Munda

Clans and Kinship

The Munda clan is the killi (Roy writes kili). Killis are patrilineal and exogamous, and most are totemic: members are held to descend from one ancestor, marry outside the killi, and will not eat or harm the totem. As killis grew they split, so that the Soe and Purthi killis, for example, have several branches. A village (hatu) was founded by one family and its kin; their descendants, the khuntkattidars or bhuinhars, held the village land in common, and only they may bury their dead in the village sasan, under stone slabs (sasandiri) that Roy calls their title-deeds. Others who came to live in the village, the parja horoko, had no such right. The secular headman is the munda and the priest the pahan. Villages that grew from one parent village form a parha with its own council (panch). In the older Bhuinhari country west of the Ranchi-Chaibassa road a parha is all of one killi and its panch has a standing Raja and officers; in the khuntkatti country to the south and south-east a parha may hold several killis, and its head is a hereditary Pat Munda. There, groups of villages formed manki pattis under a manki, who collected the villages' dues for the overlord. Some families in the east have turned killi names into gotras, so that Sandi became Sandil.

The first 21 are the original kilis in the order Roy gives them (1912, pp. 71-72, note), as printed except for plain OCR errors in the scan (Dmgdung read as Dungdung, Hemromt as Hemrom, and Kujur and Tuyu restored). Roy gives a totem only where he tells a kili's story; Risley's glosses (1891, Appendix I) are added in the notes as his. The rest are other kilis Roy names on pp. 231-238, which he says is not a full list. Roy's Appendix I also gives another list of 21 founders' kilis (among them Barwa, Lugun, Budu, Kaua, Dhechua, Jojobar, Bagsuria and Dahang) from a modern version of the legend told by a Munda Christian, which he calls less authentic.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

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

  Listed as: Munda

  Entered as 'Munda, Patar' in Jharkhand and Bihar, 'Munda, Kaur' in Tripura, and 'Munda, Munda Lohara, Munda Mahalis, Nagabanshi Munda, Oriya Munda' in Odisha, which also has a separate entry 'Mundari' (Census 2011 tables).

Checked against the 2011 census table of each state, which names the notified tribes, and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked. Mundas who went to work in Assam and the Duars from the late nineteenth century (Roy 1912; Majumdar 1937) are not in Assam's list: the Assam table has no Munda 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

Risley (1891) took the name Munda to be a Sanskrit word for a village headman, used by the tribe as its own name; among themselves the Mundas are Horoko, from horo, 'man'. Munda tradition, as Roy (1912) collected it, tells how Sing Bonga made the first pair from a bird's egg and later destroyed mankind with fire, how one pair, hidden by the spirit Nage Era, survived as Lutkum Haram and Lutkum Buria, and how their descendants wandered from the north-west until a leader named Risa Munda brought the Mundas of the 21 kilis up the valley of the North Koel to Muruma, on the Chota Nagpur plateau. Roy read the story as a slow migration over generations, and traced its route by Mundari village names and old burial stones along the river. The Hos, he thought, had parted from the Mundas before this.

History

Roy (1912) records a long series of Munda risings against outside landlords' encroachment on their land rights: in Tamar in 1789, under Bishun Manki in 1797, under Dukan Shahi Manki in 1807, under Rudu and Konta Munda in 1819-20, and the rising of the Sonepur Mundas in 1831-32, after which the government set up the South-Western Frontier Agency. In 1895 Birsa Munda, a young man of Chalkad in Tamar, began to preach a new faith and drew great crowds; he was jailed that year, and in 1899-1900 his followers rose and attacked the police station at Khunti on 7 January 1900. Birsa was captured and died in Ranchi jail while his case was pending. The government then ordered a survey and settlement of the Munda country, begun in 1902, which recorded the khuntkatti rights of founding families where descent could be traced, and a new tenancy law for Chota Nagpur followed in 1908 (Bengal Act VI of 1908).

Faith and Worship

Roy (1912) describes Sing Bonga, the Sun, as the supreme deity of the Mundas, named with the panch in the oath 'Sing Bonga on high and the Panch on earth'. Below him are Marang Buru and the spirits of the sacred grove (sarna), the village boundaries, the hills, streams and fields, whom the pahan propitiates, and the spirits of the family's dead, whom each householder worships in the ading, the sacred inner room of the house. By Roy's time many Mundas had become Christians, and a small number followed the teaching of Birsa.

Deities named in the sources: Sing Bonga, Marang Buru

Customs

A Munda marries outside his killi, and the maternal uncles of bride and groom have important parts in the wedding (Roy 1912). The bones of the dead are laid under the family's sasandiri in the sasan of the killi's village, and the bones of a Munda who dies away from home are carried back there where possible. The akhra, an open ground under an old tree in the middle of the village with stone slabs for seats, is where the panch sits and the young people dance on moonlit nights. The parha panch hears breaches of the marriage rules, disputes over burial in a sasan, inheritance and partition, and boundary disputes between villages.

Festivals

Stories and Legends

Notable Personalities