In India’s land of clouds, they don’t build bridges.
They grow them

Morningstar Khongthaw spent his childhood sitting around the fire sharing folklore stories with the village elders about the planting of the first ficus tree and the creatures that crawl in the woods. 

Khongthaw lived in a tin-roofed house in Meghalaya – a state in the northeast of India renowned for its heavy rainfall, deep valleys and dense tropical rainforests. The stories made him feel bound to his community, through a connection to his ancestors and the wild world around him.

But as he grew older, Khongthaw began to wonder if that bond was still strong. Young people seemed less interested in ancestral knowledge. They were spending less time with their families in the forest and more time on their phones. “There’s a lack of connection,” Khongthaw, now 28 years old, says. 

What Khongthaw was particularly concerned about was the disintegration of an important part of Meghalaya’s infrastructure: living root bridges. For centuries, the Indigenous Khasi and Jaintia people have been creating these intricate structures, weaving together the roots of Indian rubber fig trees (Ficus elastica) to form vital pathways across streams, rivers and waterfalls – connecting areas separated by bodies of water and providing a plethora of environmental benefits.

Keeping knowledge alive

In recent years, living root bridges have gained worldwide recognition, featured in documentaries and broadcast by influencers and travel bloggers alike. But as tourism in Meghalaya began increasing, Khongthaw worried that the specialized knowledge of how to build the bridges – and their meaning for the villagers – was disappearing.

In 2018, he established the Living Bridge Foundation, with the goal of educating young people in Meghalaya and communities worldwide about the importance of these structures – through lectures, school seminars, and guided tours. But promoting ancestral knowledge to a global audience is not without its challenges. Khongthaw must strike a fine balance between showcasing his community’s creativity and resourcefulness, and at the same time, preserving the environment and Indigenous culture.

Living root bridges are created by guiding the roots of Indian rubber fig trees across bodies of water, using bamboo scaffolding to encourage them to grow horizontally. The roots intertwine and fuse through a process called anastomosis, which creates a robust, interconnected structure. They are guided into the soil, where they continue to grow, becoming stronger and stronger over time. It can take 20-25 years for the roots to intertwine, so the process requires generations of villagers to work together, with a great deal of focus, dedication and, not least, patience.

In Rangthylliang, the village where Khongthaw lives, there are numerous living root bridges – as many as 28, he says, some as high as 70 meters (230 feet) and hundreds of years old. Walking across them, in the heights of the humid green forest – choirs of insects roaring – has a surreal feeling, like you are somehow transcending nature, but at the same time, deeply rooted to it. You are impossibly high up, soaring above thundering waterfalls, yet you are cradled, nurtured, safe. 

“The water took everything”

In recent years, however, a number of older bridges have been collapsing, something which Khongthaw puts down to the changing climate. He says that in the past two years, the monsoon – which usually begins in May – has started in March, which has caused issues for the bridges. Sometimes there is not enough water, which restricts root growth and nutrient uptake, or there is too much water, which causes soil erosion. In 2022, Khongthaw said that heavy rainfall during the early monsoon led to a massive landslide, causing a bridge to completely collapse into the rising body of water. “The water took everything,” he said, “It hurts a lot.”

Meghalaya (which means ‘abode of clouds’) is home to the village of Mawsynram, which is known to be the wettest place on Earth, receiving nearly 12 meters of rainfall each year. When rainfall is high, living root bridges enable villagers to cross over rising bodies of water, accessing their crops or traveling to neighboring villages to sell produce. The bridges also have a plethora of environmental benefits, such as stabilizing  the soil, preventing landslides and promoting biodiversity – providing habitats for birds, insects and mammals. 

“When the trees are there for longer, they create a whole biodiverse system around them,” says Satender Kumar, co-founder at Grow Billion Trees, a global initiative dedicated to planting billions of trees to protect against climate change. “There is a whole ecosystem which is living under those trees.”

But in recent years, deforestation has caused biodiversity to decline in Meghalaya. Between 2017 and 2019, forest cover increased across India as a whole, but the northeast region saw a decline. 

“There’s a huge stress on agricultural land nowadays because there are more mouths to feed, so food security becomes a big issue in our state,” said James P.K. Sangma, chairman of the Meghalaya government’s industrial development corporation and former cabinet minister of forests and environment. Another issue is cross-pollination. “A lot of foreign and alien species have been planted here,” Sangma explained, which ends up “destroying the Indigenous species.”

Grabbing the world’s attention

In 2022, Meghalaya’s living root bridges were placed on the tentative list of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. For some locals, this was an exciting moment, yet others regarded the announcement with caution. Khongthaw said that becoming a World Heritage Site would mean adhering to UNESCO’s guidelines, terms and conditions. “UNESCO is just a nametag,” he said. “Before we accept anything, we have to read the script. We have to understand the value.” 

Khongthaw wants to make sure that everyone in the village is involved in the discussion of whether or not to become an official World Heritage Site – that they collectively weigh up the positive and negative impacts before deciding how to move forward. He also wants to ensure that UNESCO “really understands the meaning of heritage” in Meghalaya. “What we want is a bottom-to-top approach,” he says.

According to India’s tourism ministry 1.5 million tourists visited Meghalaya in 2023, up from 700,000 in 2013, with many visitors hoping to experience living root bridges. Khongthaw puts the rise in tourists in part down to influencers sharing reels of these sacred sites on Instagram, capturing the “attention of outsiders.”

On balance he thinks this is a positive thing, yet he fears that people are “starting to ignore the true origin of the place.” Heritage is “our everything,” said Khongthaw, “It’s our identity; how we live, what we eat, how we survive, how we implement things, how we act.”

Sangma agrees that tourism must be managed responsibly. “The realization has come that we can’t just over-market the living root bridges,” he said, “The more people climb on it and the more human interaction there is within that area, there’s bound to be a carbon footprint that people will leave behind.” 

In 2023, Khongthaw launched the 2047 Project – with the goal of rebuilding the bridges that were destroyed during the early monsoon in the previous year. Recently, he’s been traveling to remote villages where bridges are broken and neglected, consulting with elders and building a grassroots team to help fix them. “We also want to share this beautiful knowledge,” he says, not just “within our community, but also with other communities, other tribes, across India or across the world too.” 

There are obstacles to overcome, but for many, Meghalaya’s living root bridges are symbols of resilience, ingenuity and hope. “It goes to show how human beings and Mother Nature can have a very symbiotic relationship and without impinging on each other,” said Sangma, “That’s the message that it carries: that we can find ways and means by which nature and human beings can find a middle path.”