What the Bridge Already Knows

A reflective piece on The Forgotten Folklore Project and the strange curriculum of growing up in Meghalaya

There is a bridge in Meghalaya that has been growing for over five hundred years.

It is made of the aerial roots of the Indian rubber tree, Ficus elastica, trained by hand, decade by decade, to reach across a river gorge and hold. You cannot build one in a hurry. The oldest living root bridges in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills take generations to complete. A grandfather begins it. A grandchild walks across it. It is a feat of engineering, ecology, and patience that has no real parallel anywhere in the world, and the people who built them did not need to read a paper about it to know that. They just knew.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a Meghalaya classroom, perhaps not far from one of these bridges,  a child was memorising the London Bridge.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.

I have nothing against London Bridge. It has had a difficult few centuries, structurally speaking, and deserves some sympathy. But there is something quietly absurd about a child sitting in the shadow of one of the world’s great feats of living architecture, reciting a nursery rhyme about a bridge that kept collapsing. One bridge falls. The other grows. A child learns about the one that falls.

This is not a problem unique to Meghalaya, and I am not the first person to notice it. But it is where The Forgotten Folklore Project began, not in a policy meeting or a grant proposal, but in the simple, uncomfortable recognition that the stories children in Meghalaya were reading about themselves were very few, and the stories they were reading about other people’s bridges, other people’s seasons, and other people’s vegetables were an astonishing number.

When we began working on TFFP, the question we kept returning to was: What does a child in Meghalaya need to see in a book?

Not in the aspirational sense, not “what should they learn,” but in the most basic sense. A child picks up a book and looks for herself. She looks for the shape of the hills behind her house, the sound of the market, and the colour of her grandmother’s dress. If she finds it, something clicks into place.

Our sixty-six books try to address this in different ways. Some books are about the jainsem ,  the layered, draped garment worn by Khasi women, and what it means to wear one for the first time. Ilari’s Jainsem (written and illustrated by Samanda Pyngrope) is a story about a little girl who falls in love with her mother’s clothing and goes to her grandmother to learn its rules. It is a story about transmission: the moment when a tradition moves from one generation’s hands to another’s. That kind of story is, I think, doing something that no amount of social studies curriculum can do. It is not explaining culture. It is inhabiting it.

Some books are practical in a different way. Ki Dak Jaiñtia (written by Riquoma Rq Laloo, illustrated by Casper Syiem) is an alphabet book for the Jaiñtia script ,  the first of its kind, an effort to document and standardise a script that has no other children’s introduction. A child learning to read Jaiñtia letters from this book is doing something significant without knowing it. She is just learning her ABCs ,  or rather, her equivalent ,  and in doing so, she is insisting that her language exists, that it can be written down, that it has a shape.

From the Garo Hills, there is Mai Jingjing (written by Mikhail Marak, illustrated by Jaksram Marak), a book about cicadas, the small winged insects that come out each summer in the Garo Hills making their unmistakable sound. In the A·chik community, children play a sing-song game where they pinch their left hand with their right, mimicking the flight of cicadas, calling out “mai jing jing, mai jing jing” as they tease each other with playful rhymes. The book puts this game on a page. It asks nothing more of a Garo child than to recognise something she already knows ,  and in that recognition, reading becomes not a foreign act but a familiar one. 

From the Jaintia Hills, there is Khâmnu Khah A Vâr Im? / Is She Wise? (written by Anna Notsu, illustrated by Gladinia Pyrtuh) — the first illustrated children’s book for the Biate community of East Jaintia Hills. Built from a story collected from an elder in Saipung village, it follows a man sent into the forest to fetch nathial leaves for his wife, only to find the plant refuses to be picked until he can answer one question: is she wise? The illustrations were shaped by drawings that Biate schoolchildren made during community workshops. The children’s own imagination is literally inside the book.

And then there is The Root Bridge.

The Root Bridge (written by Imtijungla Ozukum and Lanu Tsudir, illustrated by Gladinia Pyrtuh)  is the book I think about most often when someone asks me what TFFP is really for. It is the story of a small root who dreams of becoming part of one of Meghalaya’s living root bridges. It is a story about patience and perseverance, yes, but it is also, if you look at it for a moment, something stranger and more beautiful than that. It is a story about infrastructure.

The living root bridges of Meghalaya are not just a tourist attraction, though they have become that. They are a solution. The deep gorges of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills flood during the monsoon; the region receives some of the highest rainfall on earth. Metal bridges rust. Wooden bridges rot. Stone bridges wash away. But a root bridge, one that you have trained over decades from a living tree, only gets stronger as it grows. It cannot rust. It does not rot. Every monsoon makes it more deeply anchored. It is engineering that works with the environment rather than against it, and it was invented by communities that did not have access to concrete or steel and who therefore had to think more carefully.

When a child reads The Root Bridge, she is not just reading a story about patience. She is learning, in the most concrete and embodied way, that people who looked like her and lived where she lives solved a very hard problem in a very original way. She is learning that her geography, which might otherwise appear to be an obstacle, all this rain, all these hills, all these gorges, was in fact the occasion for an invention. She is learning that her ancestors were engineers.

This is not a small thing to know about yourself.

I want to be fair about what a children’s book can and cannot do.

It cannot replace a good teacher. It cannot fix a curriculum that was designed elsewhere for children imagined to be living somewhere very different from the Khasi Hills. It cannot, on its own, undo the accumulated weight of decades in which a child’s first reading experiences told her that the exciting, important, worth-writing-about world existed elsewhere.

But TFFP was never conceived as only a collection of books. From the beginning, we understood that books sitting on a shelf in a language a child does not read, in a centre without a trained hand to open them, do very little. So alongside the sixty-six books, we built a Storytelling Handbook, a structured curriculum designed for Anganwadi workers across Meghalaya, aligned to the National Education Policy 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage 2022. The handbook gives each book a life beyond its pages: six to eight days of activities for every story, structured to build language, cognitive, social-emotional, and cultural development, all in the mother tongue first.

The NCF-FS 2022 is clear that the first eight years are decisive and that learning in the home language, with locally rooted resources, supports deeper understanding and stronger foundational skills. TFFP was built in that spirit before the policy said so formally, and the handbook is how we make that alignment practical and usable in the field. An Anganwadi worker in a Garo Hills centre doesn’t need to design a lesson around Mai Jingjing. The handbook tells her how to have children sing it, act it, and extend it into a conversation about the sounds they hear in their own surroundings. The book is the occasion; the handbook is the scaffolding.

What this means is that the books are more than stories. They are, in the hands of someone who knows how to use them, a full early learning environment, one that happens to be rooted in the world the child actually lives in.

The books in TFFP are available in Khasi, Pnar, and Garo, not as afterthoughts, but as primary texts. Picnic and Pine Needles (written and illustrated by Careen Joplin Langstieh), a story about siblings on a Sngi saitjaiñ picnic in Upper Shillong, collecting pine needles and bonding with their family, exists in all four languages. The Khasi version is not a translation of an English story. The English version is, if anything, a translation of a Khasi experience.

This matters. A child who reads a story in her own language is not just accessing the plot. She is being told that her language is capable of carrying a story. That it has enough words. That it can hold a child’s attention. These are things that seem obvious and are not, because for a long time the implicit message of the book world was that the serious, the beautiful, and the worth-reading existed only in certain languages, and those languages were not Khasi.

The books were made by people from Meghalaya for children from Meghalaya. The authors and illustrators are mostly from the state itself, and the broader team draws from across the Northeast, but the project went further than that. Stories came from elders and community members, from people in villages who had carried these things in memory long before anyone thought to write them down. A handful of established children’s book authors and illustrators from mainland India also contributed, but the design of the project gave no room for the outside gaze to take over. Local writers and artists held the story. Gladinia Pyrtuh, who illustrated The Root Bridge, drew the roots from memory; she had seen them, been on them, and understood them from the inside. That intimacy shows. You cannot fake it, and the project was careful never to ask anyone to try.

What TFFP is, at its core, is an act of refusal. A refusal to accept that the stories worth telling about Meghalaya are only the ones that make sense to someone outside it. A refusal to explain the jainsem rather than wear it. A refusal to introduce the root bridge as an exotic wonder rather than a local solution.

And perhaps most importantly: a refusal to wait for someone else to do it.

I will end where I began, with the bridge.

The oldest living root bridges are in the Sohra and Mawlynnong areas of the East Khasi Hills. The most famous of them, the double-decker root bridge at Nongriat, has two tiers and is said to be around two hundred years old. Thousands of tourists visit it every year. Photographs of it appear in international travel magazines. It has been called a wonder of the world.

And somewhere nearby, a child might still be learning about London Bridge.

There is a phrase in Khasi, “ia phi,” that I find myself returning to. It means, roughly, “for you,” and it carries a sense of dedication and care that the English phrase does not quite capture. When we made these books, the spirit of “ia phi” was what drove us.

We made sixty-six books. We would like to make more. We are not under any illusion that sixty-six books solve the problem; the problem is much larger than that, and it involves questions of curriculum, teacher training, publishing infrastructure, and political will that are above our pay grade. But sixty-six books are sixty-six more than there were. And the handbook gives each of those books a usable life. And a child who reads The Root Bridge, or Ki Dak Jaiñtia, or Mai Jingjing, or Ilari’s Jainsem has had one experience, just one, of reaching into a story and finding something that belongs to her.

That is worth doing. We did it. We are doing it still.