The Khasis | Page 4

1838. In
1840 Capt. Fisher, an officer of the Survey Department, published in
the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal [7] an account which
showed that the leading characteristics of the Khasi race had already
been apprehended; he mentions the prevalence of matriarchy or
mother-kinship, notes the absence of polyandry, except in so far as its
place was taken by facile divorce, describes the religion as a worship of
gods of valleys and hills, draws attention to the system of augury used
to ascertain the will of the gods, and gives an account of the remarkable
megalithic monuments which everywhere stud the higher plateaus. He
also recognizes the fact that the Khasis as a race are totally distinct
from the neighbouring hill tribes. In 1841 Mr. W. Robinson, Inspector
of Schools in Assam, included an account of the Khasis in a volume on
that province which was printed at Calcutta. In 1844 Lieut. Yule
(afterwards Sir Henry Yule) published in the Journal of the Bengal
Asiatic Society [8] a much more detailed description of the hills and
their inhabitants than had been given by Fisher. This formed the basis
of many subsequent descriptions, the best known of which is the
attractive account contained in the second volume of Sir Joseph
Hooker's Himalayan Journals [9] published in London in 1854. Sir
Joseph visited Cherrapunji in June 1850, and stayed in the hills until
the middle of the following November.
Meanwhile the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission, originally located
at Sylhet, had extended their operations to Cherrapunji, and in 1842
established a branch there. They applied themselves to the study of the
Khasi language, for which, after a trial of the Bengali, they resolved to
adopt the Roman character. Their system of expressing the sounds of
Khasi has since that time continued in use, and after sixty years'
prescription it would be difficult to make a change. Their Welsh
nationality led them to use the vowel y for the obscure sound
represented elsewhere in India by a short a (the u in the English but),
and for the consonantal y to substitute the vowel i : w is also used as a

vowel, but only in diphthongs (aw, ew, iw, ow); in other respects the
system agrees fairly well with the standard adopted elsewhere. Primers
for the study of the language were printed at Calcutta in 1846 and 1852,
and in 1855 appeared the excellent "Introduction to the Khasia
language, comprising a grammar, selections for reading, and a
Khasi-English vocabulary," of the Rev. W. Pryse. There now exists a
somewhat extensive literature in Khasi, both religious and secular. An
exhaustive grammar, by the Rev. H. Roberts, was published in
Trübner's series of "Simplified Grammars" in 1891, and there are
dictionaries, English-Khasi (1875} and Khasi-English (1906), besides
many other aids to the study of the language which need not be
mentioned here. It is recognized by the Calcutta University as
sufficiently cultivated to be offered for the examinations of that body.
Two monthly periodicals are published in it at Shillong, to which place
the headquarters of the district were removed from Cherrapunji in 1864,
and which has been the permanent seat of the Assam Government since
the Province was separated from Bengal in 1874.
The isolation of the Khasi race, in the midst of a great encircling
population all of whom belong to the Tibeto-Burman stock, and the
remarkable features presented by their language and institutions, soon
attracted the attention of comparative philologists and ethnologists. An
account of their researches will be found in Dr. Grierson's Linguistic
Survey of India, vol. ii. Here it will be sufficient to mention the
important work of Mr. J. R. Logan, who, in a series of papers published
at Singapore between 1850 and 1857 in the Journal of the Indian
Archipelago (of which he was the editor), demonstrated the relationship
which exists between the Khasis and certain peoples of Further India,
the chief representatives of whom are the Mons or Talaings of Pegu
and Tenasserim, the Khmers of Cambodia, and the majority of the
inhabitants of Annam. He was even able, through the means of
vocabularies furnished to him by the late Bishop Bigandet, to discover
the nearest kinsmen of the Khasis in the Palaungs, a tribe inhabiting
one of the Shan States to the north-east of Mandalay on the middle
Salween. With the progress of research it became apparent that the
Mon-Khmer group of Indo-China thus constituted, to which the Khasis
belong, was in some way connected with the large linguistic family in

the Indian Peninsula once called Kolarian, but now more generally
known as Munda, who inhabit the hilly region of Chutia Nagpur and
parts of the Satpura range in the Central Provinces. Of these tribes the
principal are the Santhals, the Mundas, and the Korkus. In