Ekka Gotra

What “Gotra” means for the Oraon

Oraon families call their clan a gotra (Roy 1915, pp. 325, 335): a totemic clan passed from father to children, within which no one may marry, though a man may marry into his mother's clan. It is not a Vedic gotra and names no rishi.

Name and Origin

The clan is named after its totem, the tortoise. Roy recorded the Oraon story of how it began: an Oraon of olden times was about to catch a tortoise when the tortoise cried out, 'I am your jat', one of your own people. The man let it go, and his descendants came to form the Tortoise clan (Roy 1915, p. 328). Roy adds that Oraon clan stories tell of help or protection between an ancestor and the totem, never of descent from it. Another tradition he recorded, which he thought was worked out after the fact rather than remembered, says the Tortoise clan began on the banks of the Subarnarekha river (pp. 309-310). These are traditions, not dated history.

Historical Journey

No written history of the Ekka clan itself is known. Roy listed it as Ekka (tortoise) in his classification of Oraon totems (1915, p. 326) and found the clan in the life of particular villages. At Oraon jatras, the gatherings where villages meet to dance, the young men of a village often carried a wooden or brass figure as its emblem, and before they set out the village priest marked it with vermilion and offered a chicken and rice-beer to it. In some villages the figure was the totem of the Bhuinhars, the families of the first settlers: the Bhuinhars of Amboa in Lohardaga thana belonged to the Tortoise clan, and their young men carried two wooden tortoises and a wooden pig to the jatras (pp. 338-340). Roy thought such emblems had been on their way to becoming totem deities when the process stopped. In the 20th century the name became widely known through Albert Ekka, a soldier from a Kurukh family of Gumla district, awarded the Param Vir Chakra after he was killed in the war of 1971.

How the Gotra Is Kept

Two members of the Ekka clan may not marry, though an Oraon may marry into his mother's clan (Roy 1915, p. 330). The clan passes from father to children. An Oraon wife keeps her father's clan and its rules, and keeps the rules of her husband's clan only while she lives in his village (p. 337). Roy's rule for every Oraon totem is that members should not eat, keep, kill or hurt it, or use anything made from it (p. 330). He also wrote that by 1915 the clan rules were fading except in marriage, and that many Oraons did not know the clans of their mother's father or their aunts' husbands (pp. 329-330). Oraon clan names are now used as surnames. No family deity is tied to the Ekka clan in the sources checked; Roy says the Oraon hold no ceremonies for their totems.

Presence Across Regions

Notable Personalities

Stories and Legends