Place · Christian mission region · India
Shillong & Khasi hills missions
Also known as 1897 Assam earthquake, 1897 Great Assam earthquake
The Welsh Presbyterian mission begun by Thomas Jones at Cherrapunji in 1841, which gave Khasi a Latin-script orthography (based on Welsh phonetics) and reshaped the religious map of the Northeast — modern Meghalaya is now about 75% Christian, mostly Presbyterian or Catholic. The mission's Cherrapunji and Shillong Theological College (1887) produced the first Khasi-script Bible in 1891. Welsh hymnody is still sung in Khasi churches and remains the dominant musical idiom of Khasi devotional life. The 1900 and 1950 translations of the Bible into Jaintia, Garo and other Northeast languages followed the Khasi template. The mission's archive at Trinity College, Carmarthen, is the chief source for 19th-century Northeastern language documentation.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.570, 91.880 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The 1897 Assam earthquake, among the most violent ever recorded, levelled the town and helped found the study of Indian seismicity.
Connections (1)
- TransmissionSerampore & the Mission Press
What the missions actually left behind is scripts and dictionaries. Serampore printed in about forty languages; the Welsh in the Khasi hills gave a spoken language a Latin alphabet, a grammar and a literature. In both cases the printed standard long outlasted the theology that paid for it, and is now simply how the language is written.
On these journeys
Sources
Welsh Mission records
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