Welcome to India’s singing village
TO CALL OUT TO EACH OTHER, THE VILLAGERS USE A LONG VERSION LASTING AROUND 30 SECONDS OF EACH OTHER’S MUSICAL ‘NAME’
It expresses my joy and love for my baby. But if my son has done something wrong ... at that moment I will call him by his actual name.”
P. Shabong | Mother of three
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.
Unusual language
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 said.
“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.
“But if my son has done something wrong, if I’m angry with him, he broke my heart, at that moment I will call him by his actual name,” rather than singing lovingly, said Rothell Khongsit, a community leader.