what person you’re referring to. The obvious comparison to this is a Leitmotif. When one hears a few iconic seconds of the Skywalker theme from Star Wars, one immediately thinks of Luke. The notes are a symbolic, musical, representation of an individual, albeit a fictional character.
But in the Katarshnong, real people have theme songs.
Kongthong, with its Traveler’s Nest, is not the sort of place where one has to ask the permission of the local government to stay the night. The village is used to visitors and seems happy to have them provided they stay confined to a little scenic ghetto at the back of the settlement, next to the football pitch.
That evening I wandered into the Traveler’s Nest and for a high but not unreasonable price had a whole cottage meant to sleep four or five people completely to myself. This was a major step up from bedding down on top of uneven school desks in the Kshaid Community Hall. The Traveler’s Nest even had an attached bathroom, complete with a western style toilet, a sink, and a hot water heater. None of these worked, mind you, plumbing being an energy intensive gravitational challenge in ridgetop settlements such as Kongthong, but just the sight of the fancy amenities was strangely comforting.
Night had fallen over the Umrew gorge. After a quiet, lonely dinner of rice and vegetables at the Nest’s little restaurant, I walked over to Kongthong’s football pitch.
It’s unlikely that there is a more scenic playing field in all of Meghalaya. The huge rectangular ground carved into the top of the ridge makes Kongthong instantly recognizable in photographs and satellite imagery. The only downside is that if one loses a ball off the eastern side of the field its likely to tumble down hundreds of meters all the way to the Umrew.
The football pitch is a lovely place at night when Kongthong is settling down to sleep; when the last name-songs fade as they drift through the ether and the sound of the unseen Umrew comes softly up out of the valley below. Through the immense, dark, gulf to the east, I could see the lights of the large settlement of Wahkhen twinkling in the void, concentrated into several distinct clusters separated by patches of pitch black; different localities within the village.
To the south of Wahkhen was another, much smaller, cluster of lights, those of the still roadless village of Nongblai. My plan for the days ahead was to walk first to Wahkhen, and then, somehow, find my way across to Nongblai, from where I felt reasonably sure I could push on to Pynursla. But it was impossible to say what lay between Wahkhen and Nongblai, or if there even was a route connecting the settlements. In the deep night, the villages seemed as remote from one another as two galaxies.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on my Patreon page. There, you can download an extended edition of my book The Green Unknown which includes several chapters available exclusively on Patreon, as well as access a whole slew of other perks.
Patrick Rogers 