Cultural Heritage of Northeast India

Explore ancient traditions, vibrant festivals, folk arts, and sacred monuments across the 8 states

4 Heritage & Festivals

All Festival Dance Exhibition Market Festival Cultural Fair River Festival Tribal Culture Religious Site Handicraft Heritage Site

Heritage Site

Living Root Bridges

The living root bridges of Meghalaya are a form of indigenous bioengineering unique to the Khasi and Jaintia communities of the state's southern hills, among the wettest inhabited regions on Earth. Rather than building bridges from cut timber, which rots quickly in the region's extreme monsoon rainfall, Khasi and Jaintia builders train the aerial roots of the rubber fig tree (Ficus elastica) across streams and rivers, guiding young roots through hollowed-out betel nut palm trunks until they meet and fuse on the far bank. The practice is centuries old, though its precise origins are undocumented; Khasi mythology itself references a living roots ladder called jingkieng ksiar, believed to have once connected heaven and earth, suggesting the root-guiding tradition runs deep in Khasi cosmology as well as practical engineering. The earliest written outside account comes from 1844, when British officer Henry Yule described the bridges with evident astonishment in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, one of the first documented encounters between colonial administrators and this uniquely Khasi technology. Building a single bridge is a multi-generational undertaking: guiding and training the roots across a stream takes 15 to 20 years before a bridge becomes fully load-bearing, and the structures continue to strengthen for centuries afterward rather than degrading, unlike any conventional built bridge. Because the bridge is a living organism rather than a static structure, ongoing community maintenance, redirecting new root growth, reinforcing weak points, is required indefinitely, making each bridge as much a living cultural practice as a physical structure. The bridges are concentrated along Meghalaya's southern hill villages, including Nohwet, Nongriat, Nongthymmai, Mawkyrnot, and Kudeng Rim, with the double-decker root bridge near Nongriat village being the most internationally recognised example. For visitors, reaching most bridges requires a genuine trek down steep hill paths, and the bridges remain in active daily use by villagers crossing streams, not preserved museum pieces but working infrastructure that happens to also be centuries-old living organisms.

📍 Southern Khasi and Jaintia Hills, including Nongriat, Nohwet, Mawkyrnot, and Kudeng Rim villagesExplore →

Dance

Shad Suk Mynsiem

Shad Suk Mynsiem, meaning "Dance of the Happy Hearts," is the principal thanksgiving festival of the Khasi people of Meghalaya, celebrated over three days each April at the close of the sowing season. Also known as the Weiking Dance, the festival gives thanks to Ka Blei Synshar, the presiding deity of governance and providence in Khasi belief, for the blessings and prosperity of the year past. The festival's dance is its centrepiece and its clearest cultural statement. Young unmarried Khasi women, dressed in elaborate traditional silk and jewellery, dance at the centre of the formation, moving with slow, restrained, dignified steps, their arms and posture symbolising the seeds and the fertility of the land. Around them, young men dance in a protective outer ring, symbolising the cultivators who till and defend that land. This arrangement is a deliberate cultural statement: the Khasi are one of the world's few remaining large matrilineal societies, and the dance formation, women at the centre, men protecting the perimeter, directly mirrors the structure of Khasi social organisation itself. Music is provided by a distinct set of traditional instruments: the tangmuri (a wind instrument), besli (flute), nakra (large drum), ksing padiah (small drum), duitara (a stringed instrument), and others, together producing a sound specific to Khasi ceremonial music and found in few other Northeast Indian festival traditions. Shad Suk Mynsiem is celebrated most prominently in Shillong, where it draws large public crowds, but village-level observances take place across the Khasi Hills. For visitors, it offers one of the clearest visible expressions of Khasi matrilineal social structure translated directly into performance, making it as much a statement of cultural identity as a harvest thanksgiving.

📍 Shillong and villages across the Khasi HillsExplore →

Festival

Behdeinkhlam

Behdeinkhlam is the most important festival of the Pnar (Jaintia) people of Meghalaya, celebrated annually in July in Jowai, the headquarters of Jaintia Hills. Its name comes directly from its original purpose: "behdein" means "to drive away" and "khlam" means "disease" in the Pnar language, and the festival was historically an act of collective ritual protection against epidemic disease, cholera in particular, rather than a harvest celebration. The festival functions as a communal purification rite: it is an invocation calling on divine protection to ward off evil spirits and disease and to secure a good harvest, symbolically cleansing the land and community of misfortune before the agricultural season ahead. Traditional priests known as Dolois lead the elaborate rites that structure the three-day event, and young men take a direct, physical role in the ritual by beating the roofs of every house in the community with bamboo poles, a symbolic act of literally driving disease and evil spirits out of each home. Central to the festival are two ritual objects: tall, elaborately decorated bamboo structures called rots, built and decorated by local youth, and wooden posts known as khnong or dein khlam. On the final day, these structures are carried in procession to a pool at a site called Aitnar, accompanied by dancing to traditional pipes and drums. The festival's dramatic climax takes place at Mynthong, where community members dressed in their finest attire gather to watch dad-lawakor, a traditional football-like game played with a wooden ball between teams representing the northern and southern halves of the community, its outcome traditionally read as an omen for the coming agricultural year. Behdeinkhlam remains one of the most physically dynamic and ritually distinctive festivals in Northeast India, combining communal disease-warding ritual, elaborate bamboo craftsmanship, and a competitive folk sport within a single three-day observance.

📍 Jowai, Jaintia HillsExplore →

Festival

Wangala (100 Drums Festival)

Wangala, popularly known as the Hundred Drums Festival, is the principal post-harvest festival of the Garo tribe, celebrated across Meghalaya's Garo Hills as well as by Garo communities in Assam, Nagaland, and Greater Mymensingh in Bangladesh. The festival is an act of thanksgiving to Misi Saljong, the Garo sun god, for a successful harvest, and its timing at the close of the agricultural cycle also marks the onset of winter. The festival's name and identity are built entirely around its central spectacle: drums crafted from hollowed tree trunks, played in tightly choreographed formation. In the modern staged version of the festival, ten groups of ten drummers each, thirty dancers per group, come together to form a combined performance of roughly a hundred drums and three hundred dancers, a scale of coordinated percussion and movement rarely seen in any other Northeast Indian festival. While Wangala has deep roots as a village-level harvest ritual observed across Garo communities, its most famous modern form, the 100 Drums Wangala Festival, was first staged in 1976 at Asanang near Tura, and has since grown, with active support from the Meghalaya Tourism Department, into a large public cultural event that draws visitors from across India and abroad. This staged festival typically runs over several days each November, bringing together Garo villages from across the Garo Hills to compete and perform together. For visitors, Wangala offers one of the most immediately striking cultural spectacles in Northeast India: a landscape of traditional Garo costume, drumbeats, and dance performed at a scale that few other regional harvest festivals attempt to replicate, and it remains the clearest single expression of Garo cultural identity available to outside visitors.

📍 Garo Hills, particularly Asanang near TuraExplore →