India’s singing village where everyone has melody

Curious whistles and chirrups echo through the jungle around Kongthong, a remote Indian village, but this is no birdsong. It’s people calling out to each other in music – an extraordinary tradition that may even be unique.

Here in the lush, rolling hills of the northeastern state of Meghalaya, mothers from Kongthong and a few other local villages compose a special melody for each child.

Everyone in the village, inhabited by the Khasi people, will then address the person with this individual little tune – and for a lifetime. They have conventional “real” names too, but they are rarely used.

To walk along the main road in this village of wooden huts with corrugated tin roofs, perched on a ridge miles from anywhere, is to walk through a symphony of hoots and toots.

On one side a mother calls out to her son to come home for supper, elsewhere children play, and at the other end friends mess about – all in an unusual, musical language of their own.

“The composition of the melody comes from the bottom of my heart,” mother-of-three Pyndaplin Shabong told AFP.

“It expresses my joy and love for my baby,” the 31-year-old said, her youngest daughter, two and a half years old, on her knee.

Kongthong has long been cut off from the rest of the world, several hours of tough trek from the nearest town. Electricity arrived only in 2000, and the dirt road in 2013.

Days are spent foraging in the jungle for broom grass – the main source of revenue – leaving the village all but deserted, except for a few kids.