Santal

Clans and Kinship

The Santal clan is the pari (Santali paris). Paris are patrilineal and exogamous: a Santal may not marry within his or her own pari, and may marry into the mother's pari but not into the mother's sub-clan (Risley 1891). There are twelve. In Kolean's account the seven sons of the first pair became the first seven, Hasdak, Murmu, Kisku, Hembrom, Marndi, Soren and Tudu, and five more were made later, Baske, Besra, Pauria, Chore and Bedea, the last of them since lost. Each pari is divided into sub-clans called khunt. The note added to Kolean's account in 1887 says each pari was divided into twelve in Champa, and that Kisku and Marndi, and Tudu and Besra, do not intermarry because of quarrels there. Each family has its own abge and house (orak) bongas, whose names it does not tell to others. A village is run by the manjhi (headman) with the paranik, the jog manjhi and jog paranik (who look after the young people), the godet (who calls the village together), the naeke (priest) and the kudam naeke. Villages are grouped under a pargana, helped by des manjhis, and an appeal goes from the village council to the pargana's council and finally to the gathering of the whole country at the great hunt (Bodding 1942, pp. 104-106, 128).

The twelve paris in the order of Kolean's account (Bodding 1942, p. 9); Risley (1891, p. 226) gives the same twelve in the same order, writing Saren for Soren. Bodding's text gives no totems: the totems here are Risley's alone (his Appendix I, and his text for Pauria and Chore), and he gives none for Kisku, Tudu and Baske. The callings and forts in the notes come from Kolean's account of Champa (Bodding, pp. 10, 20) and are tradition. Risley's appendix also lists the khunt of each pari; Nij, Sada, Manjhi-Khil and Naiki-Khil recur in several. Spellings follow Bodding, except Chore, which is Risley's form.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Tripura

  Listed as: Santal

Listed as a Scheduled Tribe, under the name Santal, in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Tripura (the 2011 census table of each state; Wikipedia's compilation of the order agrees). Santals in Assam, many of them descended from workers taken to the tea gardens in the colonial period, are not in Assam's list: the Assam table has no Santal entry. Wikipedia, citing the central OBC list, says they are an OBC in Assam, which this page has not confirmed; their demand for ST status there was reported in 2022. Amendments to the order 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

Skrefsrud, as Risley (1891) reports him, derived the name Santal from Saontar, after the country of Saont in Midnapore where the people lived for some generations, and said they had earlier been called Kharwar; Dalton thought the place more likely took its name from the people. Among themselves Santals use hor, 'man'. The ancestors' story, as the guru Kolean told it to Skrefsrud in 1871 (Bodding 1942), begins with Thakur Jiu making two birds, Has and Hasil, the goose and its mate. An earthworm brought up earth onto the back of a tortoise, the birds nested in sirom grass, and from their two eggs came a boy and a girl, Haram and Ayo, whom some call Pilcu Haram and Pilcu Budhi. They lived in Hihiri Pipiri; their descendants survived a fire-rain, were made into paris on the plain of Sasan beda, and lived long in Champa. Risley gives the story in brief and links Champa with the Chai and Champa parganas of Hazaribagh, where Dalton recorded a tradition of a Santal fort. Bodding notes that most of the places cannot be identified with certainty.

History

Kolean's account says the Santals lived in Champa for ages under rulers of their own, until they were driven out and moved on east; Risley (1891) read the traditions as the memory of a real movement east from Hazaribagh towards the Santal Parganas. Old Jugia's eyewitness account, printed with Kolean's, tells how debt to moneylenders and the loss of land to new landlords brought the people of the Santal Parganas to the rising of 1855, the Hul. Sido of Bhognadih, in whom people said Thakur had appeared, and his brother Kanhu proclaimed war on the landlords and moneylenders; after fighting at Pakaur, Maheshpur and other places the rising was put down, Sido died in the fighting and Kanhu was hanged (Bodding 1942, pp. 189-192). In 1925 Raghunath Murmu of Mayurbhanj devised the Ol Chiki script for Santali, and Santali was added to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003.

Faith and Worship

In Kolean's teaching, as Bodding gives it, Thakur is the creator, unseen, who measures out each life, and the bongas (spirits) came to the Santals later. The Sun bonga is the great bonga, followed by the jom sim bonga, Marang Buru, Jaher era (the Lady of the sacred grove), the Five, Gosae era, the Pargana and Manjhi haram bongas, and each family's house and abge bongas. Every village is to have a jaher, a piece of the old forest with sal trees and at least one mahua, at the end of the village street, and a manjhi than in the street for the Manjhi haram, the spirit of the old headman. Today some Santals are Christian, some Hindu, and many keep the old religion, which in West Bengal is often called Sari Dharam and elsewhere usually Sarna (Wikipedia, citing Orans 1965).

Deities named in the sources: Marang Buru, Jaher Era

Customs

Kolean's story of the ancestors is recited twice in every Santal's life: at the caco chatiar, when a child is given full social rights, and at the bhandan, the final funeral rite (Bodding 1942, p. 2). Marriage is outside one's own pari, arranged through a go-between, with betrothal and the payment of a bride-price; Bodding's chapter on marriage also describes the other recognised forms, such as the house son-in-law (ghardi jawae), elopement, and divorce. During the Sohrae the young men and girls of the village stay five days in the house of the jog manjhi, who leads them at name-giving, initiation and weddings.

Festivals

Stories and Legends

Notable Personalities