Hills and plains
The Jaintia or Pnar kingdom straddled two very different countries: the high Jaintia hills, where its people lived, and the wet plain of Sylhet below, which supplied its revenue. It had a summer capital at Nartiang in the hills and a winter one at Jaintiapur in the plains.
Succession in the ruling house, as in Khasi society generally, was matrilineal — the throne passed to the sister's son. The monoliths at Nartiang, some of the tallest standing stones in the region, were erected by the kingdom's rulers and mark a megalithic tradition that continued into the modern period alongside the imported Hindu ritual of the court.
Annexation
The Jaintia kings adopted Śākta worship, and the temple at Nartiang and the Jaintiapur shrine were centres of it. The East India Company annexed the kingdom in 1835 on the stated ground of human sacrifice at one of these shrines — a charge of the kind routinely used to justify annexation, and one that is difficult to assess from the sources that survive.
The hill portion was absorbed into the Khasi and Jaintia Hills district and the plains into Sylhet, which went to East Pakistan in 1947. The Jaintia hills are now a district of Meghalaya.
Further reading
- Bhattacharyya, N. N. History of the Sakta Religion. Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996
- Erndl, Kathleen M. Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India. Oxford University Press, 1993
- Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine. University of California Press, 1986
- Kinsley, David. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. University of California Press, 1997
- Nugteren, Albertina. Belief, Bounty, and Beauty: Rituals Around Sacred Trees in India. Brill, 2005
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.