Birhor

Clans and Kinship

Roy (1925) describes two kinds of grouping. For the food-quest the Birhors live in tandas, bands of three or four to about ten families who hunt and move together or settle for a time near a forest. The families of a tanda usually belong to different clans, and a family may leave one tanda for another. Each tanda has a naya, its priest and headman, held to be chosen by the spirits and in practice usually the son of the last naya, with a diguar who serves him at sacrifices. Tandas join for the great hunt (disum sendra), and men from several tandas meet at weddings and at panchayats on breaches of tribal rules. For marriage the tribe is divided into exogamous clans called gotras, mostly named after an animal, plant or object; there is no organisation of a clan as a whole, though members of a clan in nearby tandas meet for sacrifices to their clan spirits. Roy divides the tribe by way of life into the Uthlu or Bhuliya, who wander, and the Jaghi or Thania, who are settled.

The 37 clans Roy (1925, pp. 90-92) had been able to find, in his order and with his glosses; he says the list is not complete, and that Risley gave only eight (Hembrom, Jegseria, Mahali, Nagpuria, Singpuria, Liluai, Nag and Siruar). A few names are of places (Nagpuria, Toriar) and a few are names of other tribes or castes (Bhat, Bhuiya, Goar, Khangar, Kharea, Mahali, Modi); for these Roy's explanation is given in the note, not as a totem. Members of a clan do not wear badges of the totem, but an emblem of it is set beside the sacrificer when the clan spirits are worshipped.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh

  Listed as: Birhor

  Entered as 'Birhul, Birhor' in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra (Census 2011 tables).

The Birhor are also a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG), a group within the Scheduled Tribes given special attention, in Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal, by the government list reproduced on Wikipedia from a 2019 press release; the category has had that name since 2006. The ST listings were checked against the 2011 census table of each state and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked.

Checked on 2026-11-06 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Roy (1925) found that the Birhors could tell little of their past beyond that they had always been Birhors, 'jungle men', as an earlier account by W. H. P. Driver (1888) put it. Some call themselves Bir Mundas, 'jungle Mundas'; others told Roy they were nearer kin to the Santals, and Roy found their speech closer to Mundari but with some Santali features, among them hor for 'man'. Clan legends tell of the ancestor of each clan rather than of the tribe: the Chauli Hembrom are said to be the first clan, their ancestor having risen from under the ground with rice on his head, and the Murum say a nilgai carried their newborn ancestor through the woods until his head-dress caught in a chop creeper, and that since then the Birhors have gathered chop and made rope.

History

Roy (1925) places the Birhors in the jungles of the Palamau, Hazaribagh, Ranchi and Singhbhum districts, and quotes Driver's account of 1888 and the district gazetteers, by which the 1911 census counted 2,340 Birhors in the province, 1,024 of them in Hazaribagh and 927 in Ranchi. Majumdar (1937) describes their country as the hills and jungles on the eastern and north-eastern edge of the Chota Nagpur plateau. He found their numbers falling, and put this down in part to the clearing of the forests of Chota Nagpur and the loss of game and forest produce. In later lists the government counts the Birhor among the particularly vulnerable tribal groups, a category that took its present name in 2006.

Faith and Worship

Roy (1925) describes Singbonga as the creator and the head of the Birhor spirits, identified with the Sun though not with its body, who is asked for game or honey before a hunt and is offered a white goat or fowl to avert danger. The mother-goddesses Devi Mai and Burhi Mai bring luck in health, children and food; with them are hill spirits, the spirits of the ancestors and some beast-gods. When an Uthlu band moves, the spirits, kept in stones and pegs, are carried in a basket by a young man walking ahead of the party, and the clan spirits (ora bongas or buru bongas) receive sacrifices with an emblem of the clan's totem beside them.

Customs

Hunting is the most valued work of Birhor men. Hunters drive game, especially monkeys, into long nets of chop fibre stretched between trees, and the naya's share of the game and the order of a hunt are fixed by custom; women may join the everyday hunts but not the great hunt (Roy 1925). Families make rope of chop fibre for sale or barter in the villages and markets, and gather honey and wax. Uthlu bands move from forest to forest for about two years before returning to where they began, and stay in one place only in the rains.

Stories and Legends