{"id":271,"date":"2021-12-13T18:09:58","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T18:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=271"},"modified":"2026-06-19T10:37:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:37:26","slug":"orality-as-dramaturgy-in-the-khasi-welsh-performance-exchange-performing-journeys-by-the-khasi-cymru-collective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/orality-as-dramaturgy-in-the-khasi-welsh-performance-exchange-performing-journeys-by-the-khasi-cymru-collective\/","title":{"rendered":"Orality as Dramaturgy in the Khasi-Welsh Performance Exchange: Performing Journeys by the Khasi-Cymru Collective"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lisa Lewis<\/strong>*<\/a> and Lapdiang Syiem<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article, written in two voices, one Khasi, one Welsh, revisits the process of devising Performing Journeys, a theatre production that toured India and Wales in 2019\u201320. It approaches the practical methodology for making work, reached between Khasi and Welsh practitioners, as a dramaturgy of orality. The performance explored the historic relationship between the Welsh and the Khasi peoples that is rooted in the presence of the Welsh mission in North East India. As such, it brought together the Khasi oral tradition and archival information pertaining to the interaction between the Welsh and the Khasi peoples, a contact that is rooted in the cataclysmic introduction of literacy to a culture that was hitherto entirely oral. The article explores the significance of oral performance for making theatre between two cultures currently exploring the implications of their intercultural entanglements in relation to contemporary postcolonial identities.

Keywords<\/strong>: Khasi, Welsh, oral tradition, memory, archive, transcultural theatre, embodied performance<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Performing Journeys<\/em>, a devised performance which toured India and Wales in 2019 and 2020, explored the effects of the cultural exchange between Khasi and Welsh peoples stemming from the presence of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission in the Khasi-Jai\u00f1tia Hills in North East India between 1841 and 1969.[1]<\/sup><\/a> This complex exchange profoundly affected Khasi culture and was to influence the ways in which Welsh people came to understand India as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is written by two members of the Khasi-Cymru Collective responsible for devising Performing Journeys<\/em>: Khasi performer, Lapdiang Syiem and Welsh director, Lisa Lewis. Both authors are responsible for leading specific elements of the article (for instance, the writing on the Khasi oral tradition was led by Lapdiang and the writing on the how the archive was performed was led by Lisa). Some passages arise from us both; some sections are thoughts relayed by one individual. However, in line with the collaborative nature of the project and the devising process itself, our voices interweave and offer comment on each other throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Khasi-Jai\u00f1tia people, one of the indigenous communities of the state of Meghalaya, belong to a matrilineal culture. While English is the official language of the state, Khasi is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages with 1.4 million speakers. The people of Wales (Cymru<\/em>), one of the four countries that currently comprise the United Kingdom, also inhabit a bilingual context; Welsh, of the Celtic language family, has official status in Wales and is spoken by 29% of the population. Between 2015 and 2019, Indian, Khasi and Welsh artists collaborated on a practice-research project, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, investigating the transcultural relationship between both cultures. The co-devised work Performing Journeys<\/em>, one of the project\u2019s outputs, was performed by Khasi and Welsh practitioners and attempted to unravel some of the historic cultural entanglements between our cultures and explore their implications for us today in a postcolonial context.  <\/s><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Postcolonialism is unambiguously understood in relation to the history of Indian independence, though North East India has a troubled relationship with pan-Indian ideas of nationhood. Wales has a more problematic claim on historical postcolonialism (having been both colonised and a participant, within a British context, in acts of colonialism). This claim is more easily understood in relation to a postcolonial condition, described by Kirsti Bohata as \u201ca structure within which the past can be interrogated with the aim of (re)constructing the present. It is a strategic methodology <\/ins>. . . rich with possibilities for peoples whose stories and histories have been suppressed, neglected, untaught\u201d (Bohata 15).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fundamental to this process, in relation to Performing Journeys<\/em>, was the necessity of acknowledging the struggle between the prevalence of the oral tradition in Khasi culture and that of literacy as a marker of colonial modernity. In the Khasi-Welsh connection, literacy was introduced into a culture that had hitherto been entirely oral. Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionary Thomas Jones arrived in the Khasi Hills in 1841, and he operated within a comparatively small field across North East India. Jones, and the Welsh missionaries that followed, learnt Khasi and began the process of translating the Bible, using the Roman alphabet and Welsh language orthography to transpose the sound of the oral Khasi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

English language literacy and education was introduced to India (as in Wales) as a \u201cdevelopmental\u201d project central to the advancement of the colonial project. Welsh missionaries were part of its delivery in North East India, though their primary objective was to translate the Bible into Khasi and advance literacy in the Khasi language as crucial steps in the process of Christian conversion. The written form, an incursion into the oral worldview of the Khasi, travelled via the Welsh missionaries on the coattails of the imperial self-improvement agenda. The colonial desire to \u201cmake literate\u201d according to the structures of Anglophone literature and education has haunted the Welsh imagination too and created a split in the Welsh psyche (in the nineteenth century, when England was attempting to unify what was never to become a fully \u201cunited kingdom,\u201d there was a concerted effort to remove indigenous minority languages by force, a process which had deleterious effects for Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh language communities).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From this point of view, both Khasi and Welsh participants shared a similar, though contextually different experience of the centrality of English literacy. Literacy (as well as nonconformity) became a marker of liberal respectability in Welsh society following the publication of the British Government\u2019s Report into the State of Education in Wales in 1847 and its denigration of Welsh people, culture and society as depraved and ignorant. This report followed the same premise as T. B. Macauley\u2019s Minute on Indian Education of 1835, which formed the basis of making English the language of education in Indian schools (Roberts 53\u201356).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How, then, to conceive of a devised performance addressing this fraught relationship between the oral and the literate (of being literate and of the centrality of literature, culturally and socially) in a historic (inter)cultural exchange that has profoundly affected cultural identities? What does thinking dramaturgically about the possibilities of the oral entail?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Khasi Oral Tradition<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

One of the main aspects defining the Khasi community is its oral tradition and culture that predates the introduction of the written script by the Welsh missionaries. In recent decades there has been an attempt to understand the pivotal role that the oral tradition plays, and its implications in a contemporary world. Esther Syiem writes, \u201cThe oral nature of Khasi society has never been completely broken even in the face of the cultural and religious invasions that brought with them the power of the written script\u201d (Syiem 75). Whilst challenging the written, the oral tradition actively works to shape Khasi identity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the decades, orality has manifestly achieved a status of power within Khasi society. It looks to a future that can attain authenticity only through absolute acceptance of its sway over the private and the public. The folk as being inextricable from the oral, and as it enhances the Khasi\u2019s knowledge of his past is a primary dimension of the larger domain of Khasi life. It cannot be trimmed off from the main body of Khasi thought. (14)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, as we attempt to articulate Khasi thought and philosophy, we return to reinterpret the significance of the oral in our history and our present. In performance, Khasi folktales, myths and legends operate by reminding us of the centrality of the oral tradition\u2014they are part of cultural performance and seek a way of authenticating themselves in the present. Interrogating their relevance and reinterpreting the stories in a contemporary framework allows us to reframe Khasi culture in a postcolonial and decolonising context. It disrupts the hierarchies of memory, in which written\/recorded history is privileged above all other forms of memory; it validates individual and collective memory as history, signifies the passing on from one generation to another and reminds us that the spoken word is a viable and valid tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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