Indian villagers who have musical identities
Curious whistles and chirrups echo through the jungle around Kongthong, a remote Indian village, but this is no birdsong. It's people calling out to each other in music -- an extraordinary tradition that may even be unique.
Here in the lush, rolling hills of the northeastern state of Meghalaya, mothers from Kongthong and a few other local villages compose a special melody for each child.
Everyone in the village, inhabited by the Khasi people, will then address the person with this individual little tune -- and for a lifetime. They have conventional "real" names too, but they are rarely used.
To walk along the main road in this village of wooden huts with corrugated tin roofs, perched on a ridge miles from anywhere, is to walk through a symphony of hoots and toots.
On one side a mother calls out to her son to come home for supper, elsewhere children play and at the other end friends mess about -- all in an unusual, musical language of their own.
"The composition of the melody comes from the bottom of my heart," mother-of-three Pyndaplin Shabong told AFP.
"It expresses my joy and love for my baby," the 31-year-old said, her youngest daughter, two and a half years old, on her knee.
"But if my son has done something wrong, if I'm angry with him, he broke my heart, at that moment I will call him by his actual name," rather than singing lovingly, said Rothell Khongsit, a community leader.
Comments