Khasi

The Khasi are an Austroasiatic people of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, one of the few Mon-Khmer-speaking communities in South Asia. Oral tradition and linguistics point to a migration from Southeast Asia by way of Upper Burma and the Brahmaputra valley. Their society is matrilineal: property passes to the youngest daughter, and men join their wife's clan after marriage.

They worshipped the supreme creator U Blei Nongthaw in the indigenous Niam Khasi religion, and the War subtribe built living root bridges by training fig-tree roots across streams. The hills were split among about twenty-five chiefdoms alongside the Jaintia kingdom, whose Pnar rulers had split from an older realm in 630.

Jaintia was briefly overrun by the Ahoms in 1707 before recovering, came into contact with the East India Company after its grant of the Diwani of Bengal in 1765, and was annexed by the Company in 1835.