Kongthong
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A special melody is composed for each child
India’s singing village, where everyone has their melody, September 19, 2018: The Times of India
The tradition, which some say is five centuries old, faces a fight for survival with the modern world creeping in in the shape of TVs and cellphones
From: India’s singing village, where everyone has their melody, September 19, 2018: The Times of India
Curious whistles and chirrups echo through the jungle around Kongthong, a remote village in Meghalaya, but this is no birdsong. It’s people calling out to each other in music — an extraordinary tradition that may even be unique.
Here in the lush, rolling hills of the northeastern state, mothers from Kongthong and a few other villages compose a special melody for each child. Everyone in the village, inhabited by the Khasi people, will then address the person with this individual little tune — and for a lifetime. They have conventional “real” names too, but they are rarely used.
To walk along the main road in this village of wooden huts with corrugated tin roofs, perched on a ridge miles from anywhere, is to walk through a symphony of hoots and toots. On one side a mother calls out to her son to come home for supper, elsewhere children play and at the other end friends mess about — all in an unusual, musical language of their own. “The composition of the melody comes from the bottom of my heart,” mother-of-three Pyndaplin Shabong said. “It expresses my joy and love for my baby,”
“But,” said Rothell Khongsit, a community leader, “if my son has done something wrong, if I’m angry with him, at that moment I’ll call him by his actual name.”
Kongthong has long been cut off from the rest of the world, several hours of tough trek from the nearest town. Electricity arrived only in 2000, and the dirt road in 2013.
Days are spent foraging in the jungle for broom grass — the main source of revenue — leaving the village all but deserted, except for a few kids.
To call out to each other while in the forest, the villagers would use a long version lasting around 30 seconds of each other’s musical “name”, inspired by the sounds of nature all around. “We’re living in far-flung villages, surrounded by the dense forest, by the hills. So we are in touch with nature, we are in touch with all the gracious living things that God has created,” says Khongsit.
The custom’s known as jingrwai lawbei, or “song of the clan’s first woman”, a reference to the Khasis’ mythical original mother. The tradition’s origin isn’t known, but locals think it is as old as the village, which has existed for as long as five centuries.
The tradition’s days may be numbered, though, as the modern world creeps into Kongthong in the shape of TVs and phones. Some of the newer names are inspired by Bollywood songs. And youngsters are increasingly going off singing out their friends’ melodic names, preferring instead to phone them.
2021: Keeping a tradition alive
Chandrima Banerjee, April 16, 2021: The Times of India
Each person in the village of Kongthong, 65 km from Shillong in Meghalaya, has two names — one in words, the other as a whistled tune. For centuries, the village has nurtured the whistling code, Jingrwai Iawbei. Now, down to the last 700, the community is pinning its hopes on a long-promised Unesco heritage tag and a school to help preserve this oral tradition.
“Every child who is born is assigned a tune at birth by the mother. When we have to call one another, we whistle those tunes,” said Rothell Khongsit, 36, a community leader at Kongthong. First, the mother composes a tune — when the baby is conceived, or when she is recovering from childbirth — by which the baby will be identified. Then, the tune is taken to the elders of the community. It must not sound too similar to someone else’s. As the children grow into men and women, they carry the tune as an identity marker. When they die, the tunes die with them.
Meghalaya has long been trying to get the whistling nomenclature system on the Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. ‘The New York Times’ in February documented the whistling language of Silbo Gomero in the Canary archipelago, which was included in the list in 2013. In 2017, Turkey’s “bird language” was also recognised. Last month, South Shillong MLA Sanbor Shullai wrote to the Centre again, seeking the heritage tag for Meghalaya’s oral tradition that has just 700 surviving practitioners now, unlike Silbo Gomero’s 22,000 and the Turkish bird language’s 10,000. Also unlike the two languages, Jingrwai Iawbei is not being taught in schools. Jingrwai Iawbei, as the older generation knows it, has been a part of everyday life at Kongthong. In practice, it is a form of paying respects to the root ancestress, Dr Piyashi Dutta, a researcher who has worked on the system, explained. “Every clan has a root ancestress. Each time a tune is created for a child, respects are being paid to her. Jingrwai Iawbei is a melody (Jingrwai) sung in respect of the root ancestress (Iawbei). There are matrilineal implications attached to this tradition.”
Each name song has two versions — one when someone is far away and another when someone is close. But they are only to be used with upbeat sentiments. “If someone calls me by my name, I know they are angry or upset,” said Rothell. Or when they step out at night, but with rules. One must only respond to a tune at night if it is whistled thrice. The tradition is alive, but the community is concerned. “I am worried how the practice will survive. When the younger generation leaves the village, they don’t have to engage with others using whistles and tunes. They tend to forget their culture,” Rothell said. “Maybe if we had better education here, children would not have to leave too soon.” The village, perched on the East Khasi Hills, has one school up to Class VIII. At a village 3km away, Ksrang, is a secondary school. For studies beyond that, Shillong is the only choice.
Archiving Jingrwai Iawbei is also a challenge. Dutta said, “There is not necessarily a lyric or a tune with a proper scale … It’s a floating sound. How does one document a floating sound?”
