Ma Kamai

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Jaintia Arts and Culture Museum here in Jowai, which is the brainchild of Ma Kamai War, a local musician and caretaker of all things Pnar and an adherent of the traditional Ñiamtre belief system. He very kindly sat with me and recorded an interview in Pnar, explaining the history of the museum, how it started in 1993 and what its purpose is - to keep alive the knowledge of Pnar culture and arts. He then described each of the artifacts he has collected, from clothing to farming tools, dishes, baskets and instruments, carefully climbing over some things in order to get to others.

Amazingly, he has done this almost completely without external funding, though he could certainly benefit from funding that would help him expand the room he keeps everything in and turn it into a true display that people could wander through. To learn more about Jaintia artifacts, you can view his webpage here, and I'm hoping to edit the video soon, for a more interactive description.

Nohkalikai Falls and Living Root Bridges

A couple weekends ago I visited Cherrapunji/Sohra with my Australian linguist friends, which is the first place foreigners entered Meghalaya. We had heard there were quite a few sights to see, and were not disappointed. Cherrapunji is a beautiful place if you manage to be there when it's not raining (this area is the rainiest spot on earth, due to the high mountains that drop severely to Bangladesh on the south). And we managed.

We took a nice hike to Nohkalikai falls, which is named after a lady who jumped from the top. The story is that kong Likai fell in love and got married to a young man from her village. They were very happy and had a child. Soon after the child's birth the husband died. Ka Likai was having difficulty providing for the family and remarried. The new couple were still very poor, and the new husband started to dislike his stepchild. One day when Likai was out of the house he killed the child and used it as meat for a meal. When Likai returned home she found dinner prepared, and though she wondered where her child was, her husband assured her that the child was only playing, and as she was hungry he convinced her to eat. As soon as she had eaten a piece of meat, she knew it was her own child that she had eaten, and full of remorse she ran to the waterfall and jumped off.

The waterfall itself is quite beautiful, though the story is rather sad. The next day we trekked down over 2,000 stairs (and back up in the afternoon) to get to a number of living root bridges that local farmers have trained slowly over the last 150 years. Apparently this kind of bridge is quite common in the War-speaking areas in the mountains at the border of Bangladesh. According to this blog, they are not common anywhere else. Here's some video: http://youtu.be/TXml5M2jkQc

Nartiang Monoliths

Last week my friend Ruhi took me along with some other friends to Nartiang, which was once the summer capital of the Jaintia kings, who ruled most of this area from the 1500's until they were deposed by the British East India Trading Company in the late 1800s. When the power shifted, trade shifted as well, so that the once-prosperous town of Nartiang is a quiet backwater.

However, it still boasts the finest collection of monoliths in the area, on a special site where the king's soldiers gathered and erected large stones and set huge flat slabs on smaller rocks to create stalls where people could display their goods and elders could gather for meetings. It was quite an incredible experience. From pictures I had seen the stones looked rather small, but once there for myself I could see that it was more like a giant's playground. Just to give you an idea of the scale, here I am standing on a huge rock slab next to one of the stones. If you come to northeast India, this is one sight you won't want to miss.

Below is some video from our visit: http://youtu.be/YDk-IwlIwfU

Video from Rynji waterfall

In case you missed it, I managed to upload some video of the trip to Rynji waterfall. Here it is below.

http://youtu.be/s1vJ4gFU0Yo

Krangsuri Falls

Earlier this week my friend Peter was in town looking for speakers of a different language. To aid in his search I introduced him to Ma Jowai, an older Pnar gentleman who knows a lot of people and has been helping me learn Pnar. Ma Jowai invited us to go with him to another waterfall, Krangsuri. So on wednesday we hit the road. Along the way we stopped to take pictures at an ancient bridge made by the Jaintia kings in the 1600-1700s. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the blocks they used, here's a picture of me and Ma Jowai on the bridge.

We continued on to the falls - it was a beautiful day for visiting the falls, with warm sun and slight breeze. Peter and I marveled at the stonework for the path on the way down, and another bridge along the way with a really cool arch. We walked around on the top of the falls, where the water escaped through the holes in the sandstone. I scoped out a spot to jump from when there's more water. The drop is only about 30 feet, and the water was so clear you could see where the boulders were.

Down at the bottom the overhang was pretty extreme, thus the word "krang" in Pnar, which describes this kind of cave. I'm told that the word "suri" is a form of "churi", which is the old word for sword, as this is the place where the Jaintia king's soldiers would sharpen their swords. I'm looking forward to coming back in the summer, when the water is more extreme.