Shillong (Meghalaya), June 23: Conrad K Sangma turned the pages on forgotten blueprints, releasing “Heritage of Khasi Hills “at Taraghar State Guest House and giving Khasi architecture its first full-volume biography.
David Arnold Kharchandy’s book reads houses like diaries. The Iing Sad wasn’t just shelter — it was law, ritual, and ecology nailed into timber. Hearths anchored taboos, community labour raised roofs, and local stone and bamboo wrote the script for living with the land. At the center, Kharchandy finds women: uncredited architects who smoothed mud floors, fed fires, mixed materials, and kept the grammar of home alive across generations.
Then the skyline shifted. Missionaries brought chapels and chalkboards. The British drew bungalows. The 1897 quake cracked more than walls. Sohra and Shillong learned new styles — Assam-type frames, sanatoriums, mission compounds, civic offices — each one a chapter of collision between the old world and the incoming.
Sangma framed the release as a rescue mission for memory. Kharchandy calls it evidence: that architecture in the Khasi Hills never sat still. It argued, adapted, and endured.
The book lands as both archive and alarm. Before the next teardown, it asks Shillong to look up, and listen — because here, every beam has a backstory.
