Shillong

See my other posts on Meghalaya, including my rural Meghalaya trip (where I went to Cherrapunji, Nongriat, Mawphlang, the David Scott trail, Dawki, some supposedly cleanest village, and more), books to read, and local music, all highly recommended!

For more photos see my wife's Instagram highlights on Meghalaya, though the first half on Shillong is really mostly food.

Like most people visiting Shillong, we flew into Guwahati and drove around three hours to Shillong. We used a pre-booked shared taxi service called Wizzride, which is around 1000 inr per person. A good option for those who don’t want to pay for a full taxi but still want a nice car. The only issue is last mile connectivity, as taxis are a pain in Shillong, but it could work out depending on where you need to be dropped (see the website for drop point locations). We ended up paying our driver extra to drop us at our stay, about ten minutes away from the closest drop point, but it was a whole ordeal which consisted of a lot of back and forth in Hindi and the driver having to call his supervisor. If you aren’t as cheap as me it’s better to just book a whole cab. If you’re cheaper than me there are buses or very crammed shared taxis from the airport.

Shillong has a small airport as well, about an hour from the city, though flights are pretty limited. We flew out from the Shillong airport to Imphal. It was an odd experience. As soon as the plane we were going to board landed, we got in a bus to drive out to the plane, which was maybe a minute’s walk from where we boarded the bus. Then we waited in the bus for five minutes as people were exiting the plane, after which it got rapidly cleaned and we did a very fast boarding. It felt a bit like taking a local train.

Table of Contents:

Intro

Things to do

Food

Cinema 

Introduction

I spent a month in Shillong in September 2024. We partly chose it because we had a wedding to go to in Imphal in October and we decided to make our way northeast as I dislike going out of my way for one place. Another big factor was Shilling being one of very few places in India we had yet to visit that met the following criteria for this part of the year: not boiling hot, not flooding, not extremely difficult to get to, and not too boring to spend a month in. Not a lot of options there. The “not too boring” part was a bit of a wildcard, since I knew nothing about Shillong and I usually find hill stations to be boring, but I saw there was one great looking restaurant and a handful of well regarded novelists from there, and that was enough for me to have faith in it. At least I’d have relevant reading material. There’s also one fancy cocktail bar, which was enough for me to convince my wife. So Shillong it was, for one month.

(I also thought it was a good chance to go to Unakoti, where I really wanted to go. Giant sculptures of gods’ faces carved into the mountains, I live for that kind of stuff. It ended up being about 10 hours away by road and, not surprisingly, I never went. It looked much closer on the map. Would have been faster if there were a highway there that cuts through Bangladesh, but alas, and that still would have been too far. I’m not so good at this whole travel thing, you’ve stumbled upon the wrong blog.)

I really liked Shillong. Not the most exciting place, I won’t tell anyone it’s a hardcore must visit, but it was great as an offbeat and relaxed remote work destination for a month (despite power cuts and network issues). Meghalaya outside of Shillong is more magical, I forgive those who largely skip the state capital and head straight for the beautiful settings deeper into the hills, but it is worth spending a few days here even though there’s not really anything to do or see. It has a unique and charming vibe, plus great local food and markets, and it's quite pretty in parts of it. It's a fun, quirky place to visit for a couple days, in a different cultural sphere, which feels like a mix of India and Southeast Asia, with a strong western influence.

I'll give my recommendations further down, but we mainly just hung out, got a lot of work and reading done, ate a lot of great food, went for nice walks, and didn’t spend much money. I don't feel a need to return, but if something called me back I’d be happy to go. I have a mental list of places I’d go if I ever want to live cheaply and focus on writing a screenplay or whatever, with few distractions but enough creature comforts and stimulation to satisfy me, and Shillong is definitely a good contender here. 

My biggest complaint is probably that it’s hard to get around, with no Uber, very expensive cabs, and way too much traffic (shockingly as bad as Mumbai at times!). Beyond that, I just wish it were nicer. It's quite lovely for India, but it's still India, and you can easily imagine it being so much nicer in an alternate reality or just several decades back when it plausibly could have been described as paradise. It reminded me of beautiful, exotic, quaint, and charming hill towns I’ve seen in Japanese and Korean movies, if those towns were poorer and had worse infrastructure. It does have that ugly/pretty/cool overdeveloped hill station look which people strangely like, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“This is almost great,” I kept saying to myself. If only this lovely tree lined lane were walkable and didn’t have cars constantly speeding through it, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. If only this view down the hills weren’t obstructed by ugly modern construction. If only these numerous cute old houses had some breathing room with pretty lawns and weren’t surrounded by concrete. Stuff like that. Periodically I would get gorgeous views of the nearby mountains, but I got them so rarely that they always came as something of a surprise, which is both funny and sad. This seems like a no-brainer, but there’s not a single cafe to hang out at that offers greenery and nice views. You find more beautiful places on the outskirts of the city, but if you want beauty you might as well go further out and not be in Shillong at all, since it’s hard to get around anyway and the city doesn’t have so much to offer that proximity to it is a major selling point. 

Still, it’s probably the most appealing city in Northeast India, and it’s far more interesting to be in than any other hill station that I’ve been to, the others which may be prettier but are really just dull tourist destinations, while Shillong has a life of its own (a hill station turned city, a gift and a curse).

I find Shillong hard to write about because its interestingness and charm are better felt than described, and our good memories aren’t of specific things we did or saw but are from just living there and making it our home (though I don’t want to discourage people there on short trips, I think most of this can be enjoyed and appreciated in just a few days!). The fresh air and greenery. The buzzing about of students from across Northeast India. The markets. The locals dressing up and walking to church on Sundays. The walks that took us up and down and up and down. That there were so few places to go we went to the same places over and over again and became regulars. That it was modern enough to be liveable but old fashioned and run down enough to have character. That everyone seemed to know each other. The endlessly rainy days. The jainsems. The ja and sha shops. The non-stop betel nut chewing and stained teeth. The sounds of the local languages (Khasi is the only language in India that is part of the Mon-Khmer family, while most languages in Northeast India are Tibeto-Burman). The funny names some people have. The shared taxis. The artisan cheesemaker and good quality breads. The monthly community market in the church hall, fun even though there was nothing I wanted. The Christian book stores, also with nothing I wanted, run by women who all called each other “Sister.” That compared to bigger cities in India it feels both more western and more "Asian" and somehow also less hip. That it’s hardly cold in September but locals still wear sweaters and sweatpants when I was in shorts and a t-shirt (and usually I’m less tolerant of cold than the typical person). That though there’s too much traffic there’s surprisingly not much honking.

On a similar note, this was my introduction to Northeast India and, well, uh, to put it bluntly, it’s… more civilized than the rest of India. The infrastructure is poor, but it ends up being nicer than most places in India because people are pretty well mannered, aren’t so loud, don’t push, don't hassle you, etc (I always wondered why it was so common for people from the Northeast to turn up in the hospitality industry in big cities but now it makes perfect sense). Women have a larger presence in public life and clearly have more freedoms and face less harassment (I often saw this credited to Khasis being matrilineal but I felt Nagaland was similar in this regard despite being patrilineal). Also, Meghalaya is one of the cleanest parts of the country, I think.

If only there were like two really cool things to see or do. Something so I could tell you, “You must go to Shillong!” Right now I’m at “Oh, you should definitely go if you’re invited,” or “Yeah, stop in for a few days before going to Cherrapunji, might as well.” But anyway, check out Shillong if you’ve already been everywhere else on my blog. If you have cheap direct flights from your city. If you want to go somewhere exotic for India but don’t feel like leaving the country for some reason, even though Southeast Asia is probably cheaper and easier to get to. If you want to hide out for a while and get that screenplay done. If you are a missionary seeking converts to your obscure denomination of Christianity. If the weather is bad everywhere else. You’ll have a nice time in a unique place and eat great food at a low cost. And the combo of Shillong with rural Meghalaya is wonderful, even if one without the other might have felt incomplete to me.

Meghalaya has three major tribal groupings: Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo. The Khasi tribe is the largest by a hair. The 2011 census numbers list Khasi speakers as 33.8% of the population, ahead of the 31.6% that speak Garo, and Pnar/Jaintia speakers are a distant third at 10.7%. Khasis loomed largest for me, given that I spent most of my time in the Khasi hills where Shillong and Cherrapunji fall. Shillong remains cosmopolitan, despite political movements that have changed its character over the decades. Khasi speakers are 46.9% of the population, while the next biggest group are Bengali speakers at 20.2%. Garo speakers are only 2.5% of the population, behind Hindi, Nepali, and Assamese speakers. 

(I have no theories why, but Meghalaya has the second highest fertility rate in India at 2.91, behind only Bihar's 3.0. The urban fertility rate of 2.32 is the country's highest! It is an exception especially in the Northeast, where the fertility rates are below the national average of 2.0, with the exception of Manipur at 2.2. Some cite a reason for this being that Meghalaya also has India's highest rate of polygyny at 6.1%, but it doesn't look like fertility correlates well with polygyny given that it is notably higher in the Northeast. Nor do other explanations seem to correlate well or make much sense.)

I wish I got more engagement with Khasi culture, both in Shillong and in the rest of Meghalaya. It’s not like the rest of India where the culture is in your face, where you can hardly avoid wedding processions and festivals and ancient rituals and hijras pinching your cheeks, and where grand historical sites are never far away. Meghalaya is more laid back, not to mention westernized and Christianized, and the more unique aspects of the culture are more behind closed doors and less audible. It seems unlikely that nobody got married the entire time I was in Meghalaya, so I'm assuming their weddings are just really quiet by Indian standards. (I did hear rock bands performing, and church hymns on Sundays, but that stuff isn't so exotic.)

I still got plenty of cultural engagement. Eating at local restaurants, walking around markets, people watching, listening to music, reading books, watching bad movie trailers, looking at monoliths, wondering what was up with the weird archery betting stalls they had everywhere (I never figured it out, here’s an article), looking at a bunch of baskets at the museum, and visiting root bridges. I wished I got a bit more, though. I enjoyed reading about traditional Khasi culture, but it felt very abstract, a world away from anything I experienced. Maybe I needed to visit a festival, or know someone who could give me an inside look. I went to a handful of villages that were beautiful, but I didn’t see anything all that interesting. I didn’t meet any shamans, witness any rituals, or hear any name songs. Okay, maybe that’s asking for too much, but I hardly even saw any traditional or traditionally inspired art or architecture.

A nice museum could have brought the culture to life for me a little more. Some interesting heritage walks would have been great. I kept thinking I needed to get out more but I didn’t know where to go or how to get there. I probably should have made an effort to get to know people, but I’m not so good at that, and people in Meghalaya keep to themselves more than they do in much of India, I think. Though Meghalaya is very beautiful and that is understandably the state's major selling point, I would like to see the culture get showcased more.

(Out of curiosity I just did a google image search of “Meghalaya” and it took me 65 photos to find any pictures of local people at all. Before that the only images depicting anything that wasn't just nature were a handful of root bridge pictures and one showing monoliths. This reflects what people visit for but I want to promote people visiting for more than just the nature stuff! Every other northeast state I looked at had far more images up front of people and architecture.)

(I was surprised to learn that around 15% of Khasis still practice the traditional religion known as Niam Khasi, going by Wikipedia’s numbers. Even in remote villages I saw Jesus posters on the walls. I’ll have to look harder next time. One interesting article described the Niam Khasi population as “small but influential” and I’m surprised this didn’t turn up more in my reading, though I did walk by the Seng Khasi hall, not knowing what it was. They should organize some culture tourism stuff, or put together a museum/cultural center or something.)

I also felt the history, while interesting, was too abstract to connect with. I like to share historical details that will hopefully deepen the reader’s engagement with a place and help them see it from a new perspective and bring its past to life in a way that connects it to the present. I can’t think of much to share here, though, beyond the very basic “British came, moved to Shillong because Sohra was too rainy, locals converted, regional headquarters, nice cosmopolitan town in the hills, earthquake destroyed pretty much everything, new cute town built with supposedly quake proof Assam style architecture (which I quite like, and here as some pre and post earthquake photos), British left, states reorganized, ugly ethno-nationalist politics, blah blah, skip ahead to the food section.” 

I could throw a bunch of fun facts at you. Did you know the inventor of the ATM machine is from Shillong? As was a pioneering aerospace engineer who used rockets to send mail. There’s more. Do you care? Should you care? Reading about British Shillong felt a little like reading about the Indus Valley Civilization, too disconnected from modern life for me to care. Did the British actually live here? They left behind some cute old buildings, like the aliens leaving behind the pyramids, and they left behind English and Christianity, but I found it impossible to imagine they were ever actually in Shillong.

Shillong intersected with other pieces of India's history. There are Tagore’s visits (I believe two of the three homes he’d stayed in on his trips are still standing, and I visited one from the outside, on gmaps as Rabindranath Tagore's House if you’re interested, and there are many nice houses around there, worth a stroll). There’s the house of the Nawab of Dacca (La-chaumiere House, many nice houses in this area as well, also worth a stroll). The Redlands Bungalow where the last king of Manipur was under house arrest when the Manipur Merger Agreement to Dominion of India was signed in 1949 (found it on the map but don’t think you can catch a glimpse of it). There’s a lot of other obscure history here too (and how about that one time when “Adolf Hitler Was Arrested By John F Kennedy In Meghalaya”?). But I don’t know. I never cared that much. Maybe I just didn’t have the right reading material, or didn’t have the right heritage walk (the government run one was okay, you can skip it). I think there could be a way to make me care more. Maybe if I were invited inside some of those cute old buildings.

But anyway, I liked present day Shillong well enough, and I found fiction and folk stories to be a good substitute for history.

By the way, I rarely saw tourists in Shillong. A few Indian tourists here and there at the famous restaurants and cafes. I only saw white people twice in the month I was there, once was a young couple at a grocery store, the other time was a group of six or so middle aged Americans hanging out at a cafe for a few hours. I eavesdropped a bit, curious what they were up to. They turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses! I suppose they were there as missionaries. They seemed nice. I wanted to ask them what they thought about Prince, but I’m fairly shy and don’t talk to strangers so I kept to myself. 

Things to Do

As for things to do, I mostly recommend kind of doing nothing. Walk around the markets, eat at small local restaurants, hang out at cafes, check out the grocery stores. Stuff like that. I also recommend checking out some of the cute old architecture, but you’ll see it around and you don’t have to seek things out. My recommendations here are less sightseeing oriented than usual.

My top recommendation is going to Don Bosco Square and walking from there to Laitumkhrah market and somewhat beyond. The walk could take 20 minutes, but you can make a whole day out of it. People watch. Check out the big blue cathedral and cool architecture of the schools near the square. Get a good local lunch (my top picks in this area are the pan-Northeastern but I think mostly Mizo and Naga cuisine Kai-Nung near Bethany hospital under a dentist, and the Khasi and Nepali cuisine Tribal Flavours, not on gmaps but at the end of the small lane across from Shillong Cafe). Go down small lanes and look at cute old houses. Hang out at cafes (our favorite was the further down Press Cafe but we also liked Enchante Tea Room, Baking Leaven, and The Grub). 

Go into shops. Regetta Store is the best grocery store in town (it has lots of local products in addition to products from around the northeast), and the nearby Olivia’s Kitchen has a small shop with premium local food products as well. I also liked the local food products store upstairs in the area behind Caramel bakery. 

My wife enjoyed the clothes shopping all around. Above Burger King there’s a small mall of little shops with clothes from China or Thailand or wherever, and there are a lot of cute small clothing stores, both locally made and imported stuff. My wife noted it’s stuff similar to what she’d see in Thailand, but I recall one nice looking brand called Kiniho that does a contemporary take on local clothing styles. 

Check out the exotic produce the ladies are selling and buy some of the weird local fruits. Go to the nice Moinee’s bakery and get lamington and ginger cookies and whatever else looks good to you, and talk to the very nice owner if she’s around. And then go to Rynsan for dinner. 

A similar but I think very slightly less fun “walk, look around, eat, and shop” itinerary can be had around the busier and more Indian Police Bazaar and the amazing nearby local market Ïewduh, which is the best single thing to do in the city. (Ïewduh is apparently pronounced “yoh doh” but I kept forgetting how to say it, thankfully it’s also known as Bara Bazaar, which has the same meaning, you can just say that.)

(That reminds me of a fun historical fact about Shillong. The Ïewduh/bara bazaar/big market up on the hill existed before the British arrived, and the British decided to move their regional capital from the excessively rainy Cherrapunji to the mostly empty area near the large market. They planned to keep the name too, but Ïewduh sounded too much like Edo, the name of Tokyo at the time, so they chose Shillong as the name, referring to the Khasi god that resides at the nearby Shillong peak. See, Shillong’s history is interesting! But then, if the most interesting thing I can say about a place’s history is how it got its name, it’s probably not that interesting.)

So go to the awesome Ïewduh, though be warned it’s very crowded and intense. Have lunch at my favorite ja and sha local restaurant Kyrsoi Khasi Food (or, the not as special but still good and well known among tourists Trattoria, in the heart of Police Bazaar). Shop, I guess, whatever that means to you. Get locally grown coffee from Smokey Falls. See the old Bijou Cinema which shows Khasi movies. Go, if you must, to the fancy cocktail bar Shad Skye.

You can also visit some of the nice heritage buildings. (I just said “you can,” words that I hate other people using when they suggest things to do. I very frequently am given recommendations in India where people say things like “You can visit the state museum to get some culture. You can try Sri Balaji Pure Veg restaurant for idlis, dosas.” This always annoys me! I want to know what I should do, not what I can do! But “you can” actually feels appropriate here. I feel running around and seeing old buildings misses the point of Shillong, though.) 

The core of the British administrative area is near Raj Bhawan, probably the best building in town but mostly off limits, you can only get a glimpse of it through the cracks in the wall on the backside (this video gives you a better look, including of the interiors). 

Near there is the very nice Ward’s Lake, probably the best preserved feeling you get of the once lovely colonial Shillong (and there’s a good juice truck outside of the entrance, one of my India travel rules is to avoid streetside juices but it was a very clean setup, get whatever is in season, I got pineapple). With that said, if you’re heading out to the beautiful places elsewhere in Meghalaya, do you really need to go to a pretty man-made park and lake? Up to you. 

Up on a hill nearby is Pinewood Hotel, started over a century ago by a Swiss Couple, and used as an infirmary during WW2. Quite cute, and there’s some more interesting information on the very faded signboard outside. Given its history, location, and architecture it should be the top hotel in town, but it’s government run so there goes that. 

Also nearby is the All Saints' Cathedral, quite cute, you can go in to see the stained glass and around the back to see the bell, if your heart so desires it. 

There are plenty of other nice old buildings here and there, but I don’t think any need to be sought out. Just keep your eyes peeled when walking or driving around. I guess also seek out the big blue art deco Mary Help of Christians Cathedral, especially nice on a late Sunday afternoon.

Shillong has three museums that I know of: the state museum at the library across from All Saints’ Cathedral, the Don Bosco Museum, and the Ever Living Museum. I only went to the Don Bosco museum, I say go to any one of the three and it doesn’t matter which, and more than one would be overkill. The state museum is the most centrally located, and I have a random suspicion that the Ever Living Museum is the best (since it’s one guy’s passion project and is most focused on promoting the tribal cultures) but it’s the furthest out. I only went to the Don Bosco museum (had attempted a visit to the state museum but there was a power cut as soon as I entered!). Quite large and well put together. I wouldn’t say I saw anything so extraordinary there, but it was nice seeing artifacts from the different tribes of Meghalaya and the rest of Northeast India (and sometimes in modern Shillong I would totally forget that I was in the lands of what were entirely tribal societies up until recently). Baskets, weapons, fishing traps, clothes, jewelry, stuff like that, plus usual natural history stuff you can skip. Also, I enjoyed getting views from the rooftop, though it’s not that exciting (when I was there in early October I could smell the aromas of tungrymbai in the making, that was an experience in itself).

Another recommendation is the Tripura Castle, the former summer residence of the royals of Tripura (who are less famous than the non-royal, musical side of the family…). Nice to visit, drink some tea with a nice view. Also, check out the cool recently renovated bar in the old stables, complete with samurai swords captured by the Royal Tripura Force in WW2 and a secret passageway.

The walk up to the Tripura Castle is as fun as the castle itself (yes, I walked from the main road!). And that leads to my last but certainly not least recommendation for Shillong: you must do those walks that take you up and down and up and down. Those are what make Shillong Shillong. I did numerous such walks to try to get a feel for different neighborhoods. I’m not sure any neighborhood’s up down up down walk was so great that it was a must do, but you must do at least one. Any one. Part of the point of these walks is to see some nice residential neighborhoods, often very pretty and with nice houses in some cases at the border of forests, but the walks are also for their own sake. If your legs aren’t hurting you aren’t Shillonging hard enough.

The walk to Tripura Castle was great, with a detour to some other nice lanes (a landmark being Ri Saw Kun homestay), as was the walk in the area to the west of it (don’t remember exactly where we walked, but we went up from Pearls Eatery). I think the most quintessential steep Shillong walk, though, is Jacob’s Ladder, which leads to Don Bosco Square (currently on google maps as Jocob’s Ladder, for some reason). Highly recommended. Some of my other favorite walks were around here too, including Hopkinson Road (the other lane right before Jacob’s Ladder meets DB²). I mentioned a few other “worth a stroll” neighborhoods above, look that up if you care.

That’s pretty much it for stuff to do in Shillong. I should say there’s a lot of nice looking naturey stuff around Shillong. Forests, waterfalls, Umiam lake, etc, but I didn’t do any (though I drove by Umiam lake, as I think everyone does, and it was pretty stunning). I got my nature fix in Cherrapunji so I don’t feel I missed out, but I suppose the more coniferous landscape around Shillong is quite different and is thus worthwhile. Transportation is a total pain, though. I never want to go anywhere without uber again. I figured out how to use shared taxis to get between Laitumkrah and Police Bazaar, and anything outside of that main stretch went mostly unexplored by me, though there were a few days where we walked for hours. 

You can also use Shillong as a base for day trips. We did a few, all south of Shillong, but I have another post for everything we did in that direction (including a government run bus tour which left from the tourism office in Shillong, not recommended unless you’re too cheap to book private transport and too lazy to figure it all out yourself). We had planned some day trips north of Shillong, but ended up not doing them as arranging transport was a pain, we never got time during the week, and everything was closed Sunday. The one day we actually planned an outing, we had to cancel the plan because of torrential rain. Some places we wanted to go were Dial Muktieh Mei Ramew Cafe and the Nartiang monoliths, and my wife wanted to do a local pottery experience. I regret that I didn’t get to see more of rural Meghalaya.

Food

Food is definitely one of the highlights of Shillong, and for the most part I found it easier to get great local food here than outside of Shillong. (Not necessarily the case, as the small local food joints dotting the highways around Meghalaya are quite renowned, and we went to one which was exceptional, but as we took shared taxis everywhere it was difficult to stop, and the villages and homestays we went to for the most part didn’t have a ton to offer in terms of local food.)

I primarily had Khasi food in Shillong from small local “ja and sha” places, though I believe some of what I had was Jaintia food. I couldn’t tell you how they differ. There are also some places offering Garo food, but they are rarer and also didn’t seem vegetarian friendly. At the high end for local food there’s also the excellent restaurant Rynsan which does a sort of modern northeastern food (probably the best restaurant in northeast India), as well as the even more excellent homechef experience A’Origins. Beyond that, you also get great food from other parts of the northeast (I had Mizo, Naga, and Manipuri cuisines), and there are some other less typical cuisines to try in Shillong such as Tibetan. I suppose the locally inspired cocktail bar Shad Skye is something to seek out too. The artisanal cheese and breads you can get are also great, though that’s better for people on long stays. However long you’re here, though, you’ll eat well (though it’s harder to eat well at dinner than lunchtime, and harder to eat well on Sunday than the rest of the week as many places are closed). You should also seek out the local fruits, which are great, and if you’re interested you can try things like locally grown coffees and teas, and there are some nice cafes. I’ll get to all of this, read through and skim as you please.

I’ll start with Khasi food, which I loved. The cuisine isn’t the sort that will knock anyone out, I don’t think there will ever be a global trend of Khasi food, but it’s the sort of thing I could happily eat every day. As a vegetarian, it was all pretty light, healthy, and simple. Vegetables were usually cooked with hardly any oil and were seasoned pretty minimally, with just subtle uses of turmeric, ginger, herbs, and sometimes black sesame or perilla seed. Some of the food actually tasted like something my mom would make, oddly. There were chutneys on the side to add spice and acid (super spicy, just put a tiny dab), but I was happy with everything on its own. 

The food was pretty accessible, or at least the vegetarian food was. You don’t have to be a very adventurous eater to appreciate this stuff. I think much of it is good, wholesome food that everyone should enjoy? It’s too bad that it seems most people don’t bother, and most hotels, restaurants, and homestays just serve north Indian food. 

With that said… tungrymbai… I don’t know. That was something. I like weird fermented foods but even that was intense for me. I liked it though, once I got the proportions right. Just put a tiny dab to add some funk.

We mostly got Khasi food (and maybe some Jaintia food?) at the local ja and sha joints, which are small restaurants, sometimes more like stalls, which have a wide range of pre-made dishes (easily 10+ dishes to try at most places) served with rice (ja), and I guess tea (sha) if you want it. They have bowls sitting out and you point at what you want and they put it on your plate. These are great for early lunches as dishes are made early and are served until they run out. Most of these are closed for dinner, and almost all of them are closed Sunday. 

The meals are usually very cheap, and you pay per dish. I think the most expensive meal I had came to 200inr per person, and that’s because we got half a dozen different vegetable dishes, which is very different from how locals do it, eating mostly rice and getting 1-2 dishes to have on the side with it (even with 5+ dishes, many meals still came to around 100 per person). I should add that the restaurants are fun local experiences (the most Khasi thing to do in Shillong?) and at a lot of restaurants it was mostly women of all ages eating there, and a mix of men and women working there. They tended to be quite clean, too. This might be the cleanest category of cheap local restaurant in all of India. Some were a bit on the grungy side, but some were spotless. Many were quite busy but had hardly any google reviews and some weren’t on google maps at all, which is bizarre (we noticed this was a thing in Nagaland as well), quite different from the rest of India where famous restaurants can have thousands of reviews.

As a vegetarian, the ja and sha places were hit and miss but usually pretty good. Much better than I expected given what even many locals had said to us. “Vegetarian? In Shillong? No, no. You see, Khasis, we are only into non-veg.” I heard that a few times but I think these people don’t get out much. Some of the restaurants were fairly basic (just dal and potato, maybe okra), but a few had a range of great options, with dishes such as pumpkin, banana flower, some type of fern, tree tomato chutney, local green beans, radish salad, some local spikey gourd, local seasonal greens, and other stuff I’m forgetting. This was really awesome and exciting. (Despite interesting local mushrooms selling in the market, sadly none of them ever showed up at these places except once at the weekly market in Cherrapunji). Vegetarians should definitely make a point to eat an early lunch, though, as some dishes would run out by 2pm. Beyond the range of dishes offered, I’d really just rank restaurants by whether or not they were oily. Usually not but some were.

Also, the people at the restaurants never really understood our request for a plate of every vegetarian dish. We usually had to go dish by dish and ask if it was vegetarian, and we’d sometimes have to remind them on a dish by dish basis that we don’t eat meat or fish. I never understood why this is. There were some exceptions, and at many restaurants there were staff members who spoke good English, but the request for “a plate of rice and every single dish you have that does not contain meat or fish” rarely seemed to process. 

Conversations like the following were typical: “What about these beans? Are they vegetarian?” “Yes.” “No meat or fish?” “It has fish.” “Oh, we don’t eat fish.” “So do you want them?” “No, we don’t eat fish. We are pure vegetarian.” “You can get these greens.” “Okay. Great. Just give us all of your vegetarian dishes.” “Vegetarian…I’m not sure.” “What about the chutney?” “It has fish. Would you like it?” “No, we don’t eat fish.” “Maybe you might like the dal.” “Okay, it’s vegetarian? No fish?” “No fish. Would you like it?” “Yes. We want every vegetarian dish you have.” “Vegetarian… hmm…” And repeat this process for 10 more dishes, until at the end they ask if we want plain rice or the pulao. “Is the pulao vegetarian?” “It has pork.” “Then plain rice. We don’t eat pork. We don’t eat any meat.” Their English was good enough that I was often confused why they weren’t grasping this. People were always nice and patient, though!

My top ja and sha place was probably Kyrsoi, a bit of a walk up from Police Bazaar, and not far from Iewduh, worth the detour. Dishes we got, which they said change daily and seasonally, included banana flower salad, green dal, fried bitter gourd, spicy tree tomato chutney, and some type of green bean, served with turmeric rice. As of writing this there are only 6 google reviews, which is crazy. I can’t say it’s a great find by me, as I saw it on a Conde Nast list, recommended by the author Janice Pariat. Still, a great hidden gem from a tourist’s perspective! Packed at lunchtime.

In the heart of Police Bazaar is Trattoria, the most famous place, with a nice chatty owner. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite, and the range of dishes wasn’t as wide as some of the others, but it was very good and we ate there two or three times given the good quality and the convenience of the location. It was also the only place that offered a vegetarian platter without any confusion.

As we stayed near Don Bosco Square we usually went out near there and Laitumkrah. Our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood was a place not on Google Maps called Tribal Flavours, on Lady Veronica Lane right across from Shillong Cafe. Good selection (a mix of Khasi and Nepali) and very clean. Also in that area is Hamkom Pyrbot Jadoh Stall which was decent but for a vegetarian wouldn’t be among my top picks, with a less exciting range of dishes and I’d say more oily food. It’s quite beloved so maybe for meat eaters it is a better option. We also ate at numerous other Northeastern restaurants in this area, I’ll get to that further down.

Another favorite was Kong Lis Khasi Food, very clean, good selection, and busy at lunchtime, but far from anywhere you’d want to go and not necessarily worth the detour. I enjoyed walking through that neighborhood and seeing the many nice old houses, though.

Writing all this made me sad. I’m hardly a lover of ja or sha but I miss my ja and sha places. Good, cheap, healthy food, served quickly and with a nice atmosphere. I wish I could walk over to one right now.

A fancier step up from those, but similar in spirit, is You & I - Arts Cafe. There’s no reason to go to that neighborhood and you don’t need to go out of your way for it, but it’s highly recommended if you’re nearby. We stayed in the area for almost a week and went there four times and we’d gladly go back many more times. There’s a fairly large menu of local food, including a blackboard of daily options, but there are no English descriptions so we just told them to bring us whatever is vegetarian, which changes daily (and thankfully they understood the whole vegetarian thing, for the most part). Really good Khasi food. There are a few full time menu items that the staff doesn’t advertise as vegetarian, such as the chickpeas and the boiled potatoes (served with some local herbs and a fish chutney but you can get it without). There are some seasonal specials as well but they didn’t have any. If you aren’t vegetarian just order the whole menu. There are many juices (watered down and with added sugar, but also fermented I think, worth trying especially some of the weird local fruits) and a million teas, including some local special herbal teas. I liked the hibiscus tea served with salt and jaggery, and we also got a weird one with local twigs and roots. They have some local artwork, musical instruments, and kitchen tools decorating the place, as well as local board games. What I liked most was the local music played, none of which I was able to find online. Some really good stuff.

There aren’t really Khasi desserts, but at the markets (and some of the ja and sha places, and at You & I) they sell some rice and millet cake things, some of them fried, wrapped in leaves. There’s a whole range of them. I really liked them, but usually only fresh as they get harder as the day goes on, though some varieties last longer.

For a higher end and more experimental take on local food, I highly recommend A’Origins, a food experience from the very talented Chef Ahme. She currently doesn’t have a restaurant (she mentioned that she’s interested in opening one, but she’s still figuring out what the market would support), but she books a venue for the meals where she serves a tasting menu. I think we paid around 2800 per person (likely to go up, as everything seems to), not cheap of course, but if it’s within your budget I’d say it’s the meal to have in Shillong. It’s something you should ideally plan for before your trip as you have to book in advance and it’s subject to Ahme’s availability. 

Ahme’s food is always changing seasonally and evolving creatively. When we went there were three starters, very modern and globally inspired, but each highlighting produce of different parts of Meghalaya. There was a filo pastry stuffed with cashew butter from Garo Hills cashews, drizzled with local honey. Mushrooms foraged from the Khasi Hills were made into a mousse served on a local rice cracker. And the Jaintia Hills are known for abundant produce and particularly greens, represented by mustard leaves stuffed with banana stems. All were excellent and made great use of unique local ingredients, something I’d love to see more of in Shillong’s food scene beyond the ja and sha places. There was also the starter drink, a cocktail with local rice alcohol and passion fruit. (Hopefully this is all correct. I’m writing this a few months later from memory without notes or photos because I’m very disorganized. If I didn’t have a good memory this blog couldn’t exist, or I guess I’d just adjust accordingly and start taking more notes and pictures.)

The main course was a massive traditional meal (a mix of Khasi and Jaintia, reflecting Ahme’s mixed heritage) and is as good as any you can get, with unusual ingredients and hard to find preparations. I remember dal, pumpkin, wild mushrooms, tree tomato chutney, salad, the just-in-season tungrymbai, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting!

Wonderful food, and it was great to chat with Ahme and pick her brain about the food and culture. I learned about a lot of the different herbs they use. One interesting one I hadn’t heard of before is fish mint, which tastes exactly as the name indicates, something I realized I had a few times in prior weeks without knowing, thinking that I was accidentally served some fish chutney despite the staff insisting it was vegetarian. I suppose I like it, as long as I know what I’m getting and don’t have to wonder why my food tastes fishy.

Ahme said she is still working on the desserts, something she struggles with as she doesn’t have a sweet tooth. As such, they were tiny, a trio of bite sized desserts that play a bit with local flavors (local rice cakes with a local fruit jam, some chocolate bite, and a flakey puff pastry with local honey) and weren’t very sweet. They didn’t stand out as much as the main meal, but as someone who also doesn’t have a sweet tooth, I have no complaints. A nice way to end the meal, which was a great experience. I hope I get a chance to try Ahme’s food again and I look forward to seeing her career flourish.

For another upscale take on local food (and northeastern food more broadly), the restaurant Rynsan is great, and I’d rank it up there with my favorite restaurants in India, not just for the food but also for its uniqueness and the specificity of what it’s doing. Plus, it’s one of the handful of great upscale restaurants outside of the big cities (reasonably priced for the quality, too, most vegetarian dishes are 300-500). Reservations are definitely recommended.

It’s a mix of traditional dishes and some fun global dishes with local twists. We made an effort to go once a week when we were in Shillong, and we got to try around two-thirds of the vegetarian dishes on the menu. Almost everything was at least pretty good, and a lot of it was great. 

We really loved two starters, the putharo (steamed rice cake) sliders (which come in two varieties, mushroom or banana flower) and the avocado toast with bamboo shoot pickle (great even though there seemed to be disappointingly more pea than avocado!). 

For mains we ordered a number of curries and stews. I forget which ones, it was a pretty big menu. One with black sesame was really delicious, as was a pumpkin one. Another fun dish is the noodles with perilla seed sauce, though I only liked it rather than loving it as I thought I would. I don’t think there was anything I disliked, but the one thing that I felt was kind of boring was the Mizo bai (of which there are numerous varieties) but I’ve had Mizo bai a few times now and that’s just how it is, a boring herbal soup. I should point out that I’m not a soup fan.

My favorite dishes were actually the salads. There was a fern salad, a fresh bamboo shoot salad, and a banana flower salad. All unique, refreshing, and delicious. I never ordered more than one salad in a single meal, treating them more as sides to balance out the meal, but I don’t think it’d be wrong to go and order all three salads with some rice.

Of course the meat dishes are the specialties, you’ll have to ask them for recommendations. They have weekend specials too.

I didn’t love any desserts, which I generally found too sweet, but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. Most people should like them, and there’s some fun options. I was most excited for the panna cotta with a black sesame sauce, but my favorite ended up being the honey cake with local honey.

There is a drinks menu and my wife really enjoyed whatever locally inspired cocktail she got, I don’t remember. You can also taste the local brews here, my wife liked the milder wine or beer-like ones as opposed to the stronger ones, and she also liked the fruit wines. 

I was there in pineapple season and got a delicious fresh squeezed pineapple juice with turmeric. There’s fresh orange juice but sadly I was too early for the citrus season. Out of season they use Valencia oranges, but I’d rather go in season as the Meghalaya oranges are supposed to be great (according to the Slow Food people, Meghalaya is “one of the lands where the ancestors of all the world’s citrus fruits originated. One of these is the Khasi mandarin (Citrus reticulata): a little larger than a tennis ball, bright orange in color, hard to peel and with sweet, aromatic juice.”). For how good the produce of Meghalaya is there was sadly a shortage of restaurants and cafes that actually make fresh juice, so this was a nice treat. They also serve the kombuchas from Assam and the artisanal sodas from Mizoram, I tried both from a shop (where they’re cheaper…) and they’re great. They use fancy local brands of tea and coffee. Basically everything here is good quality. Since the cafe scene in Shillong is lacking it’s especially too bad that there’s no Rynsan cafe!

I should add that Rynsan is in a lovely setting in a very pretty old house up on the hill, and you feel like you’re dining in someone’s very nicely decorated home, eating refined home cooking. The service is good, too, and there’s a nice bookshelf with interesting local books that I didn’t see anywhere else.

I actually found out after visiting that Rynsan that the founder is a musician whose band Da Minot is my favorite in Meghalaya! (See my music section for more info.) No wonder the playlist here was unusually good! They also have many performances here, and we got to see a really good Khasi folk group called Mookhuri. Check the Instagram to see what’s on.

After the foods of Meghalaya, both traditional and modern, I’d recommend trying some of the other cuisines of the northeast (many of them clustered near Don Bosco Square and in Laitumkhrah), particularly if you don’t have the other states in your travel plans. I’d say Shillong is the best place to try them outside of their home states?

Our favorite of these was Kai Nung (near Bethany Hospital), which I’d highly recommend to everyone, but maybe not to vegetarians unless you have time for many meals as I did. Beautifully prepared food from across the northeast but I believe the focus is on Naga and Mizo food. I was never very sure. Don’t think too much and just order everything, or if you’re vegetarian, order what you can. Like the ja and sha places, they have a wide range of dishes sitting out and you point at what you want, and there are a few things you can order fresh. The first time we went, on a Saturday when they posted on Instagram that they’re serving a lot of seasonal specials, we got a fern salad, fresh bamboo shoot salad, a chana salad, dal, red rice, rice porridge, fermented soybeans as a side, and some excessively spicy chutneys and pickles (and supposedly non-alcoholic rice beer but it tasted alcoholic to me?). There were also over a dozen non-veg dishes, much of which looked great (including many vegetable dishes that had a bit of meat or fish in them), and likely much of it hard to find elsewhere. Our meal was outstanding. We went again a few weeks later but they didn’t have the fern or bamboo salad, so it was kind of boring with just dal, rice, porridge, and chutneys. So that’s why I say this is only a maybe with vegetarians. But still, a great restaurant, as I said, highly recommended to most people.

Tribal Belly (another Mizo and Naga mix) was another good place, very clean and inexpensive and with what are unusual dishes to most people, but with limited vegetarian options (I think we just got dal, veg boil, and chutneys, a meal that sadly became the norm for us when we visited Nagaland the next month). 

Thankfully Manipuri food is more vegetarian friendly. We had a great thali at the oddly empty Phunga with two different thick dal-like dishes, a delicious potato sabzi that was oddly naturally sweet, cabbage singju, and some other dishes that I’m forgetting. We also got great Manipuri snacks such as singju and some singju like chana salad at some tiny place near Don Bosco Square, packed with students. I forgot the name and I can’t find it on the map, but it was right next to a Mizo place where I got a kind of boring Mizo bai, also packed with students (mostly ordering noodles). 

I had picked out some Tibetan places to go to, but never made it to any as they were too far, and anyway I got my fix of Tibetan food earlier in the year in Nepal. I hadn’t planned to go for Shillong style Chinese food, but when out on a Sunday there aren’t a ton of options, so The Wok beckoned us with its veg chow and some Paneer Balinese or something or other. Pretty good! You should not prioritize this though.

I guess I should mention Shad Skye, the fancy cocktail bar. I’m anti-alcohol, but my wife likes this stuff for some reason, and I’ll admit it’s a cool place. Drinks are inspired by different parts of Northeast India and include a lot of interesting, high quality ingredients with in-house syrups and infusions and fresh juices and stuff like that. My wife loved the Meghalaya inspired “Living Roots” cocktail with khus roots, carrots, white chocolate, and pine wood. The non-alcoholic options weren’t as creative, but I got an exceptional non-alcoholic ginger beer. I rarely get beverages because they usually are meh but this was 10/10. I also really enjoyed the local sticky rice papad thing they serve with the drinks, though it was kind of annoying how it got stuck in my teeth. If you get a table at the window you can get some lovely views of the city (maybe make a reservation for that?). Recommended, if this is your sort of thing, I guess even highly recommended then.

While we’re on the subject, Shad Skye is at the Shillong Address hotel at Police Bazaar, probably the nicest hotel within the city, or at least the one that leans the most into the local culture. There’s cool local artwork throughout the hotel. Right across from the bar is their nice Northeastern restaurant Ishana. (You’re all aware that Ishan means northeast? I learned that when visiting the northeast of Thailand, the Isaan province.) They have a tasting menu of sorts, or rather a thali, that covers the whole region, and the prices aren’t bad for a five star hotel (I think we paid 1500 per person). The food was very good, I really liked everything, it was flavorful and healthy (good desserts, too), but it was also clearly toned down. Kind of what I expected from fancy hotel Northeastern food. Different and exotic enough to satisfy tourists who are a bit adventurous, but not quite the real deal with nothing that will risk offending people’s palates too much (at least on the vegetarian menu). Not strongly recommended, which is why I didn’t include it earlier, but I guess recommended if a) it isn’t a splurge for you, and b) you can’t make it to Rynsan for dinner. After Rynsan it might be the best place in Shillong for dinner? Remember that most of my recommendations are only open for lunch and aren’t open at all on Sunday, so this is a maybe, something to consider.

On the subject of alcohol, we also went to the town’s fancy brewery The Yeastern Civilization. It’s a nice place, I liked the decor, and they have different sections so the people who want excessively loud bad music can sit in one area and the cognitive adults can sit in a more spacious section with reasonable volume levels. They have some locally inspired drinks. My wife got pineapple cider which she really liked, she said the beers were alright. We got a few snacks, they were decent, nothing remarkable but better than what most non-local places in the city have. I almost didn’t bother writing about this, but if you’re the sort of person who wants to go to this sort of place then I guess you’ll like it.

You can also buy the local Cherrapunji gin. My wife really liked it, “light, floral, can have it almost neat with just water and ice, good for gin and tonic,” she said. I don’t even know what gin is. The store she bought it from (a big fancy place in Police Bazaar somewhere across from Trattoria) had the same fruit wines they served at Rynsan, which she liked, and that same store had the local sodas from Mizoram which I really enjoyed (and I generally dislike soda, grossly sweet and fake tasting, but these were mildly sweet and naturally flavored). 

I’m not sure how many people will benefit from hearing about this, but there’s an excellent local cheesemaker in Shillong! Pine Hills Creamery was awesome. I loved their cream cheese, feta, gouda, camembert, yogurt, kefir, and whatever else I got. Their daifukus are fun too. We usually bought their stuff at Regetta Store in Laitumkhrah, and sometimes Rap’s Department Store. I wished I knew which cafes and restaurants used their cheeses so I could have gone there. We asked but they never responded. (Maybe none did?)

You’ll probably want to eat that cheese with some bread, and thankfully there’s some great bread in Shillong. We ordered sourdough from Iingshet a few times, it was excellent (preorder + delivery only). Unfortunately we never got a chance to try anything else from them. For our more easily available bread, we got great bread from the brand Daphi's which sold at Regetta and Rap’s, and Daphi’s also makes the most delicious butter cookies.

I’m not usually the kind of person who seeks out the old bakeries when traveling in India, nor am I much of a sweets person, but it was a kind of fun thing to do in Shillong. It went with the vibe of the place. Our favorite was Moinee’s Bakery in Laitumkhrah. The lady who runs it (actually the mother of the well known thriller writer Ankush Saikia) and her helper were very sweet. Customers come in and say “Hello auntie!” And her stuff is really good. I liked the ginger cookies the best. I hadn’t heard of the Australian pastry Lamington before, for some reason it’s a Shillong thing. I quite liked it and my wife really liked it.

Make sure you get some of the local fruits! They are great. Get everything local and seasonal that they have. I really liked the pineapples (they’re very sweet and my wife loved them, but I liked the tangier pineapples of Nagaland more). Local banana varieties were really good (but you have to buy the whole bunch here, you can’t just get a few bananas). Guavas, passion fruit, starfruit, pomelo. Whatever they have, get it. (Sadly I was too early for orange season.) The highlights were some of the very unusual fruits we’ve never seen before. Sohiong was one that was in season when we were there. These are large black berries, very sour and with large seeds. Fun to try, if not ideal to eat. They made excellent juice (which a few places sold) and jam (which a few places sold but we ended up making ourselves, that was the best). Some very tiny red berries weren’t as good. I missed the sohphie season but got the most delicious preserved salted sohphie juice from the Nefsas people (check to see if they have any farmer’s markets going on). In general the produce here was great, and very neatly kept and clean in the markets. We cooked most of our meals in Shillong and had very good ingredients to work with. They also sell human sized bottle gourds. I bought one for 60 rupees to keep as decoration, it made me happy, and after a week I cooked it.

I avoided street food for gastro health reasons, but I had aloo muri and the local chana thing a few times. Good but I say not worth the risk. Not very novel for people who’ve traveled in the slightly less north and east parts of India. The most interesting street food I had was a wild apple chutney thing, though I didn’t especially like it.

There are two coffee roasters in town, both working with beans grown in Meghalaya. We were staying for a few days in the north of the city near 7000 Steps so we visited them and had a lot of fun. Very nice and smart people who were very passionate about promoting coffee from all over northeast India. They sell a range of different coffees including pourover bags, which my wife liked, and one of the blends we gifted to a friend to brew with an Aeropress was very well received. Too bad they don’t have their own cafe! 

The other local roaster is Smoky Falls which has a tiny cafe at Police Bazaar. The coffee at the cafe was hit and miss (we probably went weekly, stopping there every time we were in the area), sometimes really good and sometimes just okay. But fun to try, and you can take home some beans as well. 

If you scroll through Smoky Falls’ Instagram page you’ll see a single origin Meghalaya chocolate bar that they made. Unfortunately the guy at the cafe didn’t know what we were talking about and whoever we contacted via Instagram, Whatsapp, and email never responded to our multiple messages asking if they were selling any bars, or if they had any extra sitting around for some chocolate enthusiasts to try. Meghalaya does grow some cacao and from what I was told by a person we randomly met who is involved in the state’s agricultural department, a big harvest will be ready in a few years and they’re still figuring out what to do with it. To test it out they gave some to Smoky Falls to make some sample bars. Would be cool to try one day!

You can also buy local teas. I’m not really a tea person and don’t know what I’m talking about, but I really liked the very floral and fragrant oolong tea from Urlong. Their black tea mixed with local herbs seemed good to my uninformed palate, as did the green tea from Lakyrsiew, which is apparently the most premium brand. I got both at Regetta store.

Here’s a good article about tea in Meghalaya, for those interested. “The story goes that when the East India Company was looking for regions suitable for tea-growing in India, they did home in on Shillong. But it did not become a tea area since the Khasi ruler insisted no migrants would work in his land. And tea cultivation is labour intensive.”

Not sure if any people reading this are coming to Shillong to work remotely and want to know which cafes to work from, but anyway the cafes are fun to hang out in and people watch. The cafe scene in Shillong isn't great, not just compared to the big cities but also to Imphal, Dimapur, and Kohima, where I went after Shillong. Shouldn’t Shillong be at least as happening as these poorer places that have less tourism and greater and more recent social/political conflicts? What’s the deal? (Though I should note that "poorer" is hard to define as Nagaland's GDP per capita is higher than Meghalaya's and I can't find data for the cities, but Shillong is clearly better developed than anywhere in Nagaland.) Since we work from cafes several times a week, we went to many of them, but only a few stood out. Unfortunately none of the better places used the local coffee. Listed in order of preference (and almost all around Don Bosco Square/Laitumkhrah): Press Cafe (definitely the nicest, large, good space, good quality coffee, decent food, nice owner), Enchante Tea Room (small but cozy, very nice tea selection, decent food), Secret Story (we stayed right underneath it so went here almost every day, the f&b is unremarkable but it’s a nice, large space, I liked sitting by the window), Baking Leaven (small but good quality coffee and decent baked stuff, okay seating but I like hanging out here outside whenever people weren’t smoking), Cherry Bean (maybe the only nice place around Police Bazaar, so-so coffee but nice space and decent food), The Grub (no wi-fi but a lot of seating on multiple floors, I liked the seats that give you a view of the street, meh coffee but good teas from the Manipur brand Dwellers and good baked goods). Since my wife really likes coffee, I’ll add Pearls Cafe (they surprisingly use the high quality and hard to find Bili-Hu coffee, and they have sohiong ice cream), Click Cafe (too small and not ideal seating, but good coffee), and Fika (a small truck setup, fun and good quality, and around the corner is a fried chicken place that has sohiong juice in the season).

Cinema 

First a brief rundown of the theaters, and then some quick notes on Khasi and even some Garo films. I haven’t seen any but a few are supposed to be very good.

I didn’t get a chance to see any movies in Shillong, but there are two theaters that are currently running, and I visited both from the outside. Neither are architectural marvels but it made me happy seeing them, especially the Bijou which shows Khasi movies. There are two others that I know of in military areas, I’m not sure if they are open to the public or not.

The single screen Bijou Cinema at Police Bazaar shows Khasi movies as well as big Hindi movies. It’s fun to walk into the lobby to see all of the posters for wacky looking Khasi movies. I wanted to buy a ticket and watch a Khasi movie even if just for ten minutes, but the google reviews turned me off from going inside without a hazmat suit. 

The two-screen Anjalee Cinema is a more middle class theater, showing a mix of Hollywood and Hindi films. Looks decent enough. I wanted to watch something there but pretty much nothing opened that I wanted to see, and what I did want to see I felt wouldn’t be done justice by the smallish and likely not great screens.

I knew of a few others that closed. I tried tracking down the Payal Cinema but it was demolished. The Gold Cinema building is still standing though, with some cafes and shops in the same complex. I took a photo of what was once the counter.

Here’s a great read on the cinemas of Shillong (and Guwahati), founded by the first Marwari family in Shillong. The Kelvin in Shillong has burnt down, and sadly I can’t even find a picture, but the Anjalee and Bijou that remain today were also part of the same group.

I had fun watching some trailers for the mostly very bad looking Khasi movies that were playing. The posters amused me as well. It seemed like there were a few new Khasi releases a month. I didn’t find anything interesting to read about the industry. I’d like to know the economics of it, and if there are any hidden gems. Evidently it isn’t one of India’s great regional industries, which isn’t surprising considering it’s a poor state with a small population split between several languages, but I wouldn’t mind watching some of these. Most looked laughably bad, but charmingly so, and some had a grimy appeal to them.

The one Khasi director whose works actually look good is Pradip Kurbah. His film Iewduh often gets cited as the best Khasi film. A low key drama about the people who work and shop at Shillong’s great local market. His earlier political action thriller Ri:  Homeland of Uncertainty looks very different and I think pretty cool. The romantic Onaatah, which he made in between, looks dull. I plan to watch all three one day. 

The one other Khasi film I’ve heard good things about is Lorni - The Flaneur. Shillong noir! I think it looks kinda hokey, but I like what it’s going for and I’ll definitely watch it one day. Here’s a very positive review from Baradwaj Rangan, one of my favorite critics. It’s the only feature from writer/director Wanphrang Diengdoh (also a musician, I wrote briefly about him in the music post, including a collaboration album that began as the soundtrack for the film) but he also has documentaries, including a “Khasi Identity Trilogy” which I’d love to watch, apparently streaming on an app called Hello Meghalaya. Here’s a trailer, not especially well edited, but it looks super interesting.

That’s it for Khasi films, but the state’s most renowned filmmaker is probably Dominic Megam Sangma who has had some success at film festivals with his Garo films. I’ve heard great things about Rapture, his second feature. His debut Ma.Ama looks good as well, if not as accomplished and also kinda boring.

There’s also Nicholas Kharkongor, a Khasi from Shillong who has written and directed some indie films, though none within the state. Mantra and Axone both look pretty good, and Axone in particular is probably the highest profile film yet about people from Northeast India.

By the way, the first ever Khasi film is Ka Synjuk Ri ki Laiphew Syiem (1981) by Hamlet Bareh, who is a well known scholar of Khasi culture and is the first Khasi to get a PhD. Unfortunately I can’t find any information or clips from the film, but it did screen at a film festival in Shillong in 2023.

Another classic of Khasi cinema is Manik Raitong (1984), based on the very famous Khasi legend (which I wrote about in my books section). I found some clips here. I’d love to see a restoration.

And there’s some cool old footage of Shillong! Here’s a video from 1936, and another from 1932 is lower quality but still interesting with its focus on Iewduh. Some footage from the 90s is kinda interesting because it mostly looks the same.

I didn’t watch any of the documentaries, though I probably should have. The six part Songs to Live By sounds good.