The Khasi Milieu: Also An Introduction to the Study of Tribal Religions

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This is the first translation into English of H. Onderson Mawrie's Ka Pyrkhat U Khasi. Although the translation cannot hope to capture the vitality of the original, it will serve at least its immediate purpose, if it is able to generate a fresh approach to the study of Khasi religion, in particular, and tribal religions, in general. Mr. Mawrie's account is free from any sentimentality or romanticism and he is never bitter in his criticism of the distorters of his tradition. It is about time that this book should be made available to a wider spectrum of readers.

H. Onderson Mawrie is a major writer in Khasi. He is deeply committed to a serious articulation of the traditional Khasi world- view and religion and to freeing them from many errors of misinterpretation that they have suffered for long. His works in Khasi include Ka Pyrkhat U Khasi and U Khasi Badlaka Niam.

Sujata Miri is currently Head of the Department of Philosophy at North-Eastern Hill University. She has been engaged, for several years now, in the study of tribal religion and culture. She is the editor of the book entitled Religion and Society of North Eastern India (Vikas, New Delhi). She is also the author of the book entitled Suffering.

IT is generally claimed that tribal religions do not have any literature or tradition of interpretation which could articulate the significance of their religion in the life of the tribal people. This may generally be the case; but the Khasis are a remark- able exception to this rule, The oral literature of the Khasis, before it came to be written down, is amazingly rich in philosophical, theological and interpretative ideas concerning their religion.

The Seng Khasi organisation founded first on 23 August 1899, has been active in making this literature available to its members and others who are interested. Amongst the creative writings coming from this organisation, Mr. H. O. Mawrie's Ka Pyrkhat U Khasi deserves a special place. Though this book has been a prescribed text for the Bachelor's degree course in Khasi in Meghalaya, there has been no serious academic attempt to understand it. The purpose of publishing this translation is to try to stimulate academic discussion as well as to give it wider audience.

The translation work was part of a project I had undertaken with financial assistance from the Indian Council of Social Science Research. My thanks, therefore, are due to the Council for their generous assistance. Mr O. Wahlang did the major part of the translation for which I am extremely grateful to him. The North-Eastern Hill University has contributed generously towards the cost of publication of this book; my thanks are, therefore, due to the authorities of this University. I also acknowledge the help of Debjani Tarafdar, Querang Lungalang and Weidamon in preparing the munuscript.

THE EMERGENCE of history as the sovereign science a tremendous influence on the anthropological study of religion. With it came an emphasis on the nature of primitive reasoning and the stages of its "evolution into civilized thought". While the intellectual tradition of the cultural evolutionists has been rejected in the west (specially with the advent of Freud and Durkheim), it is surprising to note that in much of Indian anthropology today there still persists the domination of the historicist's modes of thought in the under- standing of culture and religion. This accounts for an unashamed, continuous description of tribal religions (including the Khasi religion) as spiritism or animism.

With the advent of science, educated Europeans began to account for their own religion as arising out of misunderstanding from false analogical reasoning and ignorance of natural causes. Accordingly, the religion of the uneducated and unscientific peoples appeared still more compounded of error and misunderstanding. The simplest form of religion, "animism", as Tylor had called it, arose so he thought, when primitive peoples had reflected upon their experience of immaterial forms in dreams or considered the difference between a living man and his corpse. Accordingly for him primitive religion was a means towards a knowledge and control of human circumstance and particularly of the physical world, which in his day men of science had really begun to achieve by rational methods.

Influenced by such an approach the early enquiries, mostly foreign, into Khasi religion oversimplified the problems of translation and interpretation of Khasi ideas and custom. Original writings culled from Khasi informants were very few. The scholars who claimed the Khasi mentality as a primitive mentality knew nothing of their language nor were they intimate with their social and cultural conditions. Consequently, Gourdon's interpretation, for instance, of Khasi religion remains the resub of simple introspection. He is prepared (as other Victorian anthropologists) to compare as well as contrast 'savages' wit him. For him the primitive gods of the Khasis were the product of more or less uninstructed human reason and imagination. To Tylor the minimal definition of religion was "a belief in spiritual beings". Thus the understanding of religion came down to an understanding of the basis upon which such a belief arose at its most primitive level. Strangely enough, belief inspirits began as an uncritical effort to explain such puzzling phenomena as death, dreams and possession. Tylor believed that the idea of a soul was used to explain more and more remote and hitherto inexplicable natural occurrences until virtually every "tree and rock was haunted by some sort of gossamer presence". The "higher", more "developed" forms of "belief in spiritual beings", first polytheism, ultimately monotheism, were founded upon this animistic basis.

**Contents and Sample Pages**