A Rajya Sabha member appears to have struck the wrong note for a cluster of villages in Meghalaya by singing paeans to one of them in the Parliament.
Almost a month ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rakesh Sinha asked the government to ensure the inclusion of Kongthong village in the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage for preserving its practice of giving each child a unique tune — called jingrwai ïawbei in the Khasi language —– instead of a name.
Not amused
This has not amused 22 other villages around Kongthong that have a similar practice of mothers composing a tune for her child until they attain a certain age to be called by “normal” names.
“We are happy for Kongthong. But the world should take note that it is not the only whistling village. Out of the 53 villages in the Khat-ar Shnong area, 23 communicate through whistling and calling each other by a tune. Only one village should not get recognition,” said Kyntiew Khongshei, the sordar or headman of Mawshuit village.
Khat-ar means an area belonging to 12 clans of the Khasi community and Shnong means village. The area comes under the Sohra Hima (a kingdom-like traditional administrative unit) headed by a syiem or chieftain.
Sohra is the local name for Cherrapunjee in East Khasi Hills district.
“Villages such as Mawshuit, Khrang, Mawmang, Mawsawmah and Warbah have had the same tradition as Kongthong. So all these villages deserve to get the same focus as Kongthong,” Freeman Syiem, the chieftain of Sohra, told The Hindu on Monday.
Mr. Syiem said he would coordinate a meeting among the heads of the 23 musical villages and the government if the move for the UNESCO tag takes concrete shape.
The heads of the other villages hoped the world’s attention to their whistling tradition would ensure at least a road like the one to Kongthong.
In 2017, UNESCO had put Turkey’s whistled language on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
The UN body said that whistled language is a method of communication that uses whistling to simulate and articulate words.
