Oraon

Clans and Kinship

Oraon kinship rests on the totemic clan, which Roy (1915) records as the gotra. Clans are patrilineal and exogamous: a man may not marry within his own clan, but he may marry into his mother's. Members do not believe they descend from the totem, but they may not eat, use, harm or kill it, and the men of a tree clan will not go under its shade or cut or burn its wood; where the totem is a necessity the rule is eased. Roy found the clan mattering now mainly for marriage. Each village has a pahan or baiga (priest), his helper the pujar or panbhara, and a mahato (secular headman); in some villages the pahan is both. The descendants of a village's founders are its bhuinhars. Several villages, generally seven, nine, twelve, twenty-one or twenty-two, form a parha, a confederacy with a council (the parha panch) and villages that bear titles such as Raja, Dewan and Kotwar, each with its own flag and badges, shown at the jatras, the dance gatherings of several parhas. The young men's house, the jonkh-erpa or dhumkuria, admits boys at about eleven or twelve; they pass through three grades under a dhangar-mahato and his kotwar, and the girls have a dormitory of their own.

Roy's list of Oraon totems 'so far as known to us' (1915, pp. 325-327), in his order, with his classes as the division. Names are as Roy prints them, with plain OCR errors corrected (Bando, Garwa, Kokro, Khalkho, Beah, Kusuwa); Kerketta follows Roy and Roy (1937). Roy notes that Risley's list (1891) gives some clans twice, once by the Kurukh name and once by the Hindi (Lakra and Bagh, Khes and Dhan, Ekka and Kachua, Khetta and Nagbans); where Risley glosses a name differently, the note says so.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

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

  Listed as: Oraon

  Entered as 'Oraon, Dhangar (Oraon)' in Jharkhand and Bihar, 'Oraon, Dhangar, Uran' in Odisha, 'Oraon, Dhanka, Dhangad' in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, 'Oraon, Dhangad' in Maharashtra and 'Oraon' in West Bengal (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. Tripura's list has a separate entry 'Orang', which Wikipedia links to the Oraon; it is not counted here. Oraons who settled in Assam and the Duars, many of them as labourers (Roy 1915), are not in Assam's list: the Assam table has no Oraon 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

Roy (1915) writes that the Oraons call themselves Kurukh, a name some trace to a legendary king Karakh of the old Karus country (now Shahabad in Bihar); Oraon is the name others use, and Dhangar, the local Hindi word for an unmarried young man or labourer (jonkh in Kurukh), was once used for the whole tribe. Gait, quoted in Haddon's introduction, recorded their tradition of coming from the Carnatic up the Narmada, and found their language closest to Kannada. Oraon tradition, as Roy gives it, places the people on the Rohtas plateau, whose fort they held under a king of their own until an enemy took it during the Khaddi (Sarhul) festival, when the men were feasting and the women fought at the gates with their rice-pounders. From Rohtas one branch went to the Rajmahal hills and the other down the Son and up the North Koel into Chota Nagpur.

History

Roy (1915) places the Oraons, with the Mundas, at the coronation of Phani Mukut Rai, the first Nagbansi Raja of Chota Nagpur, by the tradition of the Raja's own family. Under the later landlords Oraon cultivators lost much of their land: a register of their bhuinhari (originally reclaimed) fields was made in 1869, there were agrarian disturbances among the western Oraons in 1889 and 1890, and some Oraons joined the Birsa movement of 1896-1900. Laws of 1903 and 1908 and a record of rights completed in 1910 gave some protection. Many families meanwhile went to work in Assam, the Duars and the Sundarbans, and many settled there. The 1911 census, which Roy quotes, counted 864,152 Oraons, and 112,738 Christian Oraons in the province of Bihar and Orissa.

Faith and Worship

Roy (1915) names Dharmes as the supreme god of the Oraons, sworn by in the oath 'Dharmes in heaven and the Panch on earth'; in some versions of their legends the name Rama is used for him. The pahan propitiates the spirits of the village. At Sarhul, which Oraons hold to be the marriage of the Earth with the Sun, the pahan and his wife perform a mock marriage; until it is held no Oraon manures his fields or eats the new fruit and leaves of the season. The 1911 census counted 112,738 Christian Oraons in Bihar and Orissa, and others returned themselves as Hindus.

Deities named in the sources: Dharmes

Customs

Clan exogamy is the main marriage rule, and Roy (1915, p. 247) found it was thought better not to marry within one's own village even across clans. The young men of the village sleep in the dhumkuria, where they learn their duties and the dances; the maidens give them sleeping mats each year, and seven days before Karam the girls sow barley in sand in their own dormitory and later present the shoots to the young men. In some villages, Haddon notes in his introduction, the bones of those who die between Sarhul and the yearly bone-drowning (har-bori) in Pus are kept in a small pot under an upright stone, the pulkhi, set up for each clan near the village.

Festivals

Stories and Legends