By Dr Omarlin Kyndiah
At the outset, one must applaud H H Mohrmen for his deeply researched, articulate, and much-needed intervention in the ongoing debate surrounding the term Jaiñtia. His essay delivers an important corrective function: it rescues history from ignorance. At a time when labels are rejected without inquiry and identities are questioned without evidence, Mohrmen’s write-up reminds us that history is not shaped by sentiment but by sources, continuity, and memory.
His central argument that Jaiñtia is neither a British invention nor a non-indigenous imposition is historically sound and convincingly demonstrated. Indeed, the tendency to blame the British for the name reflects not colonial critique but historical unfamiliarity. As Mohrmen shows, the British merely encountered, recorded, and administratively reorganised a political and cultural reality that already existed.
What further strengthens this position is the much older ethnological and migratory history of the Jaiñtia people, which long predates both the Jayantia plains kingdom and British intervention.
According to R. M. Nath (North East India: Gateway to Glory), the original homeland of the Austric peoples to whom the Mon-Khmer speaking groups of Northeast India belong is broadly traced by scholars to northern Indo-China. These Austric peoples were not a single tribe but a constellation of related groups: Khoso, Synteng, Kol, Gond, Moria, Munda, among others. One such group, referred to in early records as T’sin-taing or T’sin-tein, migrated southward from China. Over time, this group came to be known as Zyntein or Synteng, and in its later historical articulation, as Jaiñtia.This is a crucial point: Jaiñtia is not an alien label imposed from outside, but the historical evolution of an indigenous ethnonym.
R. M. Nath further records that these early Jaiñtia groups first settled in Kamarupa (present-day Guwahati). Pressured by raids and territorial expansion from Indo-Aryan Brahmanical powers, they migrated eastward to the banks of the Kolong River, and later moved south to establish a flourishing agricultural civilisation in the fertile Kupli Valley, known in oral memory as Kremlamet, located in present-day North Cachar Hills. It was here that the Jaiñtia people laid the foundations of an early political formation locally remembered as Jainta long before the rise of the historical Jayantia kingdom of the plains. Chinese historical records lend external corroboration to this early polity. The Shung-Shu (420–479 AD) records that the kingdom of Kae-pih-le (identified with Kupli) sent an ambassador to China in 428 AD, indicating a politically organised Jaiñtia state with diplomatic reach in the early fifth century.
The French scholar Jean Przyluski adds another layer of insight by noting that Austric migrations often occurred in organised batches under a recognised leader. Jaiñtia oral traditions are entirely consistent with this pattern. Folklore speaks of the great leader U Lakriah, who guided his people during their migrations. The well-known myth of U Niaw Wasa (the Seven Huts) descending through Ka Tangnoob Tangjri (the Golden Ladder) is not mere fantasy but part of a shared Austric cosmological recollection, closely connected to the wider Hynniewtrep origin narrative. As with all myths, these stories emerged in an age before formal historiography, yet they encode migration, leadership, and settlement in symbolic form.
Linguistic scholarship further dismantles the claim that Jaiñtia is non-indigenous. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee persuasively argues that Jaiñtia is derived from Synteng. He observes:
“The form Synteng gives the modern pronunciation of the word, but it is quite in the nature of things that an earlier pronunciation was Zaintein. It was thus easy for Synteng = Zaintein or Zanten to be Sanskritised by the Aryan speakers as Jayanta or Jayanti.”
This linguistic lineage is further elaborated by Prof. B. Pakem in his paper “Sources of the Early History of the Jaintias,” published in Sources of the History of India, Volume II (Institute of Historical Studies, Calcutta, 1979). Pakem notes that the term Synteng itself has multiple indigenous explanations. One view holds that when the Sutnga kings ruled over their subjects in the plains, the latter mispronounced the name Sutnga; even today, plains people pronounce it as Suteng-ga, a phonetic shift that eventually produced the term Synteng for the hill people. Another version attributes the name to U Chitang Kongor, the Sutnga general who annexed the southern plains, from whom the plains population came to refer to the hill people as Synteng. A third tradition traces the name to the ancestral mother Ka Tein (Teng in Khasi), one of the twelve children of Ka Lidakha and U Luh Ryndi, from whom the Jaintias are said to have derived the appellation Synteng.
This linguistic evolution explains the transition from Synteng to Jayantia. In this context, it is important to note that alternative views deriving the name Jaiñtia from the goddess Jayantesvari Devi, from Puranic or Tantric literature, or from interactions with subject populations in the plains remain debated and inconclusive, and do not displace the stronger linguistic and ethnological evidence for an indigenous origin later Sanskritised through cultural contact. It must also be clearly realised that the name Jaiñtia predates later political and religious expressions such as Jayantiapur, Jaintia Parganas, Jayantapura, Janteswari, or Jayanti Devi. These were subsequent developments administrative, dynastic, or religious built upon an already existing ethnonym. The name Jaiñtia was therefore foundational, not derivative.
Even more striking is the suggestion supported by Chinese records that the Jaiñtia kingdom may correspond to the ancient Kingdom of Kea-Pih-le (or Kapili), which would place Jaiñtia political history as early as 428 AD. If this identification holds, then the Jaiñtia polity predates many better-known kingdoms of the region by centuries.
Material evidence also supports the antiquity and territorial extent of the Jainta Kingdom. R. M. Nath records the discovery of a stone boundary pillar marking the jurisdiction of the Jainta Kingdom up to Jamunagaon. This pillar was found in the reserve forest on the bank of the Jamuna River and has since been preserved in the small museum at Nagaon. Such tangible archaeological evidence decisively refutes the claim that Jaiñtia political identity was a late or colonial construct.
Historical sources further indicate that the name Jaiñtia was already being used to describe Mon-Khmer–speaking peoples of the Kupli Valley when they established their first organised kingdom there. The subsequent extension of hill rule into the plains and the establishment of Jayantiapur as a capital therefore represented not a shift in identity, but the reaffirmation of an older ethnonym within a new political geography.
Seen in this broader frame, Mohrmen’s conclusion becomes inescapable:
Jaiñtia is not a colonial label, not a non-tribal name, and certainly not an insult to indigenous identity. It is a name shaped by migration, language, myth, political power, and historical continuity.
To reject the term Jaiñtia today is therefore not an act of decolonisation; it is an act of historical erasure. Mohrmen’s essay deserves appreciation precisely because it urges us to replace discomfort with understanding, and sentiment with scholarship. History, whether we like it or not, does not disappear by denial, it only waits to be rediscovered. It must also be acknowledged that the term “Jaiñtia” and the history of its people constitute one of the most researched and debated subjects among the hill tribes of Northeast India, engaging historians, linguists, ethnographers, and archaeologists across generations. Yet, despite this substantial body of scholarship, much of Jaiñtia history remains fragmentary and obscured by the limitations of early sources.
The present submission, therefore, does not claim finality. Rather, it underscores the need for continued inquiry using modern historical methods: critical historiography, archaeology, linguistics, and interdisciplinary research to uncover new evidence and throw further light on the still obscure and deeply layered history of the Jaiñtia people.
