I have taught about sacred groves. I have explained them in classrooms, described them in notes, broken them down into ecological concepts and cultural practices. I thought I understood what they were.
I did not.
Nothing — not a lecture, not a textbook, not even a documentary — prepares you for the moment you actually step inside one.
Arriving at Mawsmai
The village of Mawsmai sits in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, a state that wears its forests like a second skin. We were taken there, not as tourists ticking a destination off a list, but as guests being led somewhere that demands a certain kind of quiet before you even arrive.
The first thing I noticed was the absence of noise. Not just the absence of traffic or crowds. The absence of that low, constant hum of human interference that we have stopped noticing because it never leaves us. Here, it was gone. What remained was only nature at its peak: birdsong, wind moving through ancient canopies, the soft crunch of earth underfoot. The air itself felt different, heavier with moisture, cooler, almost pulsing with life.
We were told immediately: you do not enter without a guide.
That rule, I would come to understand, was not just about safety. It was about respect.
The Law Kyntang: A Forest That Is Sacred by Covenant
In Meghalaya, sacred groves are called Law Kyntang in the Khasi language. They are not reserves created by government policy. They are sanctuaries created by faith, protected by community law, and kept alive across centuries by the simple, fierce belief that some places do not belong to human beings.
The Mawsmai grove belongs to this tradition. It is one of the least disturbed sacred forests in the entire East Khasi Hills, and the moment you enter, you feel exactly why.
To understand this forest, you must first understand the Khasi people. Their spirit of conservation is not a modern environmentalist stance. It is ancient, bone-deep, woven into their religion and their identity. They believe that every village is incomplete without its own sacred forest. Not a temple. Not a monument. A forest, as the very identity of a people.
The Trees That Are Older Than Memory
Our guide walked us through slowly, pointing to trees that were two hundred, three hundred years old. Moss clung to their bark like a second skin. Their roots sprawled across the ground in ways that made you watch every step, as though the earth itself had chosen to surface and breathe.
The guide explained each tree not just as a species, but as a living being with standing in this place. There was reverence in the way they spoke, not performance, but something matter-of-fact and deep. This tree has been here for three hundred years. It belongs here. You are the visitor.
The forest holds around 450 species of trees and plants, including rare medicinal species, and is home to animals and birds that exist almost nowhere else. None of it has been logged. None of it has been sold. It has simply been left alone, which, in today’s world, is perhaps the most radical act of all.
What Belongs to the Forest, Stays in the Forest
The single, absolute rule of the Law Kyntang is this: nothing can be taken out. Not a fruit. Not a flower. Not even a single leaf.
The Khasi believe that the forest is home to their deity Labasa, a guardian spirit who protects both the forest and the community. This deity takes the form of a leopard when pleased and a snake when angered. Every morning, the guide told us, before entering, they chant in Khasi, asking permission, asking protection, asking forgiveness for anything they may unknowingly have done wrong.
The guide shared stories of people who broke this covenant. Someone took some leaves, and their car met with an accident on the way home. There are accounts of people falling ill after removing things from the forest. It is even said that in 1970, the army tried to remove dead wood from the grove, but the truck would not start no matter how many times they tried.
I am sharing what I heard and observed. I have no firsthand experience of these consequences. But I will say this: standing inside that forest, I felt no urge to take anything. It did not feel like a rule being imposed on me. It felt like the most natural understanding in the world, that what belongs to this place, belongs to this place.
A Faith Without Idols
What moved me most deeply was this: the Khasi do not believe in idol worship. There are no statues, no temples, no intermediaries between the human and the sacred. Their belief is deeply connected to nature itself, to the idea that the divine exists in everything, in trees, in animals, in the earth, in water.
The forest is the temple. The trees are the deities. The act of protecting the forest is the prayer.
Worship here is not reserved for one day of the week or one festival in the year. It is daily, quiet, woven into the act of showing up and being present.
I kept thinking about how much of what we call civilisation involves putting nature at a distance from the sacred. Here, nature and the sacred are not separate things. They never were.
The Women Who Hold Everything Together
And then the guide told us something that stopped me completely.
The Khasi are not just a community that protects nature. They are a matrilineal, matrilocal, and matriarchal society. And coming from north India, this was nothing short of extraordinary to hear.
In Khasi families, when a couple marries, the man goes to live in the woman’s home. If the woman is not happy in the relationship, she can ask the man to leave. The lineage flows through the woman’s family. The property passes to the daughters. If there are two daughters, it goes to the younger daughter. If there is one daughter, everything goes to her. The women manage, expand, and sustain the family’s resources and business.
And it is the women who take the major decisions. Not just within the household but across the community. The whole society is structured this way.
The guide said something that stayed with me long after we left the forest. They said that in their belief, mother and nature are one. That is why everything flows through the woman. That is why the forest is revered the way a mother is revered. That is why nothing is taken without asking. You do not exploit what you love.
I stood there quietly for a moment.
I am a feminist from north India. I have spent years writing, speaking, and working toward a world where women are safe, equal, and free. And here, in a forest in Meghalaya, was a community that had organised its entire social structure around the centrality of women, not as an ideology but as a lived reality, for centuries.
The guide also mentioned that other matrilineal communities exist in India, in places like Kerala, in the Nias community, and a few others, but in most of those systems it is the maternal uncle, the mama, who holds the actual authority. Here, it is different. Here it is the women themselves. The whole state, the whole community.
I do not know what the crime statistics look like in Mawsmai. I cannot claim more than what I saw and heard. But I will say this: when a society is built on the understanding that women hold the centre, something fundamental shifts. There is less to prove. Less to dominate. Less to take.
Perhaps what we need is not more laws but different imaginations of how a community can be structured.
What I Carried Out (Only in My Heart)
I left Mawsmai carrying nothing in my hands. But I carried everything in my chest.
I carried the image of those ancient, moss-covered trees standing in utter stillness. I carried the sound of a forest that has never been logged or sold or treated as a resource. I carried the humility of realising that for all my reading and teaching about sacred groves, I had understood them only as a concept. And concepts are thin, pale things compared to the living reality.
I carried the memory of the guide’s words about the women of this community, said so simply, so without drama, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Because for them, it is.
And I carried this thought: these people have been environmentalists for a thousand years without ever needing that word. They have been feminists for centuries without ever needing that word either. They simply built a world where the mother, the woman, and the forest were all understood as sacred. And they protected what they held sacred.
Why You Should Go
Mawsmai is in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, not far from Shillong. You will need a guide, which is compulsory and absolutely as it should be. The guide is not just a formality. They are the bridge between you and the forest’s meaning.
Go with an open mind. Go slowly. Do not rush through it as though it were a tourist attraction to photograph and leave. Stay long enough to let the silence do something to you.
And please, take nothing out. Not even a leaf.
Some places are not ours to take from. Some places exist to remind us of what we forgot.
The sacred groves of Meghalaya have survived centuries not because of government policy or international funding. They have survived because a community decided, long ago, that some things are holy. That some places belong to no one, and therefore belong to everyone, including those not yet born.
We would do well to learn from them.