The amazing living root bridges of Meghalaya

A natural man-made wonder with no parallels anywhere

Every Indian learns early at school about the rainiest place on earth, being at the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya.  

Meghalaya, which has Mawynsram and Cheerapunji, the two rainiest places globally, receives copious rainfall for five months a year, supporting forested mountains and gushing streams. Earlier tourists went to Meghalaya mostly to experience its heavy monsoon rains. However, they have had a new attraction in recent years, the state’s living root bridges. These quaint structures have gained so much attention that most tourist descriptions of Meghalaya now include content and pictures of its living root bridges.

A living root bridge is a structure overflowing water that people make by using roots of the Indian rubber plant or Ficus elastica. Such bridges have only the tree roots or other materials in their structure and help people cross rivers and streams in the southeastern part of Meghalaya. Several villages in the West Jaintia Hills and East Khasi Hills districts of Meghalaya have living root bridges. In addition, people at Nagaland and the Javan and Sumatran islands make living root bridges.

The antiquity of living root bridges is hoary. Living root bridges could survive floods and thunderstorms, whereas bridges of other materials would rot or decay due to the region’s climate of high rainfall and humidity. People at Meghalaya chose or grew Indian rubber plants on the two sides of water to use the roots for making a living root bridge. These rubber plant root bridges not only survived rains but thrived and strengthened over the years and benefited from maintenance by villagers living nearby.

There is no single type, shape, or size of Meghalaya’s living root bridges. Instead, each is unique as its makers fashion it out of tree roots. The two types of such bridges are based on roots without support or natural material scaffolding of bamboo or tree trunks.

Close-up of a root bridge

Fully natural living root bridges: Some living root bridges makers use no other material and gently pull, tie and twist roots of trees on opposite sides of the water to create a bridge. 

A bridge could be of roots of one tree or two trees on opposite water banks.

Living root bridge supported by scaffolding: In these types of bridges, the people who make them guide the roots over bamboo or wooden frame, which perishes over time, leaving the root. Some of the bridges of Meghalaya also have roots growing over steel bridges, with the bridge and the root supporting each other. However, the living root bridges makers use their ingenuity while making such structures and do not have any common guidebook or use the same material across Meghalaya.

Areca stem bridges: These bridges resemble a regular human-made bridge with semicircular areca stems providing the structure in which the living roots grow from one bank of a stream or river to the other. The bridge makers guide the roots to the soil they grow after reaching the far end. The areca stem hollows protect the roots of the rubber plant and provide nutrition. Makers of such bridges strengthen it with sticks and stone, which become part of the living root bridge over decades.

Indian rubber plants are from the Moraceae plant family, which also has the banyan and peepul trees. 

A root bridge

Like other family members, Indian rubber plants generate aerial roots that reach the soil and enter it to draw nutrition and become stem-like over time. When rubber plant roots in air touch soil, they shorten and thicken by creating tension wood due to the soil’s hardness. The tension wood in roots presses other roots in its vicinity resulting in inosculation by which roots intertwine and grow together. In living root bridges, the constant movement of people on it generates secondary roots, which also inosculate with the older roots strengthening the bridges. The bridges with inosculated roots become strong and support the structure for decades, if not centuries.

As Meghalaya’s living root bridges have no template, they have features that the local villagers fancy. For example, such bridges may have handrails. The bridges also use common engineering designs such as suspension bridges, arch bridges, beam-supported bridges, and cable bridges.

Tiers and lanes: Meghalaya’s living root bridges include those with one or two decks, with some likely to have three tiers. The two-tier bridge’s makers made the upper tier to deal with rising water levels from the river below, which may inundate the lower level. In addition, some bridges have two lanes. The living root bridges makers craft bridges like engineers using steel and concrete.

A double-decker root bridge

Living root bridges comprise the roots and epiphytic vegetation such as moss and lichens, which the humid growing environment encourages. A living root bridge is a complete ecosystem as it supports insects, birds, ferns, and other vegetation. The prefix’ living’ for root bridges thus refers to the roots in it being alive and the bridge supporting a variety of living forms within its structure. 

Living root bridges’ life span is directly linked to the tree’s health, whose roots they contain and connect spans from 20 to 250 feet. People may take a few decades to make a functional living root bridge as the rubber plants they grow or choose must develop aerial roots which form the bridge’s core. Remarkably, a working living root bridge can support the weight of up to fifty adults.

Most of them were well-maintained by individuals, families, or village communities, who regularly remove mosses on the bridges and trim and wind the roots to improve their strength. As a result, some of the bridges may be one or two centuries old, while others are recent and date back to the twenty-first century when tourist arrivals have encouraged the creation of new bridges.

There are no records for the life span of Meghalaya’s living root bridges though some of them could be even five centuries old. In the nineteenth century, they came into public attention when a Britisher first wrote about them.

The bridges withstand floods and storms of Meghalaya, the abode of clouds, which has many villages which you can only reach by crossing numerous water bodies.  

Traveling to Meghalaya’s living root bridges is an enthralling experience as most such bridges are in remote villages, which you must access by foot. However, Meghalaya has a basic tourist infrastructure, and you can take a vehicle to the motorable part of the mountainous area you are visiting. 

Visits to living root bridges involve treks through forest trails or numerous steep steps, after which you reach the village having one or more living root bridges. The season before or after the monsoon is best to go to Meghalaya to see the living root bridges when there is no rain and the associated challenges of traveling by foot there.