Mylliem Kur
Khasi
At a glance
- Called a
- Kur
- Community
- Khasi
- Found in
- Meghalaya
About
Mylliem is a Khasi kur, a clan traced through the mother, listed by Gurdon in 1907 among the clans of the Khyrim state. Three other clans in the same list carry the name with a second word, Mylliem-muthong, Mylliem-ngap and Mylliem-pdah, and may not intermarry with one another. Mylliem is also the name of a Khasi state, Hima Mylliem; the sources read do not connect the clan with the state. It is a Khasi clan in its own system, not a gotra.
What “Kur” means for the Khasi
A kur (also called jaid) is the Khasi clan, and it is traced through the mother: a child belongs to the mother's kur, and marriage within one's own kur is forbidden. It is a matrilineal clan, not a gotra and not a patrilineal surname.
Every kur of the Khasi, with how the clan system works: the Khasi page.
Name and Origin
Gurdon gives the origin of two of the related clans. The Mylliem-ngap and Mylliem-pdah are named after their first ancestresses, ka ngap ('honey', the sweet one) and ka pdah, who are greatly revered; he gives these as examples of clans in which the name of the ancestress survives. He records nothing on the origin of the plain Mylliem clan.
Historical Journey
Gurdon drew up his lists of exogamous clans from information given by the Siems of Cherra and Khyrim. The Khyrim list has Mylliem at number 134, followed by Mylliem-muthong, Mylliem-ngap and Mylliem-pdah, with the note that these three may not intermarry with one another, nor with the Sohtum clan. Gurdon explains such bans by common descent. He does not say whether the plain Mylliem clan belongs to that group. Clans with the prefix khar, Khar-mylliem, appear in both his Cherra and Khyrim lists; he reads names beginning with khar or dkhar as the lines of ancestresses from the plains. A man of the Mylliem-ngap clan appears in one version of the tradition of Ka Pah Syntiew, the ancestress of the Siems of Khyrim and Mylliem.
How the Kur Is Kept
Like every Khasi kur, the Mylliem clans are exogamous and traced through the mother. The bans among Mylliem-muthong, Mylliem-ngap, Mylliem-pdah and Sohtum are what Gurdon calls iateh kur: clans believed to share descent may not intermarry, and such a marriage is sang, taboo. The sources read do not name a family deity of the clan.
Presence Across Regions
Hima Khyrim, Khasi Hills
Tribal - Khasi
Mylliem, Mylliem-muthong, Mylliem-ngap and Mylliem-pdah are all in Gurdon's list of the Khyrim clans.
Stories and Legends
The Mylliem-ngap man and Ka Pah Syntiew
In his chapter on the Khasi states Gurdon writes that the first high priestess of Khyrim was Ka Pah Syntiew, 'the flower-lured one', a beautiful girl who lived in a cave at Marai near Nongkrem. A man of the Mylliem-ngap clan enticed her out with a flower and took her as his bride, and she became the mother of the Siems of Nongkrem. In the folk-tale he prints elsewhere, the man is instead a man from Nongjri in the Bhoi country.