Grounded entanglements: land and landscape in the Khasi Hills

This thesis aims to understand the complex entanglements between the Khasi people and their land and landscape today. The Khasis are a matrilineal tribal group who largely inhabit the Khasi and Jain tia Hills in the North-East Indian state of Meghalaya. Like many indigenous communities, the Khasis perceive their land and landscape as central elements of their identity and ways of being in the world, and one of the ways in which the Indian State recognises this is through the Sixth Schedule provisions which grant tribal people special rights over their land. Thus, the relative autonomy that the Khasis have over land and resources is an important consideration in this thesis. However, land in the Khasi Hills is understood as a multifaceted entity; land is animated, sacred and spiritual, it is an embodiment of kinship and land is also a resource that can be exploited and capitalised. Grounded on fifteen months of fieldwork in three Khasi villages – Sohtrai, Laitrum and Mawkliar – and three months of archival research, this thesis seeks to highlight the multifarious and at times, seemingly contradictory ways in which people relate to their land. It does this through a study of various materials embedded in the landscape which include a colonial road, bri farms, indigenous-built memorial resting places, a sacred forest, limestone quarries and tourism infrastructure. The thesis asks: how should we understand the Khasis’ view of land as animated, symbolic and exploitable? What kind of effects does the exploitability of land have on the community and social relations within it, particularly in the context of present-day manifestations of market capitalism? Further, do we need to reevaluate our approaches in studying tribal and indigenous peoples and their relationship with land in order to explain such contexts where the trope of indigenous people living harmoniously with their environments is not always consistent? In addressing these questions, this thesis speaks to the larger anthropological literature which examines the question of land among tribal and indigenous communities, and also works in the anthropology of landscape.