Social and State Formation in Khansi-Jaintia Hills (A Study of Folklore)

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The Khasi-Jaintia, a scheduled tribe in constitutional terms, inhabiting three districts of Meghalaya, the twenty first state of the Indian Union, is perhaps more well-known than any other tribe of the North Eastern region of the country. Since the day the headquarter of the British administration in Assam was established in Shillong, these people were exposed to contacts with other communities of the country. Even before the coming of the British the Khasi-Jaintias had extensive trade and diplomatic relations with the neighboring hills and plains people of eastern India. Although we can not retrace beyond 16th Century A.D. for a dated history of these people, they had found place in the annals and chronicles (buranji) of the neighbouring Ahom, Kachari and Koch Bihar kings, tantras and some other literary sources. By 1500 A.D. the Jaintia kingdom was very much in the political map of Eastern India. The Khasi state of Khyrim was equally known. However, it is in the works of British administrators that we got, for the first time, detailed informations about their society and culture.

Dr. Soumen Sen, the author of the book, was the Head of the Centre for Literary and Cultural studies, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. His area of interest, and consequently his work, centres mainly around studying social, political development and folk culture of north eastern hills of India, especially of Khasi-Jaintia Hills, where he has been working for more than two decades.

The Khasi-Jaintia, a scheduled tribe in constitutional terms, inhabiting three districts of Meghalaya, the twentyfirst state of the Indian Union, is perhaps more well-known than any other tribe of the North-Eastern region of the country. Since the day the headquarter of the British administration in Assam was established in Shillong, these people were exposed to contacts with other communities of the country. Even before the coming of the British the Khasi-Jaintias had extensive trade and diplo matic relations with the neighbouring hills and plains people of Eastern India. Although we can not retrace beyond 16th Century A.D. for a dated history of these people, they had found place in the annals and chronicles (buranji) of the neigh bouring Ahom, Kachari and Koch Bihar kings, tantras and some other literary sources. By 1500 A.D. the Jaintia kingdom was very much in the political map of Eastern India. The Khasi state of Khyrim was equally known. However, it is in the works of British administrators that we got, for the first time, detailed informations about their society and culture. The first mono graph appeared only in the early part of this Century when P.R.T. Gurdon had published his book The Khasis.

Since then laudable attempts have been made to construct the history of the Khasi-Jaintias starting with the pioneering though fragmentary works of Khasi-Jaintia social reformers and writers like U Babu Jeebon Roy, U Radhon Singh Berry, U Hormu Roy Diengdoh and others. In recent years historio graphers and anthropologists have added much. The present volume is only one among many such attempts. It is the result of an exercise in understanding social and state formation in Khasi-Jaintia Hills by analysing the social and political contents of folklore.

The only small claim that I can make is that as a student of Political Science and Social Anthropology and as a researcher in folklore, I have tried to examine my materials, both historical and folkloristic, in the perspective of the theories of social and state formation. That helped me in building up a history of these people which is not a narrative and not conceived as a mere record of events. History is treated here in terms of people showing how they have shaped their social and political institu tions and as the history and historical thought of a folk (a tribe in constitutional terms) finds expression in folklore, it was found worthwhile to examine the tales, legends, myths, rituals etc. to understand the process of social and state formation. This ap proach, perhaps, can also bridge the gaps observed in hitherto published literature.

The burden of this commitment, however, became all the more heavy because certain hitherto established conclusions were found to have lost much validity when put to test in the light of our theoretical and empirical experiences. Although my own conclusions are to be taken as tentative, my contention is that the Khasi-Jaintia society has long since shifted from that simple matrilineal egalitarian system which did not show strati fication and provide elaborate state structure. That both have occurred here must now be taken as facts of history. Changes have been noticed in their family and social structures. A signi ficant fact is that along with communal land holding (Ri Raid), private right to land (Ri kynti) was recognized. This dual system affected the matrilineal kinship structure and was res ponsible for stratification in the society. A kind of feudalism in the setting of communal land holding developed which in turn resulted in the growth of an elaborate state structure. The emergence of a class of landed gentry who were considered as aristocrats (Bakhraw) by virtue of their clans being the original settlers in particular areas (Raids), had accelerated the process of social stratification.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages