The Religion of an Indian Tribe

JUST about a hundred years ago, in the first week of January 1852, John Campbell, the brave and sympathetic officer who persuaded the Konds to abandon human sacrifice, pitched his camp at Godairy, a large village on the banks of the ‘Bangsadara’ (Vamsadhara) River. ‘At this place’, he says, ‘I first came in contact with the Sourah race. They are of a fairer complexion, and their features, resembling the Gentoos of the plains, have a better expression than those of the Konds. They speak a different dialect, are less dissipated in their habits, and consequently more athletic in their persons, which they adorn with beads and bangles; this custom, however, is more common with the women than with the men. Their arms are the battle-axe, bow and arrow, though a few have matchlocks. They are professed thieves and plunderers, and are the terror of the inhabitants of the plains. They readily promised, however, to have nothing to do with the Meriah rite of their Kond neighbours, agreeing to refrain from it ‘even as spectators’.1

Anthropology is the poorer for the fact that Campbell did not make his way up into the Saora hills, for he was an accurate observer and his notes on the condition of the tribe at that time would have been invaluable. Another officer, S. C. Macpherson, in a report which he wrote on the Konds in 1841, says that he proposed ‘on a future oc- casion to submit the results of his enquiries respecting the “Sourah” race, the only other Hill people of Orissa with respect to which he possessed any information’. In view of Macpherson’s account of Kond theology, which has misled historians of religion for over a century, anthropologists may perhaps be thankful that this writer did not carry out his ambition.

Perhaps the earliest European to come into close contact with the Saoras was G. E. Russell, a member of the Madras Board of Re- venue. In 1832, the disturbances in the Vizagapatam District and the Parlakimidi Taluk of Ganjam District were so serious that Russell was appointed Special Commissioner with very wide powers to estab- lish law and order in the area. It was he who in 1836 discovered the

 1  J. Campbell, A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan (London, 1864), p. 203.

       2. C. Macpherson, Report on the Konds (1841, reprinted Madras,  1863).

practice of human sacrifice among the Konds. He had to deal with the Hill Saoras in rebellion, and at one time had no fewer than two hundred in custody. His notes upon them, though tantalizingly few, are of great interest.

In 1862, the Rev. William Taylor published a Catalogue Raisonné of the manuscripts in the Government Library at Madras. Among these were some Telugu documents, bound in ‘a small quarto, of medium thickness, much damaged’, which gave an account of the Konds, and the Maliya Savaralu and Conda Savaralu; they are un- dated, but some must go back at least to 1838, when Taylor started his researches. The Maliya Savaralu, who are described as being in the ‘proximate neighbourhood’ of Vizagapatam, Kimedi and Ganjam, and as being less ‘civilized’ than the Conda Savaralu, are undoubtedly our Hill Saoras. The document describes them as ‘a people with small eyes, noses, ears, and very large faces. Their hair is thickly matted together. They bind either a cord, or a narrow bit of cloth around their head; and in it stick the feather of a stork, or of a peacock, and also wild flowers, found in the forests. They go about in the high winds, and hot sunshine, without inconvenience. They sleep on beds formed of mountain-stones. Their skin is as hard as the skin of the large guana- lizard. They build houses over mountain-torrents, previously throwing trees across the chasms; and these houses are in the midst of forests of fifty, or more, miles in extent.’ They are regarded as essentially independent, and more than ready to attack when provoked. The Conda Savaralu are equally warlike, and they ‘do not regard the wound of a musket ball, as they have a remedy for it; they are afraid only of a cannon ball; for which, of course, they have no remedy’.

In the autumn of 1870, the geologist Ball accompanied a Calcutta surgeon, Dr Palmer, in search of a sanatorium which the unique natural advantages of the Mahendra Hill seemed likely to supply. It was here, in the last week of September, that the party first encoun- tered Saoras, known previously as ‘a wild intractable race’ but by that date ‘perfectly docile’. In appearance Ball found the Saoras small but wiry, often very dark in colour, sometimes quite black. “Their hair is generally tied in a top-knot, and sometimes it is cut short over the forehead, two long locks being permitted to hang over the ears. A few individuals have frizzled shocks, with which no such arrangement is attempted. Most of the men have small square beards.’ They made little display of their weapons and had few personal ornaments.

Unhappily, although another member of the party, a Captain Murray, took photographs of groups of Saoras, they were not reproduced by Ball in his book Jungle Life in India (London, 1880), from which the above account is taken.

In 1881-2, Major-General Cunningham, then Director-General of the Archeological Survey, made a long tour of the Central Provinces and in the course of his report (which forms Vol. XVII of the Archeological Survey reports) devotes twenty-six pages to a discussion of the history and dispersion of the Saoras. He himself was personally acquainted only with the western Saoras, but he has a few notes on our Hill Saoras, and refers to a visit paid by Mr J. D. Beglar to Ganjam in 1875.

Another early writer, whose elegant and romantic pen was well fitted to describe this splendid people and their lovely hills, was Colonel E. T. Dalton. But he has only scattered references to the Saoras in his great Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872), and the Saoras he met were either Bendkars or the near-Bhuiya Saoras of Keonjhar. His travels never led him as far as the Ganjam and Koraput hills.

It is to Mr Fred Fawcett, Superintendent of Police, that we owe our first detailed account of the Saoras of Ganjam District (which was then in the Madras Presidency) to which he was posted in the course of his duties in 1887. Fawcett was a careful and accurate ob- server (even if in the fashion of his time he was rather too apt to describe prayers and incantations which he could not understand as ‘gibberish”), and he has also given us valuable notes on the Muppans, the Kondyamkottai Maravars and the Nayars of Malabar. He pre- sented his Saora material in the form of a lecture to the Anthropolo- gical Society of Bombay in 1888. It is interesting to note that at the date of Fawcett’s lecture this Society had no fewer than 300 ordinary members and 16 honorary and corresponding members. The President was R. C. Temple, whose Legends of the Punjab was in course of publi- cation. J. M. Campbell and H. H. Risley were among the Vice-Presi- dents, and members of Council included K. R. Cama, the Rev. D. Mackichan, K. T. Telang, Sir W. Wedderburn and J. J. Modi. Among the subjects then engaging the attention of anthropologists in India were A Report on the Hairy Man of Burma, Indian Necromancy, Embalming in Ancient India, the Night Demon, Demonolatry in Southern India (by an Anglican Bishop), the Evil Eye among the Modern Persians, and Personal Vows with Respect to Sexual Absti- nence. Malinowski was t..en a child of three.

Fawcett’s paper was printed in the Journal of the Society (Vol. I, No. 4, 1888) and since it is the work of a man who mixed freely with the people and knew many individuals as personal friends, it is of exceptional value. Much of the material was used by Thurston, some- times slightly misquoted, in his section on the ‘Savaras’ in his Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras, 1909). Risley, in his Tribes and Castes of Bengal (Calcutta, 1891), has a few pages on the ‘Savars’, but only a line or two on the branch of the tribe which lived ‘near Mahendragiri in Ganjam’. The Saoras of his account are, quite properly, those of what was then called Bengal. So too, Russell and Hira Lal, in their Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India which is dated 1916 but contains material collected many years pre- viously, describe an entirely different branch of the tribe with which the Hill Saoras of this book have nothing in common.

‘Our’ Saoras, as perhaps we may call them, are the ‘Savaras’ of Thurston who, although he does not seem to have had any first-hand acquaintance with the tribe, managed to compile a valuable account from the reports of Fawcett, the Gazetteers and one Mr G. V. Rama- murti Pantalu.

Thurston does not tell us anything about this author, and in his own books Ramamurti describes himself modestly as ‘a retired teacher of Parlakimidi’. He was in fact a man of some scholarship, a great capacity for controversy-he fought Government on the merits of a phonetic script for schools and assailed the Maharaja of Parlakimidi over the amalgamation of his zamindari with Orissa-and above all a devoted affection for the Saoras of Ganjam. He gave over thirty years of his life to studying the tribe and its language, and published. a Manual of the So:ra (or Savara) Language (Madras, 1931) and a Sora-English Dictionary (Madras, 1938). I must here acknowledge my very great debt to Ramamurti’s linguistic studies.

From 1938 onwards, Ramamurti’s son, G. V. Sitapati Pantalu, published a series of articles on ‘The Soras and their Country’ in the Journal of the Andhra Historical Research Society. Sitapati’s researches were conducted mainly in the area round Serango-both he and his father were close friends of the Canadian missionaries there and Sitapati helped one of them, Miss A. C. M. Munro, to translate the Gospels into Saora. Sitapati also published an article on Saora Musical Instruments in the Bulletin d’Ethnographie du Trocadero, No. 5 (Paris, 1933), a rather charming paper on ‘Sora Songs and Poetry’, and

collaborated with Miss Munro in some notes for the Census Report of 1931. Although I cannot always follow Sitapati in his conclusions and I suspect that he relied a little too much on information given him by schoolmasters and other semi-educated informants, I found his account of the Saoras stimulating and its enthusiasm for the people he described infectious.

Other work on the Saoras has been of an incidental character. Miss Munro wrote an article on ‘S’Ora (Savara) Folk-Lore’ in Man in India, Vol. X (1930). Baron E. von Eikstedt visited the Gumma and Serango Muttas for about three weeks in 1927, and wrote two short papers on the tribe.1 Dr J. H. Hutton and Mr M. W. M. Yeatts contributed very short notes to the Census Reports of 1931.

When I began my investigations among the Saoras in 1944 I had, therefore, certain guide-posts to put me on my way. During the suc ceeding seven years I visited all the chief Hill Saora villages, even those far to the north where their country merges into that of the Konds. I have had the good fortune to witness nearly all the cere- monies described in this book; of the rest I obtained trustworthy accounts which were checked by several informants. And at many ceremonies, particularly the funerary rites and sacrifices designed to heal the sick, I assisted over and over again.

Where this was possible, I was able on the first occasion to give my attention to observing and recording what the shamans were doing; on subsequent occasions to overhear and to record what they were saying. I took down the incantations, prayers and trance- dialogues directly, usually squatting on the floor as near as possible to the officiating shaman, who invariably ignored my presence. The constant repetitions made this task easier, even if more tedious, than it sounds, and I would like to emphasize that these transcriptions are an exact and literal translation of what I heard-with this exception, that I have not included all the proper names and the repetitions.

Another fruitful source of information was the recording of the life-histories of shamans and other religious functionaries. Many of these are keen theologians and like nothing better than to describe their experiences and discuss the points of doctrine that arise from them. The study of myths, ikons and the material apparatus of ritual

provided a mass of material which it was possible to check against the information gained in conversation.

My introduction to the Saoras was facilitated by the late Mr J. W. Nicholson, C.I.E., I.F.S., then Conservator of Forests, and mem- bers of his staff, in particular Mr M. Riazuddin who, with Mrs Riazuddin, was my generous host in Parlakimidi and whose guidance was invaluable to a stranger making his way through unknown forests for the first time.

On some of my tours I had the company of Mr Shamrao Hivale, whose genial presence created an atmosphere of friendliness which revealed many secrets, and on others that of Mr D. V. Sassoon, the most delightful of field-companions. On one occasion I was accom- panied by Mr Asutosh Bhattacharyya, on another by Mr Sachin Roy, both of the Department of Anthropology: to the first I owe a deeper knowledge of the Hindu background to tribal life in India, to the second I am indebted for many acts of kindness.

My friend Mr Saurindranath Roy, of the National Archives of India, placed his scholarship and time unreservedly at my disposal. I am especially grateful to him, as well as to Mr B. S. Kesavan of the National Library and to Mr Mukherjea of the Library of the Depart- ment of Anthropology for providing me with books and verifying references for me when I was in the field. My personal staff was labor- ious and faithful as ever. I cannot overpraise the work of my chief assistant, Mr Sundarlal Narmada Prasad. He quickly obtained a mastery of the Oriya language and a considerable knowledge of Saora. He managed the camp, arranged supplies, nursed me when I was ill, made friends with everyone, and recorded a great deal of information. He was ubiquitous and indispensable. His tact, his affec- tion and his knowledge made a great appeal to the Saoras, and it was widely believed that he was a Saora boy whom I had adopted many years ago and who had now returned to visit his old tribe. Sunderlal’s remarkable versatility may be gathered from the fact that similar legends have made him in turn a Muria, a Gadaba and a Bondo.

‘I confess’, says Ramamurti, author of the Saora Dictionary, ‘that I found it extremely difficult to learn Saora, and I have spent more than thirty years to understand some of the main features of the language.’ Although I was able to conduct simple conversations and knew enough to check the work of translation. I uld not dispense with interpreters, but I was fortunate in being able to engage the

services of three men who were quite first-rate, each in his own way, and after careful training became expert. The first of these was Somra, an elderly Saora, husband of a famous shamanin, who had long served the Forest Department and had retired. Intelligent, tactful, informative, he was an ideal interpreter.

Equally good was Gandorbo, a Dom from Serango, who had lived his entire life in contact with the Saoras. He was a friendly and charm- ing person, good-natured to a fault, and a careful and assiduous worker. Saoripani, another Dom but from Pottasingi, was also a first- rate translator.

I must not forget the little group of hard-worked and often for- gotten camp-assistants. In the early days I had as cook a Goan named Fero, who had once provided banquets for the Palace at Jagdalpur and had fallen on evil days; he proved a master of the haute cuisine in the remotest villages, and I have never eaten so well since. Later I had Bhajan, a Pardhan of Patangarh, who was always cheerful and witty, and at various other times Haricharan, Phaggu, Jailal and Chakropani. They all behaved admirably in camp and helped to make what was always an arduous life comparatively easy and comfortable.

A grant from Merton College materially assisted the field-work for this book in its early stages. Later the generosity of the Sir D. J. Tata Trust, the J. R. D. Tata Trust and my friend Mr J. P. Patel helped to make the work possible. For part of the time I was engaged as Anthropologist to the Government of Orissa, part as Deputy Director of the Department of Anthropology in the Government of India; but most of my tours were in my private capacity.

Part of Chapter X appeared as an article ‘The Saora Pictographs’ in Marg, Vol. II, No. 3. Chapter V is a revised version of an article, ‘The Saora Priestess’, which has appeared in the Bulletin of the Depart- ment of Anthropology. Some of the drawings and photographs in my The Tribal Art of Middle India will serve to illustrate the themes of this book. The full text of the myths will be found in my Myths of Middle India and Tribal Myths of Orissa.