By Anna Notsu
Time is often treated as a neutral backdrop to social life—something that moves evenly and ‘naturally’ while people act within it. But as I spent time among the Niamtre of Shangpung village in the West Jaintia Hills, I began to understand time differently. Here, time does not simply pass. It gathers people, stretches encounters and quietly produces forms of belonging. Community is not something one automatically belongs to; it is something enacted through shared rhythms of time. By attending to how time is lived—rather than merely measured—we can see how people come together, slow down and recognise one another in ordinary yet meaningful ways.
The last market day of Shangpung in January fell on the 30th, two days before the day of Lum Sohpetbneng. That afternoon, for the first time, I made my way to Iaw Muchai alone without my sisters’ familiar company. For the first time, too, I felt lonely in a place I thought I knew well—surrounded by a crowd whose members already seemed assured of one another’s presence. The market, usually intimate and predictable, suddenly felt distant. Without the familiar rhythm of walking, stopping and greeting alongside my Shangpung sisters, I felt momentarily out of step.
This feeling did not last long. Familiar faces emerged from the crowd, and with them a familiar weekly greeting: “Lait iaw?”—literally, “Are you going to the market?” Even when one is already there, the question functions less as an inquiry than as a social gesture, a way of acknowledging presence and shared routine. After several such exchanges, almost everyone followed it with the same question: “Are you going to Lum Sohpetbneng?” In Shangpung that week, the pilgrimage had already begun shaping conversation, preparation and anticipation. The market was not just a place of buying and selling, but a space where future movement was collectively imagined.
Both a sacred point on Earth and a reminder of divine connection, Lum Sohpetbneng, the Navel of the Heavens, is more than a site of Khasi origin mythology. It marks the place where heaven and earth were once connected through a golden ladder, now invisible to human sight. The pilgrimage to the altar, now systematised by the Seng Khasi (Kmie) and held on the first Sunday of February, produces a remarkable choreography of communal movement across Khasi-Jaintia Hills each year. People travel from different villages and districts, often in groups, marking the landscape with a common direction. This year, with the help of my companions in Shangpung, I joined this collective spiritual migration.
On 1 February, the day of Lum Sohpetbneng, I woke up at 3a.m., a moment that felt indistinguishable from the night before, as though sleep had folded time rather than moved it forward. Thick misty air stood before us like a wall, reflecting our headlights back at us. As darkness slowly yielded to a distant sunrise, we found ourselves among several cars, each packed with family members heading to the same destination. A small yellow flag fluttered at the front of our car—an expression of Niamtre faith. Crossing into the Khasi Hills, the number of such cars increased. Red-and-white flags bearing the cock, the Seng Khasi symbol, began to appear everywhere.
It was in these fleeting exchanges—reassuring glances between Niamtre and Seng Khasi pilgrims moving rapidly through stubborn fog—that I began to feel myself folded into a wider community. Belonging emerged not through shared belief alone, but through direction and the experience of moving together.
This sensation echoed my time at Iaw Muchai. Once every eight days, the market comes alive. Stalls fill with seasonal vegetables, meat, fruit and piles of second-hand clothing that seem to have arrived from far-off places. Each compartment has its dedicated shopkeeper—on the phone, sipping tea or simply awaiting familiar visitors. After days of demanding work, both at home and beyond it, the market gathers villagers back together, not just spatially but temporally.
Markets I know outside India often produce urgency: vendors shouting, hurried footsteps, bodies weaving through narrow aisles, arms constantly reaching for desired goods. Purpose dictates speed. At Iaw Muchai, by contrast, time stretches. People come not merely to buy but to linger. Even after groceries are ticked off the list, customers sit on the concrete edges of stalls—sometimes pulling up a stool inside—talking to vendors and to those passing by. Conversations drift from household matters to village news, from jokes to quiet complaints. The market ceases to be labyrinthine. It becomes a network of relationships, sustained through repeated encounters, familiarity and waiting.
It is tempting to describe this through the language of “community,” a word often used to denote belonging or social cohesion. Yet the term is frequently flattened into a shortcut, grouping people along ethnic, linguistic or religious lines. In many developmental programmes, “community” also implies speed, efficiency and constant productivity. At Iaw Muchai, however, time is allowed to linger. What I encountered instead was community enacted through time: through the slowness of market days, the cyclical return of eight-day intervals and the collective pauses that allow people to recognise one another.
Participation in events such as Lum Sohpetbneng is, therefore, not only a matter of physical presence. Not everyone can make the journey on that day. Yet the way Lum Sohpetbneng circulates in everyday conversation—who asks whom if they are going, how rides are arranged, how absences are explained—adds substance to a communal life. Community here is built as much through anticipation, coordination and narration as through the pilgrimage itself.
Four days after Lum Sohpetbneng, another gathering once again brought villagers together. On 5 February, Shangpung marked the death anniversary of Woh Kiri Dalloi Dhar, a Jaintia freedom fighter. The programme began with a prayer at his monument, followed by a conference held at the community hall of Pohshnong, a neighbourhood largely inhabited by Niamtre families. Although the programme was attended almost entirely by local residents, a friend told me firmly, “He did not die just for us Niamtre—he died for all the people of Shangpung.”
Usually a badminton court, the hall was transformed by harsh white lights that illuminated faces both young and old, all dressed in traditional Pnar ceremonial attire. At the centre of the stage, a large banner titled “National Indigenous Faith Conference” was flanked by portraits of Meghalaya freedom fighters: Kiang Nangbah, Pa Togan Sangma, U Tirot Sing and Woh Kiri Dalloi Dhar. The event unfolded through speeches, songs and cultural performances, including a drama depicting Kiri Dalloi’s life—from his early Dalloiship to the brutality of British invasion.
Even to me, whose Pnar is limited, the play was comprehensible. Through the use of English and visual contrast—ironed suits and guns in hand—the British were sharply distinguished from those who resisted them in Shangpung. At the moment of Kiri Dalloi’s death, my friends turned to me and jokingly asked, “Are you crying?” Of course, I could not fully grasp the violence of that history. Yet after months of living alongside the Niamtre, I felt a subtle, shared grief. What unfolded on stage was not distant fable but a past that continued to shape the present.
Time, of course, has changed greatly since then. When suits no longer index colonial power and English circulates freely both online and offline, what might a younger generation feel when confronted with scenes of their past? This question stayed with me as the programme continued.
What struck me was not only the content of the commemoration but its temporal texture. Beginning with a marathon at dawn, the programme slowed ordinary weekday time, suspending daily routines to make room for remembrance. The past was not sealed off as history; it was reanimated through performance, narration and collective participation across generational lines.
Through a window of the community hall, I noticed several women walking past with baskets strapped to their foreheads, continuing with the day’s work. Time among the Niamtre, I realised, is not a neutral backdrop but a social force—one that allows people to pause, gather, remember and then return to everyday responsibilities. By waiting, travelling, remembering and carrying on, community appears not as something one simply belongs to, but as something repeatedly enacted. It is through these shared rhythms—of markets, pilgrimages and commemorations—that people come together, slow down and recognise one another as part of a collective life.
(The writer is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University (Netherlands) and project researcher of the research project Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas).
