Ho

Clans and Kinship

Ho society is divided into some fifty or sixty killis (Majumdar 1937), exogamous and patrilineal; Risley named forty. Many are named after an animal, plant or object, but Majumdar found no worship of these and few food rules: the main rule is that members of a killi do not marry, and killis that split from one another may still not intermarry, such as the divisions of the Purty, Jamuda with Honhaga and Khandium, Malgundi with Kaika, and Charad with Charabayad. A village (hatu) may hold one killi or several, and each killi buries its dead in its own sasan. A killi has its own council of elders, chosen by its members, and in matters of religion and kinship a Ho is more bound by his killi than by his village. The village has a munda, appointed by the government from the khuntkatti (founding) families and helped by dakuas, and a deuri, the village priest. Villages are grouped into pirs, of which there were 26 in the Kolhan, each or part of each under a manki who answers for its villages. Older marriages were mostly made between nearby villages within a pir; by the 1930s they reached across the whole Kolhan.

Majumdar's Appendix II, 'Origin of Clans' (1937, pp. 205-208), in his order, then Sidu, named in his Lugum story, and the eight killis he names as worshipping Katumarang rather than Marang Bonga (p. 136). The 'totem' column gives the meaning Majumdar gives for the name. Majumdar counts fifty or sixty killis in the Kolhan and says Risley named forty, so this is not a complete list. Spellings are Majumdar's (Purty, Kalundi); Barai-Munda is restored from an OCR misreading.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar

  Listed as: Ho

Listed as a Scheduled Tribe, under the name Ho, in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar (the 2011 census table of each state; Wikipedia's compilation of the order agrees). Amendments after 2011 were not checked. Hos who went to work in the tea gardens of Assam (Majumdar 1937) are not in Assam's list: the Assam table has no Ho entry.

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

The Hos keep a tradition that they came into the Kolhan from the country of the Mundas, with whom they share much of their speech and custom. Roy (1912) found they had no tradition of the Nagbansi Rajas, and concluded that they parted from the Mundas before the Mundas settled the central plateau; older books call them Larka Kol. Their story of the beginning, as Majumdar (1937) gives it, is that Singbonga destroyed all living things with fire, but the river spirit Nage Era had hidden a brother and sister under the water, and from them, after Singbonga taught them to brew illi (rice-beer), came the ancestors of all peoples. Majumdar also gives stories that place the origin of many killis on the journey into the Kolhan, and notes that its hills have Mundari names while some old tanks and village priests point to earlier settlers such as the Bhuiya.

History

Majumdar (1937) traces the Hos' dealings with the British to quarrels with the neighbouring chiefs, who asked the British for help; the Hos acknowledged British rule in 1821, and in 1831 joined the rising of the Mundas, which their songs still remember. The Kolhan came under the direct management of the government in 1836. The first settlement, in 1837, counted 622 villages and assessed rent by the plough; later settlements followed in 1854, 1867, 1897 and 1917-18, and by the 1930s there were 917 villages. The government worked through the mankis and mundas, who received a commission on the rents they collected. Forest rules were brought in from 1892, and mines and a branch railway (1923-24) opened the Kolhan to traders and settlers from outside.

Faith and Worship

Majumdar (1937) names Singbonga as the supreme god of the Hos, who taught them to make rice-beer. Dessauli is the god of the village, with a fixed seat in or near it, who keeps away disease, gives rain and guards the harvest; the deuri offers him fowls at the Maghe festival, and each family offers a goat at the Hero festival. Marang Buru, also called Marang Bonga or Disum Bonga, is worshipped in some villages and by the Purty, while some killis worship Katumarang instead. The ading, the most sacred part of each house, belongs to the family's ancestor spirits.

Deities named in the sources: Singbonga, Dessauli, Marang Buru

Customs

Marriage is outside the killi and is made with a bride-price; the regular form, andi, is held around the Maghe festival. A bride must be formally admitted to her husband's family and killi before she may enter the family ading or take part in the killi's festivals (Majumdar 1937, pp. 57-59). The village munda looks after the village forest, fixes the dates of festivals with the elders of the killi, attends marriage talks, and in many villages keeps the young people's dormitory in his house.

Festivals

Stories and Legends