Sohra

Sohra stands on the southern edge of the Khasi Hills, above the plains of Bengal. Clouds driven against the escarpment bring extraordinary monsoon rains, feeding waterfalls that plunge from the plateau. Khasi communities inhabited the surrounding hills, whose chiefs governed their own territories and dealt with neighbours across the highland and lowland frontier. The British called the place Cherrapunji.

In the 1820s the British official David Scott chose Sohra as a station in the Khasi Hills. Its wet climate soon attracted notice: in 1827 Scott complained of almost unbroken rain and mist, and in 1832 the physician William Cracroft began measuring its rainfall. His observations recorded nearly 577 centimetres over four months, giving an early indication of the remarkable force of the monsoon on this exposed edge of the plateau.