SHILLONG, Sep 8: The Union Ministry of Tourism has nominated Meghalaya’s iconic whistling village of Kongthong for entry to the UNWTO World Tourism Organization’s “Best Tourism Villages” along with two other villages in the country.
Besides Kongthong, Pochampally in Telangana and Ladhpura Khas in Madhya Pradesh have also been nominated.
In Kongthong, every time a baby is born, the mother composes a lullaby that becomes a unique identity of the child for life. Moreover, the lullaby has no words and is just is a tune, a kind of hum that only the villagers are able to recognise and remember.
When a woman is pregnant in Kongthong, she thinks of a particular tune, which becomes the name of the newborn.
After the birth of the child, adults around it constantly hum that tune so that it identifies with the sound. This is an age-old tradition in the village.
“Kongthong has potentiality to attract tourists from all over the world. It is now brand of Meghalaya. Two years ago, even people in Meghalaya or NEHU were not knowing its name. Now it is a well-known destination and name. Our next challenge is to safeguard the heritage, whistling tradition, and making the village self-sustainable,” said Rajya Sabha MP, Prof Rakesh Sinha who adopted the village in 2019. The village shot into prominence after he spoke about the village in the Upper House.
Meanwhile, Meghalaya Rural Tourism Forum president, Allan West Kharkongor on Wednesday urged the state government to correct the mistake of naming Kongthong village as a whistling village.
Kharkongor, who is said to be the first to discover and bring to light the unique tradition of the village, said, “The unique tradition of the people of Khat-ar Shnong not only Kongthong by assigning a song as a name to a newborn child is in no way associated with whistling.” He said that this tradition of villagers of Khat-ar Shnong where Kongthong happens to be just one of them, actually is an act where the individual actually produces verbal utterance of words in the form of a song when naming a child which is totally different from someone who is producing a sound from their mouth in the form of whistling.
Appreciating the Government of India for nominating Kongthong as the ‘best tourism village’ before the UNWTO, Kharkongor said, “I would urge upon the Government of Meghalaya and the Government of India to correct the mistake by naming Kongthong as a singing village instead of whistling village.”
