Kharia

Clans and Kinship

Among the Dudh and Dhelki Kharia the exogamous, patrilineal, totemic clan is the working social unit: its members believe they descend from one male ancestor whose name is forgotten, regard one another as brothers, and call a marriage within the clan gotra badh, 'clan-murder'. Many clans have branches, often named after the places where they settled. The two sections between them count eleven clans as original, the Dudh nine and the Dhelki eight. Some clans have set parts at tribal gatherings: among the Dhelki a man of the Muru clan serves as pani-diha, the 'water-giver', and a man of the Samad clan as bhandari at feasts and when an outcast is taken back; among the Dudh the hereditary kartaha, head of a parha (a federation of villages of several clans), must be of the Dungdung, Kulu or Samad clan. Each settlement has a priest, the dihuri among the Hill Kharia and the kalo, baiga or pahan among the others, who with the elders forms the village panch. The Hill Kharia of Mayurbhanj, Roy and Roy found, had all but lost the clan system: some named a clan, but it did not bar marriage, and only close kinship did. The Hill Kharia of Manbhum and Singhbhum keep exogamous clans of their own.

The first eleven are the clans that Roy and Roy (1937, pp. 144-145) say the Dudh and Dhelki between them regard as the original clans of the tribe, in their order, with the totems they give on pp. 127-131 and 143. Their glosses are not always the same: the quail is given for both Kerketta (Samad) and Tetetehoin (Bage), and Topno is a bird on p. 128 and a tree on pp. 143-144. The last nine are clan names the authors heard among the Hill Kharia (pp. 125, 143); one more, a bird, could not be read in the scan. The authors list many minor clans besides, and point out that Risley's list of 34 Kharia clans (1891) counts one clan under several names.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

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

  Listed as: Kharia

  Entered as 'Kharia, Dhelki Kharia, Dudh Kharia, Hill Kharia' in Jharkhand and Bihar; as 'Kharia, Kharian, Berga Kharia, Dhelki Kharia, Dudh Kharia, Erenga Kharia, Munda Kharia, Oraon Kharia, Khadia, Pahari Kharia' in Odisha; and in West Bengal within the joint entry 'Lodha, Kheria, Kharia' (Census 2011 tables).

Checked against the 2011 census table of each state and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked. The government's list of particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs), as reproduced on Wikipedia from a 2019 press release, names the Hill Kharia for Bihar and Jharkhand and the Kharia for Odisha. Kharias who went to work in Assam and Jalpaiguri (Roy and Roy 1937) are not in Assam's list: the Assam table has no Kharia 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

Kharia tradition, as Roy and Roy (1937) recorded it, says the people once lived at Ruidas-Patna under a Kharia chief, who left with his elder sons for Chota Nagpur and settled in Biru pargana. His younger sons, left behind with their mother as sucklings, followed later up the valley of the South Koel, and their descendants were called Dudh ('milk') Kharias. The Dudh say the Dhelki take their name from del, 'to come', because they came first; another account says the Dudh took their name because they kept stricter rules about food. The Dudh also tell how their nine original clans began: nine brothers out hunting each met a different creature or thing at a pool and found it in his share of the meat, and their father gave each line that name.

History

Roy and Roy (1937) trace the Dudh Kharias' route along the South Koel through Palkot, Basia and Kolebira to Biru, where they found the Dhelki, who moved on west and south into Jashpur and Gangpur as the Dudh followed. Each Dudh clan founded its own first villages, its bhuinhari villages, such as Semra for the Soreng and Bongloe for the Dungdung, and the men of a clan may be called by them. The Hill Kharia kept to the Simlipal hills and the hills of Dhalbhum and Manbhum, living by gathering forest produce and hunting, with some shifting cultivation; those of Mayurbhanj, the authors found, had lost the Kharia language. Some groups had long before settled in Bankura and Midnapore and taken up Hindu ways, and by the 1930s many Kharias also worked in Assam and the Jalpaiguri district.

Faith and Worship

Roy and Roy (1937) give Ponomosor, Bero, Giring and Bhagwan as names by which Kharias call the Supreme Being, identified with the Sun; a white cock or white goat is offered to him when an outcast family is taken back into the tribe. The village priest, the dihuri, kalo, baiga or pahan, makes the sacrifices to the spirits of the village. In some Hill Kharia families that had taken up Hindu ways, a Vaishnava gosain initiated a young man before his marriage. Christian missions had worked among the Dudh and Dhelki for about fifty years when the authors wrote, and of the 146,037 Kharias of Chota Nagpur and Orissa, 63,725 then professed Christianity (p. 10).

Customs

Adult marriage is the rule in all three sections; cross-cousin marriage is allowed, but marriage between the children of two brothers is forbidden. Kharias usually marry outside their own village, though this is no longer a rule, probably, the authors suggest, because the members of a clan once lived together (Roy and Roy 1937, pp. 225-226). An outcast is taken back after a day's fast and a sacrifice to the Supreme Being, when he drinks a little of the blood in turmeric water, given by the pani-diha among the Dhelki, the kartaha among the Dudh and the dandia among the Hill Kharia (p. 180).

Stories and Legends