The Welsh Mission and the Script That Followed It

Before 1841 the Khasi language had no standard written form, and Niam Khasi's teachings, like Songsarek among the Garo, were carried entirely by oral memory across generations of priests and elders. That year the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionary Thomas Jones arrived in the Khasi Hills and, working from the spoken language, devised a Roman alphabet spelling system for Khasi, the basis of the script still used to write the language today. The mission that followed built schools and churches through the hill districts over the following decades, and conversion accelerated through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries until Christianity became the majority faith of both the Khasi and the Garo.

Sacred groves proved the durable exception to that shift. Because Niam Khasi and Songsarek locate their deities in specific forest tracts rather than in built temples, a family or clan could convert without necessarily destroying or reclaiming the grove its ancestors had kept, and many such groves, protected by taboo against cutting, survive today as some of the best preserved forest fragments in the region, tended in some cases by Christian descendants of the families that once worshipped there, an outcome ecologists now study independently of the religious history that produced it.