By Bhogtoram Mawroh
A few days ago, I recalled a story my late mother told me about our late great grandmother, a story that has stayed with me. Our ancestral village was Nongjri, saddled along the international border with one of our properties lying not very far from the river which divides India from Bangladesh. After a plague devastated the village, our family migrated from Nongjri to settle in the newly established village of Rana. My great-grandmother raised my mother after my grandmother died when my mother was young. A highly resilient woman, my great grandmother was quite resourceful and had married multiple times in the past. During one marriage, she got very annoyed with her husband and tried to kill him with a wait (Khasi machete). This incident reminded of the iconic folktale of Noh Ka Likai.
According to legend, there was a woman called Ka Likai who lived in the village of Rangjyrteh. The settlement is now abandoned and falls under the jurisdiction of Laitduh village under the Sohra Syiemship. In the past, however, Rangjyrteh was part of the erstwhile Hima Khathynriew Shnong and was an important iron smelting site until the 17th century. It was from around the same area that in 2013 Pawel Prakov (I met him while I was doing my PhD in NEHU) and Ireneusz Suliga from the Department of Geo-environmental Research, Polish Academy of Science found evidence of iron smelting that goes back over 1000 years along with sites in Nongkrem that had dated to over 2000 years (oldest iron smelting site in North East India). Rangjyrteh was, therefore, a very important settlement in the past.
Ka Likai had a daughter who she loved very much. Her husband had died when her daughter was born. After her daughter grew up to play with other children, she married again. However, the new husband resented Ka Likai’s inability to attend to him more because of the child. Therefore, one day when the mother went about her work at the iron smelting plant, her husband killed the child, dismembered her and prepared curry with the body parts. After Ka Likai returned, he gave the dish to the tired mother who ate without suspecting that she was consuming her own child. However, he forgot to throw away the fingers he’d put in the betel nut basket. After the husband had left, Ka Likai took the betel nut basket and found the fingers of her child. Horrified at the realisation of what had actually transpired, she shrieked and ran out of the house with the wait to kill the murderer of her child. However, she could no longer find him and in distraught, she threw herself from the precipice from which a waterfall emerged known as ‘Noh Ka Likai (the place from where Ka Likai jumped to her death).
My mother never told me what made my great grandmother so annoyed with her husband, but I presume it was over a similar incident. I imagine, though, the spirit of Ka Likai was very with her when she tried to kill him. However, she failed, and the police took her into custody and imprisoned her alongside her husband. Another man, also arrested by the police, was in the same lockup. She found out that this individual had intellectual disability. Quick-witted that she was, she convinced the man to lie alongside her in order to give the impression that he was her husband. When the police came to inspect the lockup and asked her if she and her husband had made peace, the man (influenced by my great grandmother) nodded in agreement with her. The police then let them both go and my great grandmother came back home without her husband or the man from the lockup. The only picture that we had of her was only of her standing together with my mother and her siblings. So, while she married multiple times, she never settled with any man. I guess she found them too tedious.
The ease with which my great grandmother could change partners was very much in keeping with the Khasi tradition of ease of getting divorce. According to PRT Gurdon’s 1914 monograph ‘The Khasis,’ divorce was very common and can take place for a variety of reasons, such as adultery, barrenness, incompatibility of temperament etc. During the divorce, the ‘Ksiang’ (go-between) and the maternal uncles ‘Kni’ must witness the event. On other occasions, friends and other acquaintances can replace the ‘Ksiang’. The husband and wife bring five cowries each. The wife gives her five cowries to her husband, who then places them with his and returns the five cowries to his wife, together with his own. He then receives back the ten cowries from his wife and throws them on the ground, signalling the acceptance of divorce. A crier (u nong pyrta shnong) then goes round the village to proclaim the divorce, and inform the men and women of the village that they are free to court the two parties as they are no longer together. This can be compared to the case of a North Indian friend of mine, whose husband had abandoned her nearly ten years ago. But according to her customs, she cannot remarry because he had not officially divorced her. No Khasi woman would put up with this nonsense. Ease of divorce is the mark of a civilised society where women are not forced to suffer in a toxic relationship for the pleasure of those who do not come to her aid. What the Khasis had, the world is clamouring for and hopefully more societies would adopt the Khasi principle of divorce where every person, man and woman are free to separate and find someone else if they are unhappy. And even if they never want to settle, that’s also alright.
Despite being quite old when my mother became an orphan, my great grandmother made sure that she raised all her grandchildren in the best way she could. Although now I am the eldest, I had two elder siblings who had died soon after their birth. So, when I was born, she told my mother that she was buying me and I was her son. My mother, of course, agreed, but when my parents shifted to Shillong, she had to let me go. I visited the village a couple of times, but when she passed away, I could not go and my mother told me she wanted to see me one last time. Among my many regrets, that is one I always carry.
When I think about my great grandmother, I picture her as a strong and independent woman who was highly resourceful and quite entrepreneurial. We have some land under an areca nut plantation which still provides some money for my family. But I’m sure my great-grandmother also engaged in cross-border trade, especially in the Nongjri Haat, established for that purpose. A few years ago I had gone there with my late uncle and the Haat resembled the weekly markets we see elsewhere. The only exception being that this one had many Bangladeshi traders. Even then, I saw many Khasi women selling areca nut in locally made bamboo baskets.
The Khasis share a relationship with the Austroasiatic speaking groups of South China and Southeast Asia. Despite converting to foreign faiths from India, women in these societies maintained their respectable positions. In his 2024 book ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’, William Dalrymple writes that “There was one other aspect of South-east Asian life that remained untouched by Indian influence: the high status of women. In Cambodia, women remained owners and disposers of property, something from which the Laws of Manu and wider Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them.” The Khasis have carried that tradition well into the modern period, and my great grandmother was an excellent example of that.
There’s another passage from the book ‘Garo and Khasi: A Comparative Study in Matrilineal System’ by Chie Nakane which talks about the immense strength of Khasi women as derived from the culture: Even after divorce or husband’s death, the Khasi woman (non-heiress) stays on in her household. Indeed, many divorced or widowed poor wives, whose children are still small, try their best to live and bring up their children by themselves without asking their brothers’ help. Of course, a mother and her small children may go back to live in her natal iing … However, during my fieldwork, I found no sense of psychological inferiority in Khasi women, widows or divorcées, such as we usually find in other societies. The personality of the individual seems to reflect the social structure.
Things have changed a lot and the impact of a patriarchal Christianity which preaches monogamy and obedience to the husband has had some impact. The rise of cases of sexual assault against women is an example of how modernity has not been beneficial for the Khasi women. But I hope that the example of my great grandmother and many like her (I am sure every Khasi household must have had or still have someone like her) can be a template to never forget the roots of our culture and what gives us our identity. We lose this, we lose who we are.
(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)