500 Inches a Year : Rains Keep Coming in Cherrapunji

CHERRAPUNJI, India —  The rainy season here is described in terms of knups .

A knup (pronounced ka-noop) is a kind of umbrella made of a broad jungle leaf stretched over a long-handled bamboo frame. It is said to be much more effective than the standard umbrella, and people judge the April-to-October rainy season on the basis of how many knups they wear out.

A normal year is a three- or four-knup year. A two-knup year is practically a drought by local standards. Six knups, according to Sister Mary Cecil, “is a very bad year.”

Sister Mary Cecil, 75, is a Roman Catholic nun who lives here in one of the wettest inhabited places on Earth. She is from Regina, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and she has lived in India for 23 years. For the last six years, she has served as headmistress of the Catholic girls’ school in Cherrapunji.

Not Much Like Home

Every day she measures and records the rainfall--very nearly a full-time occupation in Cherrapunji--and reports to the Indian meteorological service. Most places in her native Saskatchewan average about 15 inches of rain a year. She says that Cherrapunji, in the far northeast corner of India, averages close to 500.

Most record books list the wettest place in the world--based on annual mean rainfall over a 50-year period--as Mt. Waialeale on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which averages 451 inches. Cherrapunji, however, generally gets credit for having the wettest year on record--1,041 inches in 1861.

On Aug. 3, 1982, Sister Mary Cecil recalled, she measured 33 inches of rain in 24 hours, and “it might have been a little more.” She missed some of the rain while emptying her rain gauge.

But the rainfall is only one of the curious things about Cherrapunji and its surroundings. Despite all the rain, it is rapidly turning into a place where practically nothing can grow.

Forests All Cut Down

Decades of lumbering have led to massive deforestation. The oak and teak forests that once covered the hillsides have all been cut down, exposing the bare ground to the rain--and, thus, to severe erosion. In some places, only a foot of topsoil remains over a limestone base, and the situation has been aggravated by surface mining of clay and coal.

When the rains finally stop each October, giving way to the six-month dry season, the streams quickly dry up and there is not enough water to go around.

R.S. Khiewtam, a sociologist at Northeastern Hill University in the Meghalaya state capital of Shillong, 35 miles north of here, has studied the area and says that all this has made for a change in the villagers’ lives. “The lack of water and soil infertility has forced the local population to abandon agriculture,” he said.

By January, in this place renowned for rainfall, villagers are forced to walk miles for drinking water, which they carry back to their homes in backpacks held by straps across their foreheads.

And that is not all that is topsy-turvy about this strange land. In many ways Cherrapunji provides a view of India through Alice’s looking glass. For example, Cherrapunji is the center of a matrilineal tribal culture that is the reverse of the social structure found in most of the rest of India.

In the tradition of the Khasi tribe that is dominant in this part of India, inheritance is passed down generally to the youngest daughter, not the eldest son. Women handle most of the money, make most family and business decisions and decide on suitable marriages for their children.

Instead of a bride moving in with the groom’s parents, as is traditional throughout the rest of India, the groom moves in with the bride’s parents. If there is any dowry, the groom provides it.

In this culture, men complain, they get very little respect.

The Rains Came Inn

“They consider us useless objects,” said Donald Fraser Nongkynrih, the owner of a popular restaurant in Cherrapunji called The Rains Came Inn, which he named for the novel and a 1939 film starring Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power.

Nongkynrih, 68, a retired Indian navy chief engineer, has strong opinions about everything that happens here.

Cherrapunji is undoubtedly the wettest place on Earth that also has a cement plant as its main industry. The plant was built 10 years ago with Yugoslav aid and equipment, but it has been a financial failure, mainly because of nagging problems with rusting machinery, aggressive mildew and, in the dry months, severe water shortages. The plant is the object of much dry humor.

“It was just a publicity stunt by the Yugoslavians,” Nongkynrih said, smiling, “to show they could produce the world’s driest commodity in the world’s wettest climate.”

Cherrapunji is also home for one of the world’s strangest state-sanctioned lotteries. It is a gambling enterprise similar in most respects to other lotteries, but the winning numbers are determined by counting the number of arrows that archers can sink into a banana stalk.

Texas Playboys

And Cherrapunji must be one of the few places in India where most of the schoolchildren know the words to “San Antonio Rose,” as performed by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

Until very recently, all the excitement of Cherrapunji was beyond the reach of most foreigners. Except for a few religious workers, like Sister Mary Cecil, and a handful of British tea planters, foreigners have been banned in India’s politically volatile northeast states since the Indo-Chinese war of 1962.

“We are not exactly on the tourist map,” said Stanley Roy, a Khasi political leader who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1943. Roy, an Indian citizen, was born to a Khasi tribal leader and his American missionary wife. Most of the tribal people who live here are at least nominally Christians and have Christian names.

Last month, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi relaxed the rules to allow a few foreign journalists into Assam and a few neighboring northeast states. Roy and others who want to develop the place hope that Gandhi will soon permit the northeast to be opened to foreign tourists. With its strange mists, crashing waterfalls, jungle orchids and rare butterflies, Cherrapunji has a lot to offer.

According to Nongkynrih, the unofficial town historian, Cherrapunji has 6,195 people and 80 television sets. The town is situated high on a limestone escarpment in Meghalaya state, overlooking the watery plains of Bangladesh to the south.

‘Abode of the Clouds’

In the Khasi language, the word meghalaya means “abode of the clouds” and, indeed, it sometimes looks as though all the world’s clouds might have their home here. This is a land of deep gorges that open on the Bangladesh plains. When the Bay of Bengal and Indian monsoons cross the plains, they converge here and are caught in the deep gorges, causing massive rainfall.

Meghalaya is the only state in India where most of the people are tribal. Mainly they are of the Khasi, Garo and Jainta tribes and came here with the earliest Mongolian invasions of the Brahmaputra valley. The Khasi language is the only dialect of the Mon-Khmer family of languages found in India.

The Khasi people around Cherrapunji are known throughout India for their beauty and their liberated sexual attitudes. There are few social sanctions against sexual activity, even among strangers. Generally, women here are said to be more sexually aggressive than men.

Women dress in a variation of the sari but the most striking thing about clothing here is the popularity of Scottish tartans. Some of the early missionaries were Scots who attempted to introduce weaving as a local industry. Today, almost every Khasi woman wears a Scottish plaid representing the family colors of a McGregor or MacDonald or MacIntosh.

The men are generally so accurate with bows and arrows, with hand-thrown arrows and slingshots (called catapults) that there is very little bird or animal life left.

“We will eat almost anything that can walk,” Nongkynrih said, standing over the stove at his restaurant.

Meghalaya is one of the few states in India where it is legal to slaughter cows. In most other states the dominant Hindu religion has seen to the enactment of laws that forbid the slaughter of cows.

Men Are ‘Poor Dears’

Nongkynrih’s main complaint about Cherrapunji is the way men are treated by their women. The best thing a Khasi woman will say about their menfolk is something akin to “the poor dears.” Generally, the men are depicted as lazy, drunken louts who if given any money will lose it on the lottery.

“It’s true,” Nongkynrih admitted. “Our chaps drink like hell.”

The favorite drink is a fermented rice wine, although brandy is becoming increasingly popular.

There is a move afoot by leading women’s and social welfare groups to curb male drinking and gambling and instill male pride. Not long ago a law was passed by the Meghalaya state assembly that permits male wage earners to keep their salaries rather than turn them over to their wives or whatever woman is considered head of the family.

“I think this kind of reform is good,” said Virna Wathre Ingty, chairman of the Meghalaya Social Welfare Board. “With this law, the men won’t be so destitute.”

Ingty, one of India’s delegates to a recent United Nations women’s conference in Kenya, has started a petition drive to outlaw the popular and unique lottery, known as teer .

Teer, which means “arrow” in most Indian languages, is a numbers game based on ancient archery competition in the Khasi hills. Twelve teams from 12 different tribal clans launch hundreds of arrows at a banana stalk placed at distances of up to 100 yards. At the end of the competition the arrows imbedded in the stalk are counted and the last two digits form the winning number in the lottery.

The game is practically impossible to rig since it is difficult to regulate the number of arrows that will hit the target.

“We wish to focus your attention to the growing dragon of social evils,” the women’s petition says. “In addition to liquor addiction, teer is a social evil which has done the maximum harm to young and old alike, including school-going children, breeding in them a habit for easy money, and dissipating their energies and distorting values, which spell disaster to the society and country as a whole.”

Talks About the Weather

With all these distractions, it is a wonder the people of Cherrapunji find time to talk about what outsiders might consider the most likely topic of conversation--the weather. If you press them, though, people will tell you that you have not really seen a rainfall until you have seen the rains of Cherrapunji.

“It is not that the raindrops are bigger; it’s that they are much closer together,” Sister Mary Cecil said. “The rain comes down like a curtain.”

More than a century ago, the British tried to establish a military headquarters in Cherrapunji because of its ideal strategic location in the hills overlooking Bengal. But in 1864 they abandoned the post after several officers stationed there committed suicide.

Sister Mary Cecil said she sometimes misses the sunshine and cold weather of her native Saskatchewan, but added: “It’s very strange. I never get depressed here by the rain.”

She said she has liked Cherrapunji since her first visit here six years ago, when she heard the children singing as they played in the streets.

Every afternoon, across the street from St. John’s School, where she lives and teaches, a family plays a scratchy record of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys playing and singing “San Antonio Rose.” Nobody knows why the family plays the song every afternoon, but by now most of the school children know the lyrics and can sing along--with a Texas accent.