Introduction
The Meriah Song
Appeasement of the Spirit of the Dead
Lamentation for the Dead
Invocation to Goddess Chitagudi
Sloka to Exorcise Diseases
On This Sacred Soil of Ancestors
For the Dead Ancestors
I Offer you my Black Fowl
Friends and Brothers
Salt Business Fish Business
Voices Get Tired
The Thorned Bamboo
Come You All Snakes and Frogs
Intimacy, Ring to the Ear
The Siali Creeper
The Slender Beloved
A Rare Commodity
The Beautiful Narangi
The Sun Beats
The Turmeric Rain
I Float as the Eagle
Love, Roots Grown into...
The Anklets Jingle
If I Pinch Your Cheeks
Crown on the Head, Nose-ring on the Nose
Earth Sun Moon Be Witness
The White-haired Dhangda and the Dhangdi
of Empty Body
Mango Grove and the Sound of Water
Thieves from the Other Village
Tassels in the Wind
Saw Her on some Hill-Slope
You alone are Happiness
Those Lusty Young Men
Bringing along the Yams
Stepping down from the Marriage Altar
Sprinkling Turmeric Water
Introduction
Jadur Songs
Karam Songs
Jarga Songs
Japi Songs
Jatara Songs
Gena Songs
Adandi Songs
Introduction
Bakhens: The Ritual Invocation Songs of the Santals
Binti: The Song of Creation Myth
Kudums: The Santali Riddles
Hital
Love Songs
Marriage Songs
Baha Songs
Songs of Death
Miscellaneous Songs
Introduction
Come and Entwine Me, Delicate Pumpkin Creeper
My Sweet Grief
And He Did Not Dance
Come, My Rhythmic Fury
Words without Horizon
Emptiness
Sweet Agony
Bangles of Many-splendoured Rainbows
You are the Rain, Fill Me Up
In the Dance-hall of the Earth
Introduction
Mage Parab
Baha
Marriage
Love
Introduction
Sarhul
Karam
Jadur
Jatra
Marriage
Songs of the Fields
Introduction
Siran Uge: The Magician's Song
The Peacock Dances
The Empty House
Sweet-Potato Creepers
Useless as Dimiri Flower
O Spirit of the Hills
We are the Marat Leaves
White as a Crane
The Roads of Malkangiri
Appendices
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
Singing is older than speech. In singing the human being has always expressed his relatedness with his forces, with the totality of life. In his speech he expresses his relationship to things. Song is the primeval communion of all the ancient amicable-inimical closeness of nature whose pulse educated its rhythms. Speech is acquired separation ... Song is magic.
-MARTIN BUBER, Introduction to Kalevala
Men, patterns of moving dust, loving those familiar limbs, learned to think lovely curves, so tenderly shaped to receive and give, closed their long eyes, their things cooled in the tribal water and cooled their dreams in unending memory, endless year.
-FREDERIC PROKOSCK: Daybreak
The madal beats
Somewhere there, hidden.
The madal’s rhythmic
Continuous beat
Proclaims itself.
Is it not ashamed
To beat like this
Like a mad throbbing heart?
-A Munda song
In his "Appreciation" to Dennis Tedlock's Finding the Centre: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, Jerome Rothenberg observed:
Tedlock is an anthropologist who becomes a poet. By doing so he brings together two sets of concern with the tribal and "primitive" in human experience. The first - an older, nearly by-passed direction in anthropology - sees primitive cultures not as mere targets for objective study, but as series of communally structured and ecologically sound models, from which to learn something about the reorganization of society and the revitalization of life and thought. The second comes from the artistic avant garde (and behind or beside it, the political one), not in its orientation towards the future but in the parallel sense that it's rediscovering and keeping alive the oldest real traditions of man in poetry and art.
I have found in this the confirmation of a faith and concern which I have always held very dear. For more than a decade now I have had the opportunity of working among and knowing intimately tribal communities like the Mundas, the Oraons and the Santals and a number of other tribal groups inhabiting the hilly and jungle areas of Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal. As a Deputy Commissioner in two northern districts of Odisha, Mayurbhanj and Sundargarh, I had an opportunity to work among the Mundas, Oraons, Santals and Hos of Odisha between 1968 and 1972 and picked up their language. Later, on a two-year sabbatical on a Homi Bhabha Fellowship during 1975-77, I returned to the area for a more intense and intimate contact and study. I have roamed the hills and forests where these tribes live, stayed in their villages and participated in the rhythm of life in their villages. I have been moved by the intense and passionate character of their community life and the songs and dances that punctuate it. In my own way, I have tried to make myself an integral part of this rhythm. I have been lucky to have been admitted not only into performances of songs and dances, and other normal communal functions, but also to that strictly ritualistic and invocatory function to which outsiders are normally not admitted. I am grateful for the love and affection with which I was accepted into their community life and feel privileged to have been permitted to watch and participate in the ritual of even those more exclusive religious functions.
In this anthology are presented a selection from the oral poetry of some tribal groups of Eastern India. I have tried to present as large a variety of the oral song-poems as possible, ranging over subjects from love to death, from riddles to sanctified mantras, songs for social occasions as well as for ritual occasions. Ideally, one would have liked to present in translation the poetry of more tribes and more poetry from each of them and the present selection is only a small step in that direction. This anthology uses some materials previously published in the six anthologies of tribal poetry I have translated and edited earlier but a sizeable volume of fresh materials has been added.
The primitive poem or song is part of a complex of communal activity, which includes singing, dancing, religious celebration and celebration of social occasions. The songs, the dances and the relevant festivities are intimately and integrally related. For celebrating each important religious festival or socio-religious ceremony, the tribal’s have an appropriate set of songs and dances. It is necessary to view these poem-songs as part of such a total communal activity, which is not true of modern poetry.
The difficulties of recording and translating the songs are numerous. Firstly, the tribal is somewhat shy and withdrawn, and unless he is first taken into confidence, it is very difficult to get anything out of him, whether it is a song, a tale, or information. And you need all the patience in the world, the patience of a bird-watcher, not to try and force the pace. Slowly, by stages, by the intimacy and openness of your behavior and action, you can gain his confidence. And once you have crossed that threshold and are accepted you find him so different: so open, hospitable, friendly and intimate! The songs were collected partly by recording them at the time of actual celebration and partly by manually taking them down from the singers. There was no collection of songs in a simulated celebration. In this work, the assistance of local people and local tribal leaders was invaluable. Secondly, often the younger generation of singers are not acquainted with the background to many songs and Primitive Poetry as Love and Prayer the exact meanings of a large body of allusions, references and images which occur in them. It is only the singers of the old generation who know these and can also isolate the later additions or improvisations in an otherwise traditional song. Above all there is the question of language. Most tribal languages are unwritten: conventional from the point of view of usage but fresh and inventive. They are also highly musical. They contain a large number of symbols. It is necessary to retain in translation as much as possible of the symbolism as it is the essence of poetry. It is also necessary to preserve, as far as possible, the line-structure of the original. A lot of the music of the original, however, is bound to be lost for obvious reasons. The alliteration, the musical endings, the "meaningless" refrains can scarcely be retained. Often the same sets of songs were recorded in different villages to compare variations in structure, substance and style. Slight differences in the same group or groups of songs were noticed only when one moved a considerable distance away in a region or from near the urban centres to the interior villages. This was only natural and to be expected. The tribal communities are undergoing rapid socio-economic transformation and song-structures and song themes can't remain completely isolated from these developments.
The recognised performers remember the songs very well, particularly when they happen to be of the older generation. Most of the songs circulate by the process of oral transmission and their roots lie buried deep in the group-life of the tribes. There are no fixed song-makers and no attempt is made to take credit for having discovered or improvised any song. Most of the songs have come down from generations and performers learn them from their elders. The continuity of the old tradition is thus maintained.
It is true that, over the years, particular songs tend to get slightly altered. This, however, does not happen by any conscious design. While reciting the songs, one or more of the performers may suddenly introduce a new phrase or a single word or line which is generally appropriate to that song and it may catch on. The overall picture, however, is one of stability in the text and the formal structure of the songs does not change violently with time.
The poems or songs often accompany dances. The recitation of the words and the movement of the body are the two co-ordinates of the graph of socio-religious and ritual action which they define and describe. Curt Sachs, the noted authority on primitive dance, has said that, for the primitive, dance was a means of control over the surroundings. This endeavour to gain control over nature expressed itself through a psychological process of sympathetic transcreation. And the transcreation was a combination of bodily gestures, verbal symbolism and prescribed ritual action. For example, the Sarhul festival of the Mundas is partly a vegetation ceremony and also partly a fecundity ceremony. The ceremonial bath, the stacking of rice in baskets and the offering of rice beer to the village ancestors and using some of this rice for sowing is associated with fertility. It is thus an invocation for good and abundant crops. It is also an invocation for more members in the tribe, for more sons and daughters. The Sarhul procession is taken out to the village sarna, the village deity. The festival is celebrated by liberal drinking and dancing. The pattern of dancing thus gets integrally related to the text and meaning of the song and the rituals accompanying it.
The anonymity of the song-makers is a notable phenomenon in primitive society. The absence of a written language makes the process of transmission of the songs with their complex structure of social and communal association an amazing phenomenon. For the arrangement of words, the stylistic pattern and the grouping of images remain vitally unchanged over the years and this is largely because of this unwritten, oral character. "Anonymity in the present structure of society", said Robert Graves, "usually implies that the author is ashamed of his authorship or afraid of the consequences if he reveals himself; but in a primitive society, it is due to just the carelessness about the author's name.” This kind of carelessness is inherent in the primitive mind for what is important for him is the song and not the song-maker. To that extent he can be compared to the unknown artists, painters and sculptors who, in Konarka, in Khajuraho and all the world over, in sculpture, architecture and painting, have not left behind their names even while enriching the common heritage of mankind. The primitive mind does not know the emphasis on the ego, the "conceit" of the author which the twentieth century has brought so much to the forefront. The lack of any personal aspiration and ambition for name and fame makes these songs so much more genuine and authentic. The songs remain; the emotions they convey remain for the creator's sons and daughters, and their offspring after them. What more could the primitive singer wish for himself !
As I look back, I recollect wistfully how it all began, this involvement in the oral poetry of the tribes. It was a sparkling moonlit night in 1969 and the landscape, a lonely tribal village of Odisha lost in the midst of dense forests: the night of the full-moon in the month of Pous (corresponding to January) and one of the most important festivals of the Mundas. The lonely village street near the akhra was gradually filling up with the villagers. In groups they came, boys and girls, old men and women, dressed for the dance, humming tunes in high spirits. It was no longer the same village I had seen in the day-time - featureless, squalid and ordinary. It had been transformed by the magic touch of moonlight and the exuberance of spirit all around. They danced and they sang. Ancient, timeless songs. Old as the neighbouring hills, ancient as the moon. There were sprinklings of improvisations, and interpolations from the new world growing up around them: the world of development blocks, jeeps, village-level workers of government, fertilisers, insecticides and birth-control pills. The refrain line was "spring has come” and the following stanza's first lines were, in tune with spring's advent, "the koel has come", "the mahul and salflowers have come". But in no time they added on to these traditional lines others such as, "the babus have come", "the jeeps have come", etc. But these were mostly from the dancers of the younger generation. An old tribal sat by my side watching the dance, almost completely drunk, and looking very much lost. Suddenly he broke into song, like a winter tree coming into leaf. I can still hear the soft agony of that ageless voice and song. It was a part of that natural order, the lonely moonlit night of the empty mountains and forests, almost the voice of the night. Then I knew the tragedy inherent in the situation; the near-impossibility of integrating the tribal people into the greater society while preserving intact their cultural autonomy and individuality. It is only right that public policy should not treat them merely as museum specimens to be preserved, isolated and uncontaminated by modern society, in deep forests for study as "noble savages” by the scholars from cities. But may not socio-economic integration for the tribes bring about a cultural anomie, a drying-up of those sources of fulness of spirit, dark energy and exuberance that characterise much of the tribal way of life? May not their own oral tradition of songs be either forgotten, despised or hybridised by treatment with "insecticides” and "pills” by their own younger generation? May not acculturation and growing sophistication kill the authenticity of life, the art-forms and songs of these simple tribals? May not the more educated young men reject the very social milieu of which these songs and dances are the symbols? Certainly these songs deserve to be collected and preserved before perhaps they are sung no more and, maybe, die out.
These sentiments may be easily mistaken as nostalgia for a lost world, or a form of romanticised primitivism, and can easily be ridiculed as an attempt at reviving Rousseau's idea of the “noble savage”, of man who is born free and uncorrupted and is everywhere in chains, and being corrupted, the chains and corruption flowing from technological progress, prosperity and urbanization. It is as easy to romanticise the noble savage concept or the world of the primitive tribals as it is to ridicule them. Technology is not an unmixed blessing even for the primitive world and its socio-economic transformations. Nor is the cultural ethos of the primitive world always anti-progress or anti-growth. At least some part of the tradition and ethos of these societies could be selectively used for the development process. The path to economic progress and social transformation is not a fixed path. There are many roads to progress and many paths to Utopia. What is required is, therefore, a balanced view on the tribal world which can help resolve the mental ambivalence so common today among policy-planners, political leaders, social anthropologists and folklorists. The primitive world of the tribe, with its socio-cultural mores, its stagnating economic order, cannot obviously be frozen for ever. The law of social change renders this impossible. Contact with the larger community encysting these small tribal worlds will bring about transformations, whether desired or not. Hence the task for us is to find the mechanism which can marry the imperatives of technological progress with the preservation of the cultural autonomy of the group.
The world of oral poetry of Indian primitive tribes is an almost unexplored but vanishing world. Archer, Elwin and perhaps another handful of scholars have gathered and presented some of this vast body of poetry. But they have only touched the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of thousands of songs remain undocumented. And what is more important, with rapid socio-economic transformation they run the risk of dying out or distortion beyond recognition. There are a very large number of tribes, each with a large volume of songs and literature. Even in respect of the three States in eastern India- Orissa, Bihar and West Bengal - there are nearly one hundred tribal groups. In Orissa alone there are sixty-two groups. What is presented here are only small selections from the poetry of seven selected tribes in these three States. The originals in transliteration in Roman script could have been given, but it was thought this would only increase the size of the book without adding much to the appreciation of the poems, as readers acquainted with the languages of the originals would be very few.
Far too long have the songs, the tales, the mythologies, the rituals and legends of the "primitive" tribes been treated as mere ethnological data; and, in an age of the assumed superiority of economic analysis of ethnographic materials, no wonder they are looked upon as somewhat residuary and unscientific and, in any case, of only marginal interest to the social anthropologist. This situation is not peculiar to India. It is a world-wide phenomenon. A time has come when it must be realised that, while we can speak of stages in technological growth, the same cannot be said of growth or efflorescence in the field of culture. There is no linear growth in the cultures of societies and all aspects of culture may not be susceptible to economic analysis. And the word "primitive" itself is somewhat of a misnomer. The Aztecs, the Mayas were also perhaps "primitives" from this point of view. Levels of culture are not proportionately related to either levels of economic affluence, personal incomes or levels of consumption or the capacity of the individual as a waste-maker. Social anthropology has to view these data as extremely significant tools of analysing personality traits, normative attitudes and social actions and behaviour-patterns. Scientism, whether of economic or political anthropology, can be a fallacy if not seen in the perspective of social processes, personal responses and inter-personal relationships. Further, it is high time we realised the immense value of these songs, legends, mythologies, etc. as literature per se. The absence of a written language, a script or proclaimed authorship of the songs or narrations do not in any way detract from the excellence of the songs or poems. All the songs/poems in this anthology are in fact anonymously authored. But, as Robert Graves stressed, contrary to the situation in modern societies anonymity is favoured not for avoiding guilt or embarrassment but because of the absence of a heightened ego which would claim all art-creation as that of the individual creator.
A word about the arrangement of the chapters. Two modes were available: thematic or community-wise. The songs could have been placed under different broad headings such as life-cycle songs or poems (birth, marriage, attainment of puberty, death, etc.), ritual songs (specific invocations of gods or goddesses), festival song (songs specific to different festivals, both agricultural and others, occurring during a year), cosmological songs (about myths of origin, migration, wars in historical times, etc.). Songs relating to different tribes could have been brought under thematic umbrellas. It was, however, for this anthology thought more appropriate to group the selected songs tribe by tribe. There are advantages and disadvantages in both methods. The method adapted here, it is believed, can give a reader a somewhat integrated view on the attitudes, mores, values and approach to reality of a particular tribe when a selection of the songs of that tribe is under one focus. A brief introduction to the songs of each such tribe is given not so much to present the cultural background "essential" to the understanding of the poems, than as mere introductory remarks on the group concerned. Learned discourses on the culture of a tribe is as relevant to the understanding of its poetry as would be the socio economic picture of Kalidas's times to the appreciation of his plays. It is, however, not denied that some poems have a particular "cultural context" and some basic awareness of the tribe and the main contours of its culture would help such appreciation.
Writers and poets, as also ethnologists and social anthropologists, have paid very little attention to "unwritten" poetry. Way back in 1940, in his Foreword to W.G. Archer's The Blue Grove, Arthur Waley lamented this inadequate attention to a very vital sector of primitive life and communal organisation. He said:
Another proof of the lack of work upon traditional song is the fact that when in 1934 the Anthropological Congress was held in London, out of nearly a hundred papers there was not one which dealt specifically with song. It may of course be said that song is not a detachable, independent subject, and is bound up with music, dance and other activities. But there were scores of papers which dealt with much narrower subjects; there was one, for example, on Aspects of Dentition.
Or take another test. I possess about a hundred and fifty books on ethnology, Only four or five of them mention singing, and there is not one which treats of it at all adequately.
That was in 1940. Forty years and more later the situation is not very much better. Tribal oral traditions have been, no doubt, studied and more of the poetry of the primitives published but social anthropology is still not very kind to the study of primitive songs as a method of sociological enquiry. Besides, these songs are not merely of interest as sociological literature; they have a lot of value as poetry. As regards Indian tribal poetry, Verrier Elwin's Folk Songs of Chhatisgarh, Folk Songs of Maikal Hills, Songs of the Forest (the latter two with Shamrao Hivale) and W.G. Archer's The Blue Grove, The Dove and the Leopard and The Hill of Flutes have made significant contributions towards understanding and appreciation of these folk songs and poems. In The Baiga, an ethnic monograph, Elwin made extensive use of songs as sociological "documents". As a matter of fact, poetry and ethnography are inseparable in this wonderful work. Archer's translations of Oraon songs in the two anthologies referred to follow the technique of Arthur Waley's brilliant transcreations of Chinese poems. The Blue Grove contained some of the finest translations of Indian tribal poetry I have seen to date. They were done with a great deal of delicacy and reveal a high sense of intimacy with the Oraon way of life and sensibility. Mention may also be made of Hem Barua and Gopinath Mohanty's contribution in this field. Barring however, these and a few other works, the picture, unfortunately, remains as bleak today as in the forties.
There have been no systematic attempts to document the oral poetry of the different primitive tribes all over the country. Analysis of the songs, the myths, the tales, the legends and the riddles can follow, but the first task is a systematic collection of these data which run the risk of vanishing into oblivion by sheer disuse and neglect. In each tribal group, generally speaking, the younger generation which has got the benefit of modern education tends to look down upon participation in the songs and dances of the tribe. Eager to climb the socio-economic ladder, they forget the lore of the tribe and, with the passing of the generations, certain songs also die and nobody knows them. Even within a decade I have seen proof of such extinction in particular tribal villages. In 1978 nobody knows or remembers a song which was recited with gusto in 1970 as the main voices, which had been those of a few old men, are no longer there. It is therefore, essential that we collect all the traditional songs, myths, stories, riddles, rituals, and cosmologies as early as possible, systematise them and analyse them, not only as oral literature but also in relation to value-systems, social structures, personality traits and symbolic milieu.
These oral poems are highly concrete in their treatment of theme and generally refer to some specific aspect of community life, its myth or symbolic structure. In a sense, the entire community life of the tribal is a very intense and uniform symbolic milieu. There is, therefore, no problem of communication, no difficulty of aesthetic distance that burdens so much of modern art and poetry. For us in modern society the symbolic milieu has been completely fragmented. The mythical universe is no longer part of a living tradition in most urbanised communities. When attempts are made to resuscitate the myth there is a genuine risk of its appearing as part of cultural anthropology rather than literature. This, I believe, is the difficulty in Eliot's poetry. The Waste Land goes back to The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance but society no longer understands or, rather, is no longer immersed in, the living myths of the tribe. It is, therefore, at best, harking back to an academic tradition; at worst an attempt to bring in too much of cultural anthropology. The difficulty of a return to myth and to myth-oriented literature, so extensively attempted by Eliot and Pound, and given such stout critical support by Professor Northrop Frye, is precisely this: the roots of social consciousness in the West are no longer in those fertile, dark and primitive unconscious realms. But to the Munda, the Oraon, the Kondh or the Parajas the myths are ever present realities. Their poetry, therefore, is very much concrete. Take this Munda song:
Dreaming of you in bed
I woke and took to the road.
Stumbling the stone
On the village-road I remembered
I remembered my caste, my gotra
And stood transfixed.
The obstacle to love here is not merely a mental block. The stone is not merely physical; it is mental itself. The stone marks the point where the remains of the ancestors lie buried, the symol of kinship and gotra. So when the boy stumbles on the obstacle, it is also a mental block. The stone is the ancestor and thus the song expresses very concrete despair. As if the stone says, "No it cannot be" ____and this denial may be more insistent and forceful than oral objections of parents in a traditional society.
In all primitive songs words are only part of a complex grouping of communal activities, namely, religious or social activities and dances. The accompaniment of dance with regular patterns of body movements or mimetic gestures with supporting actions like clapping or stamping of feet influence the pattern of the words. To this extent the songs which are merely the word-patterns lose something in standing alone without the music and the movement. In the words of C.M. Bowra:
The pleasure is not so complete as it might be if we enjoyed the whole, proper performance, but in isolation the words give the intellectual content of the composite unity. They take us into the consciousness of primitive man at its most excited or exalted or concentrated moments, and they throw a light, which almost nothing else does, on the movements of his mind.
In his Preface to The Empty Distance Carries..., an anthology of Munda and Oraon poetry edited by this author, the eminent British poet and critic David Holbrook observed:
The songs, and the illuminating comments on Oraon and Munda culture belong to a world-wide struggle among men to try to find a sense of their identity, not in mere "nationalistic" terms, but in terms of how, since they live "in" their symbolism, they can find particular meanings and forms of "authenticity" in their own lives, in their own place and time.
The more I have worked on the poetry of the various tribal communities of the eastern region of India, the more I have been convinced of the truth of Holbrook's assertion. In the three decades since the World War II one important trend in literature and the arts is a pervasive sense of loss of meaning, an inability to comprehend reality, a growing sense of rootlessness and non-belonging and an overwhelming feeling of blankness, pessimism and despair. Such a mood may have its origin in a variety of factors which are deeply embedded in our sociological and historical situation. Whatever the reasons, this mood has brought literature and art almost to the brink of an abyss, to a point where another step would commit us almost irretrievably to nihilism, moral cynicism and the death instinct. A period of rapid technological change, social transformations and urban explosion always has an unsettling effect on the cultural pattern. And the last five decades have possibly witnessed far greater revolutionary changes both in the structure of society and the material world than in any comparable period in human history. It was Pasternak, who had cautioned us that in an age of speed we must think slowly. Unfortunately, our generation seems to have almost lost the capacity to think slowly and effectively. This mood in art and literature has its effect on style. There seems to be a growing devaluation of the need for cohesiveness and lucidity in expression; an almost pathological obsession that the medium employed by the artist is no longer effective to express his complex fate and, therefore, true art today has to choose between silence or a form of broken Becketian expression that reflects a broken distorted gestalt. This is a total negation of the validity of art and literature and their relevance to our times. Life is meaningful only as the arch of a rainbow whose extremities are hidden away in the unseen past and future, in the incomprehensible timelessness of death; only as a span of relationships bridging an endless expanse of despair. It cannot have meaning apart from the colourful, inter mediate fleeting arch of the rainbow. Authenticity in art and literature, as also in life, consists of this ceaseless quest for what Martin Buber calls "the significant other".
In a pluralistic society the autonomy of the cultural groups constituting it needs to be preserved and strengthened. This strengthening cannot, however, be achieved either by looking upon the primitive communities as museum specimen to be retained tucked away in valleys and hills and to be studied by the "civilised” scholars from the cities, or by seeking to assimilate them into the melting pot of the larger community encysting them. The healthy attitude should be to see them, as Rothenberg observes, as a “series of manually-structured and ecologically sound models from which to learn something about the reorganisation of the society and the revitalisation of life and thought."
In these societies there is poverty but there is no public squalor. A Santal house, for example, is the last word in neatness and order. The delicately carved bamboo-rods used by the Kondhs to keep their tobacco can be the envy of any artist. Tragedies abound but there is no disgust for life, no turning back on it. There is no fashionable pessimism. At a time when it seems to require courage to say that man can be happy, the life-view of these primitive communities has a special bearing for us. In his Introduction to The Wooden Sword, one of the anthologies of Munda songs edited by this author, Professor Edmund Leach referred to this:
They do not seek consolation for the inevitability of decay by looking forward to a blissful rebirtn, in an imaginary "other world". Renewal is here and now in this world, in the quickly fading blossom of the jungles and the adolescence of our own children.
Life for the primitive tribes may be cruel and hard. Occasions of celebration, of festivals and joy, only briefly punctuate a life otherwise burdened with poverty, undernourishment and exploitation. But still, life is looked upon as an opportunity, and all activity as a thanksgiving for all the beauty and sacredness of nature, the hills and the valleys, the rustling streams and flitting butterflies. Many tribal songs have, no doubt, no purpose other than enjoyment; quite a number have an ostensible social or ritual purpose; but the largest number are concerned with the quest of beauty and holiness, of dreams and fantasies which transform the sordid ordinariness of daily existence into something rich and strange.
Of the large number of tribal groups inhabiting Odisha, Bengal and Bihar, at least seven have a fairly large body of oral literature, including poetry, which needs to be properly documented and analysed. In particular this is true of the Mundas and the Oraons, the Kondhs and Parajas, the Santals, the Hos and the Koyas. Some of the songs are of a narrative type; others don't tell a story but refer to some significant mood, situation or emotion. Narrative poetry largely relates to the cosmology of the tribes, their historical origins and migration in historical times. More important than these narrative poems are the poems associated with the festivals running through the cycle of seasons and rituals like birth, naming ceremony, attainment of puberty, marriage and death. The festival songs and a large number of the ritual songs usually accompany dances. As such, the melodies of many of the songs can be transcribed in regular musical notation. Working on the melodic patterns of the tribal songs of Eastern India, an eminent Hungarian musicologist, Dr Rudolf Vig, has found close similarity between them and gypsy music. He has put forward the interesting hypothesis that many tribal communities of India were possibly the original settlers of Eastern Europe around the Caspian sea and migrated to India many centuries ago.
These poems or songs can be considered from various points of view. Since they are meant to be sung they are often susceptible to expression in musical notation. The scores of a few songs have been provided in the appendix to generate an interest in this area. Secondly, the song-poems can be analysed also from the point of view of literature, their excellence as poetry. Often it is a poetry of symbolism and extended metaphors with a freshness all its own. Thirdly, often they have a ritual, social or religious purpose, be it the celebration of a phase in the agricultural cycle, a life-crisis or a normal social function. Fourthly, dance numbers generally accompany them and they deserve to be studied also from that point of view.
Like all oral literature, these tribal songs also undergo a number of distortions over a period of time. Among the distortions which are common to oral poetry mention may be made of the incorporation of stray lines composed of words borrowed from the events and situations in the context of development efforts in the tribal areas and the changing tribal scene. In traditional Baha songs of the Santals, for example, I have earlier referred to the incorporation of a line like The Babus have come, they have come in a jeep, to rhyme with the line, spring has come, welcoming the first flowering of sal and mahul trees with the advent of spring. Secondly, the traditional songs also tend to lose the wealth of old associations of peculiar, archaic words and are modernised by new composers. This has happened to Oraon songs and also, more significantly, to kondh songs. In the early forties, the well-known Oriya novelist, Gopinath Mohanty, collected the songs of the Kondhs of Koraput. He fully translated a number of them into Oriya. In respect of others he provided only gists. Thirty years later, it has not been possible to get at the meaning of all the words of the original songs even in the Villages from which these songs were collected. Being an oral tradition, its strength lies in authentic oral transmission from generation to generation, and as such disappearance of certain words, subtle nuances and lines from traditional songs is not to be wondered at.
The most fascinating aspect of tribal poems is their symbolism. Owen Barfield in his Poetic Diction puts forward the interesting thesis that poetic diction is nothing but the primitive, undifferentiated state of language, when objects are identical with, and non-distinct from, the bundle of associations they give rise to. This is the key to the understanding of the nature of symbolism in tribal poetry and its basic difference from symbolism in modern poetry. Basically, symbolism in modern poetry is an attempt to look for the unfamiliar, the concrete and the strange in a world excessively devitalised by the drabness of familiarity and generalised abstractions. It tries to break the stranglehold of the referential, representational and discursive use of language in everyday use. The world we live in is not the symbolic world of the primitive. It is mapped out, connected, intelligible. A sense of wonder and awe is discounted. For the primitive, on the other hand, social communication is itself part of the vast symbolic milieu in which he swims as a fish. The strange and the unknown peer out of everything and language is a method of gaining some control and direction in such a world. In a sense the entire linguistic structure is symbol. This can be illustrated by any number of poems in this collection. For example this Munda song:
The mahul tree
Full of branches and leaves
How it made the paddy field look lovely!
They are cutting away the mahul tree.
You five brothers, save it, save it!
Here the subject is not at all the mahul tree. It is the girl who has been given away in marriage. The village will look desolate when she is gone. And “they” are the members of the bridegroom's party. All this is never stated but always understood. Further, the brothers are not really expected to drive away the bridegroom's party. It is only a mock protest and a reference to the brother's role as the sister's defender in that society.
In an Oraon poem oranges are very cleverly used as sex symbols for a girl's breasts and the ripe, raw and half-ripe are described as being "too sweet", "too sour" and "sweet-sour" respectively. This can be compared to the Maikal Hill folk song:
He saw ripe lemons on her tree
How could he control his hunger?
In another Oraon poem:
To a tree full of fruits
Come birds to peck
Crows, pigeons, doves
And they chirp and frolic
The tree is the house of a man who has a number of marriageable daughters. The girls can also be sweet-smelling mallika flowers. The girls of village Diuri and Surmali are, in a Munda dance number, compared to ludam and champak flowers:
How nicely they bend down
The ludams of Diuri
How sweetly they wave in the breeze
The champaks of Surmali.
When moving in a line or running in a curve
What a necklace do they weave.
This kind of hidden symbolism in what is called the "clue” poems, is quite common in Mundari and Oraon folk songs but not in Kondh or Paraja songs.
The following Munda poem makes an interesting use of sexual symbolism:
Red alta on your feet
Yellow turmeric on the palms
Which alta field did you enter
Whose turmeric field did you go to?
Tell me truly, dear,
Did you enter a house of turmeric
In Munda and Oraon society red is often a symbol for life, energy and sex. The sindur or vermilion mark on the forehead and in the parting of the hair is a symbol of married life. Red also stands for blood. Similarly, turmeric has associations with marriage and loss of virginity. Entering an alta field or a house of turmeric, therefore, suggests loss of virginity or sexual intercourse.
In the Munda poem the "well" is a symbol for the girls sex:
There is a well at the end of the village
Its brick walls shine and glitter
……………………………………………………
The bucket went down and down
The poor girl how she wept
And wept
The well in tribal society is very much of a social institution. It is the club for the village women where they come to fetch water and exchange the gossip of the day. The well is a trysting place for lovers. But it also is often used as a symbol of the female sex as in the earlier example. A Gond song upbraids a girl:
O little well, you give no water,
Your youth is past
Think well, your youth is ended
While a Dhanwar song says of a girl who has come of age:
She still
Looks like a parrot
But the well
Is full of water now.
According to CM. Bowra –
…in most modern symbolism a symbol may indeed embody much that is important to what it symbolises, but it is separate from it, as the Cross embodies many Christian associations but is not the same as Christianity. But primitive symbolism asserts a real identity, The whale and the womb, the roots of a tree and the male member, are treated if not as exactly identical, at least as different examples of a single thing, which is both natural and supernatural and perfectly at home in the familiar works.
There are two other techniques of using symbolism which need to be mentioned briefly. In the first technique the comparison is put side by side with the statement of the song, as in the old Chinese poem quoted in translation by Arthur Waley in his Introduction to W.G. Archer's The Blue Grove:
The pelican stays on the bridge
It has not wetted its beak
That fine gentleman
Has not followed up his love-meeting.
This technique can be seen in the following Oraon poem:
When the paddy stalks are full of sap
The grains mature and ripen,
The pigeons come crowding.
I have a grown-up daughter,
And friends and relatives
Even from distant villages
Come crowding to my house.
In the second type the entire statement is through symbol, without any clue. It is only at the end of the poem that one or two lines occur that suggest what the symbol stands for. No parallelism is worked out, unlike in the first technique. In the following Mundari poem, until the dire consequences are mentioned, we do not suspect that the "mad dark bees" are love-lorn young men:
The glistening white mallika flowers
Blossoming in your garden
Invite the mad dark bees;
When the flowers fade
And the aroma is no more
The bees will vanish;
If they are caught send them
To the Keonjhar cutchery.
While analysing the symbolic structure of tribal poems we will do well to remember the essential social purpose they serve. Since tribal society is much more of a symbolic milieu than ours is, there is no hiatus between poetic symbolism and social communication. Verrier Elwin rightly observed,
A symbol is the readiest cure for embarrassment and can smooth over a business transaction or a hitch in one's love making with equal facility. So when emissaries go on the delicate business of arranging a girl's betrothal they do not state their purpose directly, but say they have come for merchandise, or to quench their thirst for water, or seek a gourd in which to put their seed. Similarly, the whole intricate absorbing business of daily love is carried on with symbols. Women by the well ask each other, "Did you have your supper last night?" "Are you weary from yesterday's rice-husking?" Men speak of digging up their fields, getting water from the well, entering a house. Not only the solicitations of the seducer but the domestic arrangements of wife and husband cannot be decently conducted without a verbal stratagem.
In comparing Oraon love songs to Baiga love songs Archer says that “If we define a love-poem as the expression of rapture Baiga poems are as obviously love songs as Oraon poems are not". The Mundari, Kondh and Paraja love poems are real love poems in this sense. The Kondh love songs probe even deeper as in the example below:
Beloved, dear,
How fickle, how impatient you are!
Only the flash of a face
A streak of lightning
In a moment you fade in the dark;
The distant firefly, coming near, no more.
A Paraja love song goes even deeper in its musings and sees love and death together:
You are eternal as death
The fear of death and your love
As intimate neighbours
They inhabit my dream
And so I play with life
Or
You are the rain, the new bride
The raindrops are you
They fill me up.
Or
How beautiful is the golden phasi
Down the bridge of your nose
Pining for that face
The brass string of my dung-dunga weeps
How sweetly it rings out the agony
The bare, naked voice of grief.
In many of these poems one can also notice a peculiar obsession with the passage of time. Time is not merely a sequence of seasons; or cycle of activities; it is also life and death, pain and pleasure. For example:
Asadh comes
And how she goes!
And where?
Where does Time go?
It comes - only to go?
And time is also Death, its ceaseless watch on life to be captured:
At your back
Death watches you
From dawn to dusk
He keeps a watch on you.
The Kondh poem refers to the world as a dancehall of men, a "dhobi-ghat", i.e., a place where washermen wash soiled clothes.
Life, for the Munda, Oraon, Kondh or Paraja, is not all dance and song. Dances and songs do punctuate their lives but tears lurk not very far behind those joyful faces. Different forms of anxiety obtrude. They are not merely economic or social. There are personal tragedies; love is not returned; a girlfriend or a wife deserts, naked and brutal reality threatens:
Speak no cruel words to me
My dear
How my heart pines for you,
Great is our misery
My parents have no money
To offer as kanyasuna.
As the bamboo tree dies
Swaying in the wind
The poor Paraja dies
Driven to grave by ceaseless labour.
The pumpkin plant's tragedy is from the day
Two leaves shoot forth from the seed;
Men pluck them out.
Man's tragedy is alike:
From childhood
Useless iron is thrown into corners
The poor man enters the forest
Crow-bar on the shoulders
Basket on the head
And life, only a tragic song.
But tragedy is often endured with a smile. It is sometimes even scoffed at. The primitive is very sensitive to the incongruous and the absurd. He can laugh at practically everything, including himself. Here is an example:
The co-fathers-in-law come
Like a pair of bullocks
They have drunk at the hat
And come back together
Like a pair of bullocks.
The two drunken old men (father of the bride and of the bridegroom) walking like a pair of bullocks is certainly a hilarious subject
Or this stubborn, outspoken refusal to marry:
Oil and turmeric
I will have none
Never on my body
And don't tie up flags
Of waving mango leaves
I will not marry the black girl
Of this wretched village;
Do you hear, friends?
Never shall I marry that black one!
But at the end of all pain and misery there is thankfulness for the very fact of being alive. As in this Kondh song of an old man on the day of Pous Purnima festival:
The old hearts still beat
And we are alive
Here in this ancient village
Of dead ancestors
And so today we could partake
Of this great jubilation.
It is here that these tribal poems so much resemble Chinese poetry in their outlook and tone. Of Chinese literature, Arthur Waley said that it “excels in reflection rather than speculation". As in Chinese poetry, here one finds such a lot of creative delight in experience; such a lot of courage in accepting reality without any dramatisation, idealisation, or rationalisation. In his Introduction to Plucking the Rushes, an anthology of Chinese poetry, David Holbrook refers to this resignation, not despair; this transcendence of envy; the gratitude for the continuity of life and love in Chinese poetry that puts sufferings in the larger perspective of human existence set among the indifference of the natural world. This is where it differs, he rightly holds, from modern existentialism. These tribal poems reveal a similar attitude of a mind which is aware of pain, in fact writhes in pain, but refuses to curse or run away into despair. Albert Camus once said that "all great art extols and denies the world at the same time". The simultaneous celebration and rejection of the world by the simple primitives can perhaps have a lesson for us.
The invocatory songs of the Santals and the Meria song of the Kondhs are almost reminiscent of the Vedic rituals invoking prosperity and plenty for the community. For the tribals the supernatural world, the world of bongas, of spirits and dead ancestors, is as real as the natural and social world he lives in. There is a benign or evil god in the neighbouring hill, the flowing stream at the outskirts of the village, the sacred grove and even the domestic kitchen. These gods take an intimate interest in human affairs and their blessings have to be invoked by appropriate propitiatory devices. Here poetry and ritual go hand in hand and serve an intimate and important social objective.
In modern technological society, art has tended to oscillate between two extremes. It has either been treated as a packaged form of mass entertainment or as the concern of an increasingly small minority of elites that should more appropriately be termed a "priesthood". Maybe, avant garde art seeks to preserve the mysteries of art as a secret fiesta from the profanation of all-conquering technology. But it is not possible to forge a healthy relationship between art and society on the basis of such a narrow concern. Secondly, the production and consumption of various art forms in modern society are being regulated and controlled more and more by the economic gate-keepers, the producers of films, the reviewers and critics, the stage managers, the art-gallery owners. In primitive societies, these economic gate-keepers were conspicuous by their absence. Art is wedded to life, it springs from love and is woven into the structure of the daily ritual of living. There is a continuous linkage between action and dream, between manual labour --using one's own hands-and art-creation using one's intense imagination. The entire community participates in the joys and sorrows, the triumphs and tragedies. The individual is not the rootless estranged self suffering and the angst of alienation and the sense of non belonging that brings nausea, Tribal expressions of art, song and dance are governed by age-old customs, and by the employment of these forms, songs and rituals, the tribes keep alive their value systems, their creation-myths and time-honoured customs of their ancestors. They produce art because they must. The motivation for art-creation is none other than the passionate desire to express a sense of form.
There is yet another area in which the study of the oral poetry of the tribals, as also their other art-forms, can have relevance for us.
While the trend towards transformation of tribes into castes has lost momentum in India and steps have been taken to preserve the autonomy of tribal cultures, the thrust of socio-economic transformations has been modifying and reorientating traditional tribal cultures. The emphasis on tradition, mythology and a golden age in the past has acquired a new dimension in the context of socio economic transformations of the tribal societies. An important result of these transformations is the emergence of a noticeable group of power-elites within these societies who want to emphasise the cultural exclusiveness and uniqueness of the tribe and its tradition and mythology. Part of it is no doubt a genuine search for roots but it is also partly due to a kind of vested interest in resurgence and revivalism. But one has to look deeper, both into the social structure and the emerging social stratifications to understand the nature and direction of this new emphasis on cultural forms. Myths, symbols, oral literatures, religious beliefs, traditional values, no longer remain what they were; they have been revised, reorientated, sometimes even without a conscious design or sense of direction. Interest in culture becomes often vicarious, gratuitous, a part of the search for the new dynamics of acquiring and sustaining political power and status. And yet, superimposed on all these is an awareness of the "community", the small community. This itself surely holds hope in a world of growing impersonalisation and loss of individuality under the pressure of large-size organisations. Discussing the ritual processes not merely as a structure but also as an anti-structure, Victor W. Turner refers to their role in achieving communitas, which is basically an egalitarian relationship between persons stripped of status and property. In discussing the formation of the Franciscan Order in the Middle Ages he quotes M.D. Lambert (Franciscan Poverty, 1961) that Francis was a "supreme spiritual master of small group; but he was unable to provide the organization required to maintain a world-wide order." This is where the tribal culture as a small community can serve as a model. Martin Buber observed:
An organic commonwealth - and only such a commonwealth can join together to form a shapely and articulate race of man - will never build itself up out of individuals, but only out of small and even smaller communities; a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities. (Paths in Utopia, 1966).
It has been typical of Indian social organisation that it has always sought to create such a living and growing community, which is in essence a community of communities.
Secondly, among different models of integration of tribal culture and society with the larger society emphasis was so far placed only on the theory of a melting pot with constant give-and-take and cross-cultural co-existence. The time has come also to emphasise the search by the tribes for universal human values inherent in their own cultural matrix. The search for the great tradition, for abiding historical values transcending the demands of here and now, point to this. This is a positive sign for cultural growth and efflorescence vis-a-vis the arid confrontation or withdrawal of earlier years.
Thirdly, and this is most important, there are signs of an emerging force of counter-alienation in this new search for cultural roots by the tribal groups. Over-emphasis on ethnicity leads to a drying up of sources, an anomie grows in the heart. Tourain has rightly told us that
today it is more useful to speak of alienation than of exploitation; the former defines a special, the latter merely an economic relationship. Alienation means cancelling out social conflict by creating dependent participation. Ours is a society of alienation, not because it reduces people to misery or because it imposes police restraint, but because it reduces, manipulates and enforces conformism.
A genuine awareness and growing interest in tribal culture will sustain our commitments to universal values which emphasis community, instinct and imagination and may even help us look at the city as a conglomeration of neighborhoods or as Buber's community of communities with varying cultural patterns, beliefs and value-orientations fitted into a mosaic.
Examining various devices which may reduce and even prevent social confrontation and conflict, Coser suggests in his book. The Functions of Social Conflict, that mass culture and popular entertainment are primarily meant to provide a vicarious and safe release to hostile impulses. Institutionally, therefore, they are in the nature of a safety valve to release tensions. Directly and indirectly art helps bolster the morale of groups and helps to create a sense of social solidarity and unity; it may also function as a nucleus for organizing social action and social change.
The role of art in a primitive community is to identify a cultural field. This is something akin to what Marcuse identifies as the subculture in present Western societies existing as the Great Refusal or the posture of defiance. The continuity and universality of a culture is assured in a small community. Cultural conflict by way of formation of sub-cultures and contra-cultures is absent in such communities. A homogeneous culture can rise only in a small community.
A significant impact of the development of the Western conception of fine arts and culture has been a change in perceptions, so that the artefacts, dances, songs and the myths of the people all over the world, whose forms expressed aesthetic qualities, became “visible". Andre Malraux has rightly pointed out that
before the coming of modern art no one saw a Khmer head, still less a Polynesian sculpture, for the good reason that no one looked at them. It has now become possible to conceptualize various intricate aspects of primitive culture so that world culture may benefit from it. For to participate in the work of art is to reassert its existence as an object rather than as an individual personal expression.
This is apparent from the various studies on the theory of diffusion of culture and culture traits in such communities by Paul Wingert in his Primitive Art: Its Traditions and Styles. The small community makes the preservation of these expressions possible in a unique and authentic way. The distortions are less, the genuineness and true-to life character still predominate. This makes preservation of the authenticity of culture and its transmission a simpler and natural task, which in turn makes it all the more important that we who believe in unity in diversity should emphasise the need for maintaining small communities and their cultures, allowing them develop in their own unique ways.
One of the consequences of a greater awareness of the cultural traditions of the primitive tribes can be to induce us to step outside the prevailing climate of over-emphasis on cultural relativity that has encouraged cultural myopia and ethnocentrism. It can broaden our very conception of art. It is necessary to remember that the forms called art today were not perceived as such in earlier times or by other cultures. As we know, even in the western tradition one era sometimes did not understand another. For example, in the twelfth century no one really looked at Greek art. Similarly the seventeenth century almost totally disregarded mediaeval art.
Much has been said about the difficulty of translating poetry. This difficulty is all the greater when the poetry happens to belong to an oral tradition. In translating tribal poetry the major difficulty is how to retain the music. The songs generally have a “refrain” and a certain number of words occur at the end of each line. Carrying them over literally into English translation sometimes mars the effect. It is for this reason that an attempt has been made to retain as much of the pattern of the lines and the texture of the songs as possible. It is only rarely that deviation has been made from the structure or pattern of the stanzas and the songs. The music of such songs is much more difficult to retain. Often there is refrain line or lines which really do not convey any meaning but, because of their alliterative sequence, lend rhythm to the song in original. The poems in their original reveal an infinite capacity to invent onomatopoeic words and expressions. These sonorous phrases greatly add to the effect of the songs. Only a few of them may be mentioned here--ariari, ata-mata, bojo-bojo, chere-bere, chum-chhum, keleng-beleng, kere bore, kidar-kodora, rese-pese, ribi-ribi, tapu tupu, tiri-tiri. Similarly the free use of expletives like ge, go, ho, re, do, etc., the arbitrary lengthening of vowel sounds for the sake of euphony or emphasis and the insertion of short vowels in the middle of words or as suffixes to words adds to the melodic quality of the songs.
Apart from alliterative words which lose most of their music in translation there is also the problem of comprehending the structure of the symbols. Malinowski referred to the need for “the verification of the cultural context’’ in the translation of tribal poetry. In his words the translation of words or texts between two languages is not a matter of mere te-adjustment of verbal symbols. Poetry in the last analysis is a system of symbols, which are compulsive because of their vitality as images. Hence it must always be based on a verification of cultural context.
Further, there are certain words which, because of their archaisms and esoteric significance, are difficult to translate into another language. The images also sometimes partake of this difficulty. For example, when the lover is described in a Munda poem as "handsome as the arum flower", it becomes difficult to appreciate the significance unless one knows that the vigorous and yellow arum flower is a source of never-ending fascination for Munda girls. The beloved's body is compared to the flame of an earthen lamp. The woman "stands as a banana tree". Often she is mentioned as a flower or a dove without any overt reference to such a comparison being made.
In any language, and more so in its poetry, words are not merely sounds, they are also signs. "For the poet”, observes Jean-Paul Sartre in his What is Literature?, “language is the structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his eye-glasses." This is more so for the primitive for the simple reason that his language is less differentiated, logical and ratiocinative. In such a situation, the meaning of a poem of song remains peculiarly mixed up with its image-structure as well as its melodic pattern or rhythmic beat. The signs may often be the sounds and both may point to a vaguely felt impression which builds up to an image. Archer has discussed at length the difficulty of translating Indian folk poetry into English. Differences of verbal structure" he says, "are so great that if parallel images are retained, the rhythms will be different. If the rhythms are maintained the image will suffer, while no form of English can reproduce the musical effects of Hindi, Uraon, Gondi or Mundari.
But the rhythm is so powerful that in translation it also comes in to an extent or rather forces itself in. But where retention of rhythm or the original musical form in English demanded sacrificing or changing an image I have scrupulously avoided it and resisted all temptation either to poeticise it by adding in or omitting. Arthur Waley himself says, “Above all, considering images to be the soul of poetry, I have avoided either adding images of my own or suppressing those of the original."
For successful and authentic translation of the tribal song-poems, direct knowledge of the tribal language is no doubt ideal for the translator. Knowing Santali I have found it most satisfying to translate from Santali as also from the allied poetry of the Mundas and Hos. When, however, knowledge of the language is not available to the translator, the next best course is to take the help of someone who is well-versed in the tribal language. In this context I have noted with great satisfaction the translation of Mundari songs done jointly by Ramdayal Munda and Norman Zide of the University of Chicago. While Zide is a linguist and a capable translator, Ramdayal Munda is himself a Munda and also a linguist. Elwin's translations were perhaps less authentic as there were many attempts at poetisation. The native-born speaker of the local tribal languages on whom Elwin depended was obviously not as sensitive and as well-informed about the problem of translation as Professor Ramdayal Munda.
Ideally, it is perhaps necessary to give two renderings of each tribal song-one, a word-by-word rendering as per the line-scheme and another, a literal translation or paraphrasing. The first would indicate the peculiar syntactic structure of the specific language. Such an attempt has been made in the section on Koya song poems.
The structure of the songs, as also the arrangements of the lines, differ from tribe to tribe. Normally, the Munda songs are short and have a repetitive pattern, as in the following example:
The cut-away twig, mother
The cut-away twig
The cut-away twig never sprouts again.
The waters of the river, mother
The waters of the river
The waters of the river never turn back again.
The Koya songs are often longer, as also the Kondh songs. There is also a wide range of variation in the general emotional climate conveyed by the songs. While the Kondh songs are more serious and reveal a tragic sense of life, the Santali, Munda and Oraon songs are lighter in vein and often have a peculiar sense of irony, The invocation songs of the Santals are recited either by the village priest or naike or the head of the household. On the other hand, the general songs of the tribes are participatory in nature and the community joins in the songs, which also generally have their accompanying and corresponding dance-numbers.
In his Preface to The Empty Distance Carries, an anthology of Munda and Oraon songs edited by this author, David Holbrook observed:
In our civilization we are actually having to battle, to assert that man's primary need is for the significant other, to use a phrase from Martin Buber. And how much our London culture could learn from the deeply metaphorical eroticism in these poems, which contrasts so sharply with the new and infantile grossness that has overwhelmed us, making true love poetry almost unspeakable today in England.
Primitive poetry and art have thus a relevance not merely to literature but also to the quest for meaning and authenticity in the face of dehumanization of the arts and the resurgence of the libido and death-instinct in it. There is a crying need to re-emphasize the life instinct in modern art if art is not going to become totally irrelevant to modern civilization. It is in this sense that I feel primitive poetry has relevance today: not merely as "poetry" as C.M. Bowra had so ably analyzed, but as adding a significant dimension of meaning and purpose to the business of living and dying.
There is a world-wide awareness today that human life must be brought back to the hidden intuitive exuberance and zest for living that characterized human imagination in many earlier centuries. In his Age of Aquarius, for example, William Braden, speaking about the America of the future, poses this same question. Will it be blacker, more feminine, more intuitive... more exuberant and just possibly better than the America of the past? "It depends", Braden answers, "on the outcome of the struggle between the humanist and the technologist, both bent on reshaping society in their own ways" There is an inherent conflict here. It is no longer possible to keep in separate compartments the scared ritual and profane technologies, our moral fervour and scientific rationalism. But it is possible and extremely desirable today to find solution to the tension between what Braden describes as "those who wish to make the world a comfortable dwelling place and those who conceive of it is a machine for progress”.
Technology no doubt has to find an answer to the problems of poverty afflicting the primitive communities. But their rest for living, the inherent sense of communal solidarity and harmony with the natural world, are values which modern societies suffering from growing cynicism and lows of nerve, insipid individualism and the breakdown of the ecological balance, are perhaps desperately in need of fostering and developing. In the heart of modern technology as also of primitive rituals is an emptiness; in one case, the emptiness of being tired of life, in the other the emptiness of poverty and drudgery. Each has need of the other. The city must be married to the jungle and the new technology must be married to the lifegiving rituals and mythologies. That way perhaps lies the key to a new resurgent life-affirming culture.
The Indian primitive tribe’s world is immensely alien, not merely to the western world but even to the world of the urban elite in India. The songs/poem in this volume will, it is hoped, reveal some this strangeness not merely from the technical point of view of data or facts but also of the attitude and approaches, the values and the perceptions; in short of the mechanism of apprehending reality. Some of them may be even action-packed ritual but their beauty, freshness and occasional technical virtuosity remain to be envied. The emphasis is, however, not on the “alienness” or strangeness of this world or the strange modes of apprehending experience. It is more on the naturalness and case, the simplicity and grace, the elegance and absence of anxiety which characterize many of them. The emphasis, in short, is on the freshness of the images and metaphors, the authenticity of experience and the concern for community.
I have sought to prevent the poems as poems of today, living vital and warm, and not as dry ethnological data of complex and strange "primitive” world. Being a poet myself, I have tried to see and feel them as poetry and no other consideration has matter-neither enthology nor religious association or ritual significance, I can’t but conclude this note by quoting Brand on from his preface to The Magic World: American Indian Songs and poetry: “All that we want from any of it is the feeling of poetry. Let the enthnologists keep its ‘science’ and the cocoming generation of Indian poets its mystry.”
Here we Sacrifice the enemy
Here we Sacrifice the meriah
It was the golden sunshine of the last days of Pausa. Eighty-year-old Sarabu Saonta leaned against the sal tree at his doorstep and looked into the distance. The air was fragrant with the aroma of unknown forest flowers and mahua wine. Butterflies with multi-coloured wings floated like lamps in the golden sun. In the distance, at the end of the village street. The worship of Dhartani, the earth goddess, had started. Almost the entire village had gathered there. The houses and the village street were empty'. The rhythmic beat of the drum revived memories of his earlier days, and Sarabu started reminiscing.
He remembered his youth, his songs, the mad abandon of moonlit nights, and his girl friends of yester years, whom he used to call Nilas, Talas, Lember and Dumbar---those affectionate names which he had conferred on them while passing the night in the dormitory for the unmarried boys of the village. The unmarried girls had one also. His entire youth floated past like a dream, like the morning fog slowly unfolding layer after layer of the hills.
Sarabu remembered also his endless miseries and the miseries of his tribe. He was the Saonta, the headman of the village, dressed in a loin cloth, copper-coloured hair on his head, thick and dishevelled, a quid of tobacco-leaf always in his mouth. His Kondh religion told him that the King--the Authorities--happened to be the younger brother while the Kondh, the Paraja (the subject), was the elder bro ther. The younger brother was crafty and had snatched away the kingdom from the elder brother by dishonest means; but he did not mind. He had learnt to forgive. He was as tall as the hills, broad and expansive as the sky, somewhat uninhibited and impulsive.
Sarabu still gazed into the distance; the drums continued their rhythmic beat; the rows of houses stood vacant in the sunshine. Beyond these were the blue-green ranges of hills arranged like coloured palanquins. Range after range of hills and valleys: that was his beloved Kondhistan Down below, the gurgling hill-streams with their crystal-clear water; the yellow alsi flower everywhere and buzzing bees. Sarabu was ill. His whole body ached. There was pain in his chest, the murmur of the streams, muted, somewhere inside. But then he had lived so long; enough proof of the fact that in his previous life he had been a good man. For if he had been a bad man, he would have died much earlier. In his last birth, he must have done some good work and certainly in his present birth he had done no wrong to any body. He knew his physical body would grow old and be discared. His soul would go out and return in some other body to this beautiful Land of hills, flowers and streams. Death was only another stage in the eternal process of ever-returning life. The villagers, the people he knew, the green hills-everything would still be waiting for him; the streams would still be flowing and the sap of life would be still surging ahead when he returned. Sarabu confronted Death, face to face, but he had no worry. He had lived his life to the full, gone out on shikar, enjoyed his food, drink and tobacco. What did it matter if he died now? He was sure to come back to this beautiful landscape, the dazing valleys and the gurgling streams. He could not long be parted from the glory of human life.
Sarabu brought his flute from the house and, in the golden sunshine, of late Pausa, his flute called out the names of Nilas, Talas, Lembar and Dumbar. Sarabu danced as if he was possessed like the Kalisi or the Bejuni; as if the Nachini goddess had possessed him and he was worshipping the life-force with the last drop of his energy. Sarabu played the flute and danced. In the honey-coloured afternoon sun, the village dozed; dark shadows danced before his eyes and Sarabu dozed off finally on the most important festival day of the Kondhs.
ABOVE: Dharmu the God of Justice
BELOW: Dhartani the God of Ancient Earth
common to perhaps the as an integs and calami dancing, 1
This is a translation of some portions from the opening chapter of Gopinath Mohanty's celebrated novel, Amrutar Santan (Sons of Nectar), Sarabu may be an imaginary character but he typifics almost everything that the Kondh culture represents: a deep attachment to and intimate love of life and the world, along with a painful realization of all the miseries of economic exploitation, deprivation and want. A deep sense of mellowness and human tragedy overhangs, like the shadow of the hill on a hill-stream. But the crystal-clear waters of the spring still gurgle forward with occasional rays of the sun dancing on it; for life is endless and death only a step in this eternal recurrence.
Discussing the religious symbolism of primitive tribes and modern man's anxiety, Mircea Eliade has said that "Anguish before Nothingness and Death seems to be a specifically modern phenomenon. In all the other non-European cultures, that is, in the other religions, Death is never felt as an absolute end or as Nothingness: it is regarded rather as a rite of passage to another mode of being: and for that reason always referred to in relation to the symbolisms and rituals of initiation, re-birth or resurrection."
The Kondhs have a saying, Pahanahan tinjara, which literally means "By sharing, cat". This sums up the whole philosophy of the Kondh and his approach to life. While most primitive communities retain the intense intimacy of inter-personal, inter-family and inter-village bonds and are strangers to the lonely individual so common to modern urbanised society, these communal bonds are perhaps the strongest among the Kondhs. The entire village behaves as an integral unit, an organism. In joy and sorrow, in festivities and calamities, in privations and pleasure, in celebrations of rituals, dancing, hunting, clearing the jungles for podu or mourning a death--the whole village acts as one. This togetherness, this sense of belongingness is as ancient and as solid as the hills and as refreshingly dynamic as the gurgling hill-streams. It flows from a deeply felt sense of a mutual bond with the other members of the community and the village. The village is the unit of social organization; every individual is born into it, lives his life, suffers with it, dances and enjoys with it, and, when dead, becomes either a pointed stone (male) or flat stone (female) relic in its surroundings. The simplicity, frankness and naivete of the Kondh is reflected in his village organization. Rarely is a guest turned away from the village without being properly fed or looked after.
The saonta is the headman of the village. He is the repository of village authority and most inter-personal, inter-family difficulties and quarrels are sorted out by him. Next to him in traditional rank or status are the priests, disari and jani. The former is an astrologer, a visionary seer, who scans the starry skies, pronounces on the weather, calamities, good fortune, and forecasts things and events. He is in communion with the heavenly stars. The jani conducts most of the ritual worship and festival celebrations. The three together--the saonta, the disari and the jani form the informal but really effective village council, as distinct from the officially elected panchayats. The village is sacred, for it is on the sacred soil of ancestors". Here the dongar (hillside) is burnt out for cultivation, "the stream is full" and "maize and millets swing in happiness". Here the tribe has lived out its life for generations. It is an almost physical attachment. Experience has shown how the Kondh, perhaps more than any other tribe, resists being taken away from his original village setting on the hill slopes to be settled in government colonies down on the plains. Without the hills, the dense jungles and the babbling hill-streams he is, as it were, a fish out of water. The night-long dances in the open space at the centre of the village, the relics of the dead symbolised by the stone slabs, the fields of millet and maize - this is where he belongs and it is difficult for him to tear himself apart from all this. Even the dead ancestors are an essential part of the village scene. They are remembered during festivals with gratitude and affection. The spirit of the dead, the duma, is both loved and feared.
The Kondhs (variously described as Kandhas, Khonds and Konds) are the largest single group of tribals in Odisha and their number, as reported in the 1971 census, is 869,965. They are concentrated mostly in the districts of Koraput, Phulbani and Kalahandi. Well known for the rite of human sacrifice or meriah even in historical times, the name of the tribe, according to Macpherson, is derived from the Telugu word konda which means a hill. Along with their sub-tribes they form nearly forty per cent of the total tribal population of the State.
The Kondh villages generally nestle on gentle hill slopes and in the laps of rolling valleys. They are not very different from typical Odisha villages but the houses are not as neatly arranged in rows as is the case in Santal villages. The houses are also much smaller and simpler. Each village normally has ten to twelve houses and the agricultural fields adjoin it. Domestic animals like pigs and goats are generally kept in a small separate structure attached to the main house. The walls do not have the elaborate finish and smoothness of Santal houses, nor are they decorated with painted motifs or even a simple colour wash. The houses are generally very sparsely furnished and the walls mostly bare. The village common, the Village street, and even the tiny verandahs of the houses are often liltered with cowdung, the excreta of pigs, the droppings of pigeons and ordinary dust and dirt. Besides the individual family-houses, there are the village dormitories -generally one for the unmarried boys and one for the unmarried girls.
The Kondhs usually live in joint families with parents, married sons and unmarried children living under the same roof. In this also they differ from the Santals. The family is patriarchal and the head of the family's word is the last one in all matters relating to the family. It is also patrilineal and descent is always through the male line. The sconta's office is hereditary, but he can be replaced if he is rendered physically or mentally unfit or unsuitable for the job. Adoption of children by issueless parents is permitted. On a father's death, his property is equally shared among his sons.
The Kondhs look upon marriage as a sanctified union of man and woman. Extra-marital sex after marriage is, therefore, disapproved. Before a girl attains puberty, there is no restriction on her mixing with boys, participating in communal songs and dances, and sometimes choosing her life partner in the process. Traditionally, there is a bride price or jhola. When a boy is not in a position to pay the bride price, he sometimes chooses to run away with the girl of his choice. More often than not this is done with the consent of the girl. This form of marriage is called udulia and has a legitimate place in Kondh society, The bride price is generally fixed by the parents of the bride. It varies from place to place in Koraput and Phulbani districts and is generally given in the form of cattle, buffalo, rice, ragi, etc. When the boy is not in a position to pay the bride price he is asked to work in the father-in-law's house until the bride price is paid off.
Kondhs generally do not marry among their kinsmen. The tribe is divided into different septs, Marriage within one's own sept or in a sept of one's mother's mother or father's mother is prohibited. There is no bar, however, on marriage in a sept of one's mother's brother, i.e., maternal uncle or the maternal uncle's father.
The Kondhs have four main forms of marriage:
(1) Conventional marriage;
(2) Marriage by elopement;
(3) Marriage by "abduction" of a girl from a public place with her previous consent; and
(4) Marriage by a girl making a forced entry into her lover's house against the wishes of his parents.
Ability to dance and sing and perform the domestic chores are the qualities usually looked for in a Kondh bride. The Kondh boy prefers an active and strong girl as his partner in life. Even though marriages are often finalized by negotiation, they are almost always preceded by courtship between the boy and the girl and and their mutual acceptance. The negotiations are characterized by certain traditional rituals and examination of good or evil omens. Boiling of rice in a pot and watching whether it overflows, and observing whether a snake or a wild animal is sighted on the way to the bride’s house are among the rituals that are common in this regard. The actual marriage ceremony is a very gay occasion. There is plenty of singing, dancing, drinking and feasting.
A mock duel of wit and humour takes place between the bridegroom's party and the bride's party, the latter following the former sometimes even up to a mile for the apparent purpose of rescuing the bride, whereafter they allow the groom's party to go away peacefully. It may be mentioned here that mock protest on the occasion of a marriage is a common characteristic in most primitiva societies. The Mundas and Oraons, for example, have a large variety of mocking songs which are hurled at each other by the two parties at the time of marriage. These songs are full of clever insinuations and innuendo.
The marriage ritual follows several steps. “Sprinkling water" is one of them. The bride is drenched in turmeric water and led to the village stream. All the way, turmeric water is sprinkled on her. The bridegroom and his party are mockingly challenged to claim the bride, to "open their lips" and to speak out. They are assured love, affection, drinks and meat. All the time the nervous bride is also reassured in a playful and jocular manner. (See also marriage songs 6 and 7.)
While the marital bond is held sacred, there is no bar against divorce, nor is a divorcee looked upon with contempt or disdain. The Kondhs have a perfectly empirical and frank attitude towards both marriage and divorce. They presume that, if two persons cannot live happily, there is no reason why they should continue to inflict agony on each other. This is why divorce is extremely easy among them. Contrary to the picture painted by the former British officers, the Kondhs are not given to sexual permissiveness or orgiastic licentiousness. No doubt they drink, and sometimes quite heavily--particularly at the time of festivals, but for married women or men, sex outside marriage is not approved by the society, nor is it very common.
Youth dormitories play an important role in the life of the Kondhs. These dormitories are known dhanger basa. They are organised institutions meant for socialization of the youth, the unmarried boys and girls. Prior to their marriage, grown up girls sleep together at night in the dormitory meant for girls. Normally, an old woman is in charge of the girls' dormitory. The unmarried youths similarly sleep together at night in the bachelors' dormitory. It is a common practice for the boys to play their flutes or to sing songs addressed to their respective beloveds sleeping in the maids' dormitory. The songs are generally in the name which a boy might have assigned to his lady-love and which may be a secret between the pair. The girl may reply from the maids’ dormitory and this way the long night is spent singing to each other from the dormitories. Sometimes the boy and the girl may pair off at night. The dormitories thus serve a very useful purpose in enabling the unmarried Kondh boys and girls to pick up friendships and choose their life-partners. It also enables them to imbibe the values and mores of the tribe, its etiquette and courtesies, its songs and dances. The dormitory's role in the process of socialisation cannot be under estimated.
The mainstay of the Kondh economy is agriculture. This is still at the primitive subsistence level and is largely shifting cultivation or podu. Shifting cultivation is wasteful and is destructive of valuable forest resources. Productivity in such cultivation is very low and the Kondh lives in a perpetual cycle of poverty, indebtedness and exploitation.
Human sacrifices were once prevalent in many agrarian primitive cultures. Frazer has discussed them in detail in his Spirits of the Corn and The Golden Bough. Mircea Eliade has also documented many of these forms in Patterns in Comparative Religion. Here is the account of the meriah sacrifice of the Kondhs in Frazer.
The Meriah was a voluntary victim, bought by the community: he was allowed to live for years, he could marry and have children. A few days before the sacrifice the Meriah was consecrated, that is, he was identified with the divinity to be sacrificed; the people danced around, and worshipped him. After this, they prayed to the Earth: "O Goddess, we offer thee this sacrifice; give us good harvests, good seasons and good health.” And they added turning to the victim: “We have bought thee and have not seized thee by force: now we sacrifice thee, and may no sin be accounted to us!" The ceremony also included an orgy lasting several days. Finaly the Meriah was drugged with opium after they had strangled him, they cut him into pieces. Each of the villages received a fragment of his body which they buried in the fields. The reminder of the body was burnt and the ashes strewn over the land.
The British administrators used to look upon the Kondhs as a barbaric and uncivilized people given to drinking, dancing and debauchery. Even the rite of human sacrifice was explained away by linking it to the supposed belief of the Kondh that human blood will make the turmeric they cultivate redder in colour. Today it is obvious that these observers never saw the ritual base of the meriah sacrifice. Even a cursory reading of the song accompanying the sacrifice will make it clear that it has nothing to do with making turmeric red. (See translation later in this chapter). It must be seen as a part of the universal pro-occupation of the primitive mind with the supernatural and the effort to invoke the blessings of the bening God for the peace and welfare of the group. Nineteenth century social anthropologists had largely missed this cross-cultural perspective on the rite of human sacrifice and its relationship to religious belief and ritual practices.
Often, anthropologists go about judging primitive cultures by the same standard as those they apply to modern society and culture. It may be true, as Franz Boas observed, “that primitive society does not favour individual freedom of thought”; but the very conceptions of truth and freedom are differently viewed by the primitive. Anthropologists have come to recognise varying criteria for determining truth. In the meriah sloka one sees a tremendous concern for group welfare. The physical and the human world, as the Kondh knows it, are described in intimate terms and the blessings of the earth-goddess Dhartant or Dharitri is invoked. The meriah sacrifice, therefore, is very much a part of religious symbolism. The natural world is the original model of the human world and is a vestige at once of the earthly paradise and "pre figuration of the heavenly paradise”. A Kondh is temperamentally meditative and withdrawn inspite of all his community activities and communal participation. He implicitly believes in the myth of his being deprived, as the elder brother, of his kingdom by the cunning younger brother who lives in the plains. This explains his strong and intimate attachment to nature and the near-dignified indiference he exhibits in his attitude towards his exploiters and the non-tribals around him. He is no doubt a pagan and for him nature is a friend to play with and to enjoy, not an indifferent object to be exploited or an enemy to be conquered.
The British administration came across the meriah system of the Kondhs during the thirties of the nineteenth century. With a view to putting a complete stop to this "barbaric” practice, strict executive directives were issued, making such sacrifice punishable as a crime and the Meriah Agent was appointed in 1845 by the Government of India to enforce the directives. General Macpherson and General John Campbell visited the Kondh areas of Jeypore agency and Baliguda to see that the directives were strictly enforced. Major General John Campbell had forwarded a study report to the British Government in 1841 which actually formed the basis for the appointment of the Meriah Agent and the steps taken for prohibiting this practice. Later, he published a more complete report in the thirteenth volume of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Mr Campbell reported to Government in 1851 that since 1845 there had been no meriah sacrifice. This must have been an over-optimistic official report. Stray cases of meriah sacrifice in the deep interior of hills and jungles were noted even as late as the last two decades of the nineteenth century, but it would be correct to say that after 1845 meriah sacrifice as a regular feature of Kondh society had come to an end. The British Government permitted the symbolic killing of a buffalo in place of the human sacrifice. This continued to be the prevailing practice till about the 1930s.
The entire community used to subscribe to the purchase of a buffalo which was sacrificed. Later, as the cost of a buffalo started becoming prohibitive, three other types of animals, namely, pigs, goats and rams, were also being sacrificed as substitutes. It is only the prosperous Kondh villages which still sacrifice buffaloes on this ritual occasion.
The Kondhs have no written language of their own. Most of the songs presented here were collected by the eminent novelist, Gopinath Mohanty. The songs are part of an oral tradition and need early documentation as they are in the process of being forgotten by the younger generation. The most important of these songs is tha meriah song or sloka to which reference has been made earlier. This at song or sloka is an invocation to the earth-goddess for the welfare and prosperity of the tribe and, in parts, it can be compared in tone to the Vedic hymns,
The meriah sloka has to be looked upon as a ritual incantation which combines the emotions of fear, surrender to the unknown supernatural power, and a concern for the welfare of the community. In its lyrical tone, and the pathos, compactness and straight forwardness of the emotions conveyed, it is perhaps unparalleled among primitive ritualistic incantations anywhere in the world.
The songs of the Kondhs, being ritualistic in context, are meant exclusively for particular occasions. A ceremonial song is taboo on non-ceremonial occasions. For example, the meriah song is not supposed to be uttered at any time other than at this ceremony. It is recited and taught to another person only by a Kondh priest, and even then under certain strict conditions. This is why this was one of the most hidden and obscure songs in the literature of tribal India.
The Kondhs worship mainly Dharmu and Dhartani, but they also have numerous other gods and goddesses, their pantheon being fairly large. Many of their gods and goddesses owe their origin to the deification of powers believed to be animate and controlling "the sensible forms of the universe". There are other divinities which owe their origin to adoration of the divine energy, as it is vaguely associated with abstract ideas, predominant social sentiments or some mystic local objects. They believe, for example, in the Iron God, the God of Small Pox, the Moon God, the Rain God, the God of Hunting, the Tank God, etc.
Chitagudi, for example, is a goddess whose grace drives away all enemies, all misery, accidents and calamities. She is the giver of health, happiness, peace and plenty. She has various names: Chitagudi, Chitama, Sitama. When misery strikes, calamity falls, or the cattle die in large numbers, she is worshipped. On a Monday in Chaitra, when the Kondh enters the forest for shikar, she is invoked. Occasionally she is invoked at marriages too. Men and women sing to her together.
The sloka for exorcising diseases and evil spirits is usually recited by a bejuni who goes into a trance 'after carrying out elaborate rituals of fasting, worship and offerings. This song is an incantation and is recited like a mantra, in a deep, possessed voice.
Most Kondh songs make liberal use of refrain lines which by their repetitiveness and inherent rhythm add to the music of the song. The refrain line occurs generally at the end of each stanza, the length of which varies from song to song. Sometimes it occurs after each line of song. The boy or girl who is the main singer sings the line or the stanza and then the group picks up the refrain line in chorus. Instances when the entire group sings in chorus, both the stanza and the refrain line, are also not rare. The refrain lines generally have meaning and are actual words. In Love Song 7, at the end of this chapter (The Turmeric Rain), the refrain line for the dhangda is sungunda dulane' he meaning, "particles of lime falling", and for the dhangdi it is replaced by the refrain line, hingagunda dulane hé, meaning "turmeric powder rains everywhere". In another song, the refrain line occurring after each line is sol ningadi toine, meaning the anklets jingle. Sometimes the refrain line may be only meaningless rhythmic sounds like baile, baile or proper nouns like Nilas, Talas. The songs are also so patterned that the same words recur, adding to musicality. For example in the meriah song:
Nangé, papu hilléeh
nangé doha hilléeh
(We commit no sin
We have no guilt)
Then in the lines for the rope, the sword and the axe, each eating the meriah, the repetitive word is "eating" or tinjimjane:
Itā kandā tingimajané,
Meriah kandā tinjimjane
Meriah doruli tinjimjane, etc.
Similarly the following lines in the same meriah song :
Abāré manbé
Batāré manbé
.
(Let all be happy
Let all live in peace)
The Kondhs are fond of jokes and laughter. They can laugh at themselves as much as they can at others. While the tone of a song might be light-hearted and make-believe, there may be an undercurrent of the hard facts of life--the trials of old age or an unfortunate marriage, for example. The Kondh is indeed often capable of an incredible degree of non-seriousness and irreverence. How else can he face the many trials that beset him: premature death, disease, privation, the maraudings of tigers and other wild animals, and exploitation by still wilder men?
Many of the songs are confessions of intense love by the dhangda for the dhangdi or vice versa. Very often, at night, the young man in his dormitory will play his flute or dung-dunga and call out the assigned name of his beloved-a name which, as mentioned earlier, is usually a secret between the lovers. Everything is promised: love, happiness, wealth. Appeal is also made to compassion, for "he will be forlorn like a little girl" if his love is not returned. Passion is hinted at in the blue surge of the moon and there may be a "threat" of "abduction", which is often met initially with mock indignation, then “resignation", and finally acceptance. For does not a dhangdi prize courage, physical stamina and professed love? As the dhangda sings from the boy's dormitory, his dhangdi or lady-love, either alone or along with other girls, sings in response from her dormitory. The usual pattern is one stanza from either side and mostly by way of questions and answers. The singing both from the boys' dormitory and the girls' dormitory is generally in groups and only rarely solo. The songs of the girls are not accompanied by musical instruments. Playing musical instruments is an almost exclusive prerogative of the Kondh boys. And thus the endless dialogues, the ceaseless flow of questions and answers is kept up in the dormitories to the tune of the dung-dungas and the flutes. Love names are assigned: Nilas, Talas, Lembar and Dumbar. The flow of life rushes on despite poverty, misery and death.
It is almost impossible to bring out in translation the peculiar auditory qualities of the Kondh songs. They have to be listened to for real enjoyment. Their imaginativeness is also remarkable. The unmarried Kondh boy is compared simultaneously to a crab and an iron nail - a crab with its crafty movements and distant vision and an iron nail with its capacity to penetrate the softness of female flesh. The songs also employ a large number of onomatopoeic words and the accompaniment of the musical instruments gives them an atmosphere of wistfulness and pathos which is extremely moving.
Among the musical instruments of the Kondhs are several kinds of flutes and the deka which has a round wooden stem about one foot long with gourds at each end and three steel strings stretched along its length. A bow-shaped reed, strung across, is drawn across the wires to produce music. The tone of this instrument very aptly expresses the soft agony inherent in the love songs of the Kondhs:
When you have touched me in love
I am alone no more.
Disappointed, I will be forlorn.
Vacant in mind, a lone jackal
My small hopes will outlive me
Like the jackal's hopes.
The meriah sloka is in three parts. It is the most important invocatory song of the Kondhs and accompanies the sacrifice performed to propitiate the earth-goddess Dhartani or Dharitri. The British civilians mistook the significance of the sacrifice. They thought it was meant to make the turmeric the Kondhs cultivated redder. Actually, the sacrifice is a symbolic fertilization of the earth; the flesh cut away from the meriah (the object of sacrifice) being buried in the fields to this end. The meriah is generally acquired well in advance and preserved and nurtured in the saonta's (village headman's) house till the time of the sacrifice. It is given all possible care and attention. On the day of the sacrifice, the villagers go to the saonta's house and sing the first of the three songs below. They then symbolically purchase the objects. Symbolically too, in sacrificing the meriah, the headman sacrifices one of his sons; for the meriah has become his son.
The second song is sung by the jani (priest) on inflicting the first stab on the meriah. His recitation is usually followed by a chorus in which all the villagers join.
The third song invokes wistful racial memories of an ancient Kondhisthan and prays to Dhartani to bestow prosperity and plenty on the entire village community. The reference to Durga, the Hindu goddess, is intriguing.
The total rejection of any sense of guilt or criminality, considering that human sacrifice was involved in the ritual not so long ago, is a notable feature of the songs. The sacrifice is treated as a sanctified ceremonial offering to the gods and goddesses who have to be appeased and propitiated so as to enable the community to live in peace and plenty, with ample crops, and protected against the depredations of tigers and other wild animals.
The meriah or the object of sacrifice is generally preserved and nutured in the saonta’s (village headman’s) house long before the sacrifice. All poissibel attention is endowed on it. The villagers go to the house of the, saonta on the day of the sacrifice, sing the first song and then symbolically purchase the object.
O' our saonta
Our village elder
Have you baby kutras
Have you got tiny fowls
Have you got sons?
The season has come
The season of Dhartani
The earth-goddess.
Give us young fowls
Baby kutras
We will buy
The following sloka is recited by the village priest and the first stab inflicted on the object. The priest's recitation is generally followed by the chorus joined in by all the villagers.
Here we sacrifice the enemy,
Here we sacrifice the meriah,
The gods eat up this sacrifice,
The enemy is thus worshipped.
Let there be no collective loss,
Let not tigers prowl;
The gods need so many bribes,
So many offerings,
Let there be no dark forests,
No calamity
Let all be happy
Let all live in peace.
Let no famine
Visit our land,
Plague our people,
Our land and the world—
Let them be in peace.
In plenty,
Like the siali and gulchi creepers,
Our crops flourish.
This offering we make
To Thee.
The hills of Kandarani, Tinirani,
Rekamali, Kulerpani,
Kodihinmadi, Sobahanmadi,
Pandramadi, Dandramedi,
Bayamadi, Hatimudi,
Guamadi, Andamadi,
Pasapatia, Sodtatia,
Lenjuwali, Raskakota,*
They are our home,
So many offerings.
Let onions grow well,
Garlics grow well.
We commit no sin,
We have no guilt.
We only feed the gods.
*These are names of hills, the original birth-places of Kondh culture. The hills are very high, densely wooded and hardly approachable. They are in Koraput district of Odisha.
To you, our god,
This offering.
Let no creepers enmesh the head,
Nor thorns prick,
O' God.
This rope you have made
To tie the meriah,
This sword and the axe you have made—
They cat the meriah,
We have no sin,
We have done no wrong,
No crime have we committed.
Your blacksmith has fashioned
This axe
.
Durga* eats,
Durga cats everything
Below: Dhartani, the quiet ancient earth;
Above: Dharmu, the god of justice;
And we offer
Only a small offering,
Insignificant.
The land will be happy,
The god will be happy.
Let them prosper.
The lance eats (the sacrifice),
O'God, we offer you
So many bribes.
*The reference to Durga, the goddess of sakti or energy, primordial essence of life, is interesting.
Appeasement of the Spirit of the Dead
On the 8th, 9th, or 10th day after a person's death, the relatives perform ceremonial ablution. The Jani invokes the dead man's spirit by name; four or five fowls are offered and this sloka is recited.
This we offer to you.
We can,
Because we are still alive;
If not,
How could we offer at all,
And what?
We give a small baby fowl,
Take this and go away
Whichever way you came.
Go back, return.
Don't inflict pain on us
After your departure.
The chorus for the dead is heart-rending.The mourners pick at their own cheeks, make them bleed, and sing in chorus, swaying to the rhythm of the song.
Did some evil spirit
Devour you, eclipse you?
Alas Alas!
What justice! What pain!
Did some sorcerer kill you?
Alas! Alas
Or did we ourselves
Kill you ?
Where did you hide, dear one?
We do not know
Who killed you, ate you.
Let our sigh, our curse
Be on his head;
Let him die accursed
Like you.
This is a sloka invoking the blessings of the goddess Chitagudi or Sitagudi. When there is disease in the village or an epidemic among the cattle, Chitagudi is worshipped. In the month of Chaitra, when the Kondh enters the forest for the hunt, her blessings are also invoked. The worship is generally held on a Monday.
Mother Sita Goddess, mother, elder sister,
Mother Laxmi, elder sister,
Thou, the protector of the house,
Thou, the goddess of the house,
All my blessings and wealth
Due to you,
All my health-excellence
Due to you,
Mother, the earth goddess below,
Dharmu above,
We, all your sons,
Are in peace due to your blessings,
The sharp pirka grass in the forest,
The swarming tigers in the forest,
The fear of tigers in the forest,
The fear of snakes in the forest.
[Protect us from these, O Goddess.]
This sloka has many esoteric references which are not clear. There is mention of the names of the Kondh Kalisi or bejunis who became sprit-possessed and recite the sloka. The lines are cryptic and there are references to the esoteric ritual. “Two girls, two mattresses, sixteen horns, sixteen worships, black cow, red cow and thin thread, red rope, Dikirai, Paikrai, Masutrai, Manguduguru, Anguduguru” seem to be references to and names of well-known and traditional sorcerers or kalisis or tantriks. The last two lines refer to local hills. The lines “when alive counted/when dead remembered” express the popular Kondh philosophy of life. After death the remembrance is by a stone pointed if male and flat if female) on the village street.
Earth-goddess below,
Dharmu above.
Black cow, red cow,
Dikirai, Paikrai.
Go away, green,
Go away.
Sixteen horns,
Sixteen worships,
They survived
They sang.
Witness is Masutrai.
He could,
He breathed.
He said:
Two girls,
Two mattresses,
Thin thread,
Red rope.
When alive, counted;
When dead, remembered.
Manguduguru, Anguduguru,
I will cut him.
I will shrivel him up.
Repu Pijli, Patu Pinjni,
Kula dara, Manamej.
This is normally sung by men and women together at the village meeting-place. The village and the soil of the village are sacred to the Kondhs. There the dead are buried. The soil yields crops. But the hill-slopes (dongars) have to be cleared, burnt out by fire so that the ash will fertilise the land and improve its quality - system of cultivation the Kondhs call podu. The Kondh is not a modern agriculturist but he brings a lot of artistry to the cultivation of his crops. This is a primitive agriculture and often results in destruction of valuable forest, but to the Kondh this is a way of life sanctified by generation of practice. Attempts at putting an end to podu and bringing the Kondha down to the valley from the hills and settling them in government colonies have met with very limited success. The village is sacred. Its soil is sacred. It is where history is. It is where the ancestors and their spirits dwell.
The stream is full
Our age equal
Come, dear brother.
If you are the son-in-law
If you are not
Come, dear brother.
Calling you in love
Calling you with open heart
Come, dear brother.
When in our backyards
Maize and millet
Swing in happiness,
Come, dear brother,
Come all you son-in-laws
All you brothers-in-law
We will have fun
In the backyards,
Come, dear brothers
.
With the help of all the sons-in-law
We will make a bonfire
We will spread the compost,
Come, dear brother.
We will burn the dongar
We will grow many crops
Come, dear brother.
This is sung only by the men-folk during the Chaitra festival. For the Kondh, the ancestor is an ever-present reality and not a shadow. A man is not dead and gone. His spirit, his duma oversees and overhears everything in the village. There are good and bad, benevolent and malevolent dumas. Even tigers and other animals are believed to have dumas after death. The Kondh speaks lovingly of dead ancestors; on several occasions offers them food, drink, fowl, and worships and prays to them for the health and happiness of the family.
One festival will follow
Another
The never-ending cycle.
In the festival
We remember the ancestors
Invoke them to come.
Shameful not to be hospitable
To those departed.
And yet
Our hospitality
Won't keep them with us.
For their chosen and true place
Is the funeral ground.
If we cry
Dharmu will come to us.
If we join our hands
In prayer to him
He will come to us.
After anointed bath
Wearing new clothes
I tell him my prayers,
The music plays
The incense burns
I pray to him.
Lord of the world
Keep us in happiness
Keep us alive,
Eat my offerings
Eat my offerings and bless me.
The black fowl I rear
On so much rice
I offer you, I offer you
Be happy with me, give me your grace
Give me the roots of herbs
I will cure men-folk
Of diseases.
Anthropologists refer to the fear element inherent in all religious faith. This is more true for the primitive. Exposed to all the vagaries of nature, the inclement weather, diseases and wild animals, the Kondh, like most primitives, prays to the 'Dharmu', the Almighty to keep them alive, grant them peace, plenty and happiness. The 'bribe' is the offering given to him. The black fowi is the most coveted offering and they implicitly believe that the Deity is capable or enjoying the food. The novelist Gopinath Mohanty once told me the story of a kondh in Koraput District who cut the head of the fowl and pressed the bleeding head to a photograph of Vinobaji. saying all the time: 'Take this, take this Bino Baba, this is for you!
We have come
All the dhangdas
No laziness no worry
All our work
Nicely done.
We are friends and brothers
We are tied in love
Nothing is done
If there is no mutual love.
Loving words beget love
Hostile words hostility
Hostile words hurt the heart.
Knowing the mantra
You will be authority.
Salt business quite nice
Dried fish business quite nice
I have grown garlic
In my garden
If I loved you
I would give you.
We are singing
For love, in love,
Voices get tired, singing.
.
Voices burn low, singing
Yet the heart craves
For more songs.
And yet more.
And our song
Floats on to the authorities.