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

Villagers in Kongthong village, Meghalaya, where locals communicate with each other via hoots and toots.
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.