The Khasis | Page 3

first contact between the British and the inhabitants of the Khasi
Hills followed upon the acquisition by the East India Company, in
consequence of the grant of the Diwani of Bengal in 1765, of the
district of Sylhet. The Khasis were our neighbours on the north of that
district, and to the north-east was the State of Jaintia, [1] ruled over by
a chief of Khasi lineage, whose capital, Jaintiapur, was situated in the
plain between the Surma river and the hills. Along this frontier, the
Khasis, though not averse from trade, and in possession of the quarries
which furnished the chief supply of lime to deltaic Bengal, were also
known as troublesome marauders, whose raids were a terror to the
inhabitants of the plains. Captain R.B. Pemberton, in his Report on the
Eastern Frontier (1835), mentions [2] an attack on Jaintia by a force
under Major Henniker in 1774, supposed to have been made in
retaliation for aggression by the Raja in Sylhet; and Robert Lindsay,
who was Resident and Collector of Sylhet about 1778, has an
interesting account of the hill tribes and the Raja of Jaintia in the lively
narrative embodied in the "Lives of the Lindsays." [3] Lindsay, who
made a large fortune by working the lime quarries and thus converting
into cash the millions of cowries in which the land-revenue of Sylhet
was paid, appears to have imagined that the Khasis, whom he calls "a
tribe of independent Tartars," were in direct relations with China, and
imported thence the silk cloths [4] which they brought down for sale in
the Sylhet markets. A line of forts was established along the foot of the
hills to hold the mountaineers in check, and a Regulation, No. 1 of
1799, was passed declaring freedom of trade between them and Sylhet,
but prohibiting the supply to them of arms and ammunition, and
forbidding any one to pass the Company's frontier towards the hills
with arms in his hands.

The outbreak of the first Burma War, in 1824, brought us into closer
relations with the Raja of Jaintia, and in April of that year Mr. David
Scott, the Governor-General's Agent on the frontier, marched through
his territory from Sylhet to Assam, emerging at Raha on the Kalang
river, in what is now the Nowgong district. This was the first occasion
on which Europeans had entered the hill territory of the Khasi tribes,
and the account of the march, quoted in Pemberton's Report, [5] is the
earliest authentic information which we possess of the institutions of
the Khasi race. Dr. Buchanan-Hamilton, who spent several years at the
beginning of the 19th Century in collecting information regarding the
people of Eastern India, during which he lived for some time at
Goalpara in the Brahmaputra Valley, confused the Khasis with the
Garos, and his descriptions apply only to the latter people. The name
Garo, however, is still used by the inhabitants of Kamrup in speaking
of their Khasi neighbours to the South, and Hamilton only followed the
local usage. In 1826 Mr. David Scott, after the expulsion of the
Burmese from Assam and the occupation of that province by the
Company, entered the Khasi Hills in order to negotiate for the
construction of a road through the territory of the Khasi Siem or Chief
of Nongkhlaw, which should unite Sylhet with Gauhati. A treaty was
concluded with the chief, and the construction of the road began. At
Cherrapunji Mr. Scott built for himself a house on the plateau which,
two years later, was acquired from the Siem by exchange for land in the
plains, as the site of a sanitarium. [6] Everything seemed to promise
well, when the peace was suddenly broken by an attack made, in April
1829, by the people of Nongkhlaw on the survey party engaged in
laying out the road, resulting in the massacre of two British officers and
between fifty and sixty natives. This led to a general confederacy of
most or the neighbouring chiefs to resist the British, and a long and
harassing war, which was not brought to a close till 1833. Cherrapunji
then became the headquarters of the Sylhet Light Infantry, whose
commandant was placed in political charge of the district, including the
former dominions in the hills of the Raja of Jaintia, which he
voluntarily relinquished in 1835 on the confiscation of his territory in
the plains.
Cherrapunji, celebrated as the place which has the greatest measured

rainfall on the globe, became a popular station, and the discovery of
coal there, and at several other places in the hills, attracted to it many
visitors, some of whom published accounts of the country and people.
The first detailed description was apparently that of the Rev. W. Lish, a
Baptist missionary, which appeared in a missionary journal in