By Bhogtoram Mawroh
Over the last few days, the letters and articles on the origin of the term ‘Jaintia’ (another name for the Pnar) have been very illuminating in shedding light on the process of how history is constructed and reconstructed in an oral culture that has no written records. The absence of a script, however, does not mean the absence of a history. For example, the Inca Empire was the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas, but they did not have a written language. They left a lot of artifacts, though, which include majestic architectural sites like Machu Picchu, a UNESCO world heritage site, which has given a lot of information about the Empire and the people who inhabited it. The same is not the case with the Khasi, where such works are not yet prolific. Till then, the history of the community will be on contested ground, and from time to time, new narratives will be created to suit a particular purpose.
The attempt by PM Passah in his letter ‘The History of the Jaintias and Their Kingdom’ to differentiate ‘Jainta’ (six letters) from ‘Jaintia’ (seven letter words) reminds me of a version that someone recently narrated about the origin of the name Khasi. According to this version, the name Khasi actually comes from Kashi, which is another name for Varanasi, implying that the Khasi came from the west and settled in what is today known as Meghalaya. This is completely different from the scholarly consensus that the Khasi came from the east to the present location. But if you look at the words ‘Kashi’ and ‘Khasi’, you will be inclined to believe otherwise. You change the position of the ‘h’, and there it is, Khasi.
My stress on the similar sounding names is because there is a suggestion that the word Jaintia, which is a different name for the Pnar (Synteng being another), does not come from ‘Jaintiapur’, which after being occupied by Hima Sutnga became known as Hima Jaintiapur. The origin is actually from ‘Jainta’, which, according to his article, ‘The Meghalaya State Anthem’ was the name of the “first state JAINTA formed by the Monkhmer or Austric-speaking race in Kopili (Kupli) valley, where they settled after fleeing Kamrupa before 500 A.D.?” Accepting this argument means that the word ‘Jainta’ has nothing to do with Jaintiapur or the versions given in the Jayantia Buranji linking it to the queen Jayanti Devi. This elevates PM Passah’s claim to an absolutely original one and these are not the only ones he makes.
Connected to the earlier claim, it was not the Jaintia Kingdom, according to PM Passah, but the “Sylhet kingdom that was divided into three, one of which was called the Jayantya kingdom. It is erroneous to associate this kingdom with the Jaintia kingdom, which originated in the Jaintia Hills.” Let’s assume for the time being that these claims are correct and see where this line of argument takes us. Accepting these claims gives rise to three possibilities.
The kingdom captured by Hima Sutnga was not Jaintiapur but ‘Jayantya(pur)’, and after capturing it, they changed the spelling from Jayantya(pur) to Jaintiapur, taking inspiration from the original ‘Jainta’ by adding an additional letter ‘i’. And that’s how the subjects of this new kingdom got the name Jaintia, which continues to this day. So the oral history of Hima Sutnga capturing Jaintiapur got the name of the kingdom wrong? Or, accepting that, based on oral tradition, Hima Sutnga did capture a kingdom called Jaintiapur, but it is different from the aforementioned Jayantya kingdom. In other words, Jayantya(pur) and Jaintiapur were two different kingdoms, and only Jaintiapur was captured by Hima Sutnga. So, it’s just a coincidence that Jainta, Jayantya, and Jaintia sound so similar and existed in proximity to each other but have different origins. That’s absolutely freaky and incredible. But there’s a third possibility that is even more incredible, i.e., the kingdom captured was not Jaintiapur (to whom the name was given later by Hima Sutnga), but one whose name has been lost to time. The oral tradition simply gave the new name having forgotten or deliberately ignoring the old one.
Leaving aside these fanciful speculations, archeological evidence has proven that 2000 years ago (500 years before the 500 AD, when according to PM Passah, the ‘Jainta’ people were fleeing Kamarupa), Nongkrem, which is more than 100 km from Kopili/Kupli (where the JAINTA state was formed), already had the presence of a population practicing iron smelting. Does it mean that people in Nongkrem do not belong to the same ethnic stock as the ‘Jainta/Jaintia, i.e., the Pnar? I am wondering what original research PM Passah has done to contradict oral traditions, genetics, literary, and archaeological evidence.
This ‘original research’ according to PM Passah is in his article “Nari-Rajya, or Women Kingdom, and the Name ‘Jaintia,” published in “Golden Jubilee Souvenir” 2020 of the Moosalyngkat Dorbar Chnong, Jowai. I would request that he scan the article and tag me on Facebook so that I and others can read it. My own concern will be with the sources that he might be citing so that we can go to the original sources and see the mention of not just the term ‘Jainta’ from which Jaintia is claimed to be derived but also about the ‘Sylhet kingdom’ and the most fascinating one, the ‘Jayantya kingdom’ which is different from the kingdom of Jaintiapur. I hope he has mentioned some sources and not just based the article on hearsay. In particular, as mentioned earlier, it will be important to see if his version matches with the other evidence in linguistics, genetics, archaeology, literature, and oral tradition. PM Passah did not do that in his letter, and his endeavor appears, to me, to be an attempt at indigenizing the term ‘Jaintia’.
Those claiming indigenous origin for the term ‘Jaintia’ appear to be uneasy with the foreign origin of the term, connected to the Indo-Aryan-speaking kingdom practicing Hinduism. For me, however, it represents a great achievement for our people, who were able to build a great kingdom whose boundaries in the past covered areas beyond the present-day international border and under whom many different people lived: the Austroasiatic (us), Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-Aryan. The catalyst of it all was the conquest of Jaintiapur, and therefore the name of the new political entity became Hima Jaintiapur, after which the people living under it also came to be known as Jaintia. I feel confident in this version because it is based on historical events (Jayantia Buranji), which agrees with folk legend (the origin of Hima Sutnga and the many versions of how they captured Jaintiapur). We should assess PM Passah’s version similarly and see how it conforms to peer-reviewed evidence.
Then there was his clarification regarding the population of the Khasi Hills. Initially, (and I am quoting him verbatim so that I am not accused of being inaccurate), PM Passah wrote that he “would like to see someone write on the various stages of migration of the Jaintias to populate Khasi Hills—the greatest exodus being the one led by Sajar Nangli in the 16th century, but the FIRST ONE led by U Shyllong is believed to have taken place between the 11th and 12th centuries.” Notice the emphasis that he placed on the one led by U Shyllong as being the FIRST ONE. Suddenly, in his recent letter, he wrote that “Khasi Hills was not populated by only these two migrations of the Jaintias but by four to five before the British took over these hills.” This change in emphasis happened because his argument regarding U Shyllong was found to be false. Based on the dates given by Passah, Nongkrem and Sohra in Khasi Hills already had a thriving population a thousand years before the migration of U Shyllong took place. I am not arguing that there were no migrations from what is known today as Jaintia Hills to the Khasi Hills. But the one by U Shyllong was not as significant as PM Passah claims, or even the FIRST ONE, his original claim, from which he has now backtracked. His retraction of the earlier claim about U Shyllong raises a question mark on PM Passah’s previous claims as well. How genuine are those claims and what are his sources?
History has always been a contested arena and susceptible to manipulation to create a certain narrative. Scholarly consensus now exists that Sanskrit and the earliest form of Hinduism have their roots outside the subcontinent, having been brought by an Indo-European group around 3500 years ago. Khasi and the other indigenous Tibeto-Burman groups in the North East were already present at least a thousand years earlier, before these Central Asian migrants arrived on the subcontinent. Scholars had arrived at these conclusions decades ago through an analysis of linguistic, literary, and archaeological evidence. The recent genetic evidence corroborated these earlier conclusions. However, there are those who still cling to the Out of India theory, which claims that Indo-Aryans (today’s majority of North Indians and upper castes in South India) are indigenous to the subcontinent. Except for Hindu nationalists, no one takes this claim seriously. However, in the case of the Khasi, scholarship on its antiquity is not as voluminous as that of ancient India. Still, some work has been done, and it’s from those few that we can get some insights into who our people are and how they came to be.
The attempt to indigenize ‘Jaintia’ is nothing but the Out of India version in the local context. These, though, are the growing pains that the historiography of our Hills has to undergo. In time, we will learn more from research done by serious scholars with scientific rigour and not have to pay attention to flights of fancy and the deliberate destruction or deformation of history (both oral and written) to suit a particular agenda. Till then, let us be careful of claims made without substance.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organisation or institution)