Sauria Paharia

Clans and Kinship

Risley's correspondents told him that the Male have no endogamous or exogamous divisions and that marriage is barred only by nearness of kin. Risley was not fully convinced and asked for more inquiry; Elwin (1955) repeats the point, comparing them with the Hill Saora, who also have no clans. Each tappa had a sardar over the manjhis of its villages, and from 1778 the British confirmed these headmen by formal appointment. In Risley's time the village headman or the head of the household made the sacrifices, and the demano, once a diviner chosen for his gift of trance and wearing long hair that may not be cut, directed religious ceremonies.

No clan list is given because the sources used here (Risley 1891; Elwin 1955) say the Male have no exogamous clans.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar

  Listed as: Sauria Paharia

Checked against the 2011 census table of each state and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked. The Mal Paharia, a separate people of the southern Rajmahal hills, have their own entries ('Mal Paharia, Kumarbhag Paharia' in Jharkhand and Bihar, 'Mal Pahariya' in West Bengal) and are not counted here. The PVTG list reproduced from the 2019 PIB release names the Sauria Paharia for Bihar and Jharkhand.

Checked on 2026-11-07 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) explained that the people's own name is Mal, and that Male and Maler are forms of the word with pronoun endings: Malen, 'I am a Mal', Maler, 'they are Mal'; Maler is also the Malto word for men. He records Sauria, Savar Paharia and Asal Paharia among their names. Elwin (1955), listing the many peoples called by some form of the name Savara, notes that the Male called themselves Savar Paharia or Sauria. Lieutenant Shaw's account of 1795, as Risley gives it, tells of seven brothers sent to people the earth, each choosing his food at a feast; the eldest, who was ill, was given every kind of food in an old dish, was left in the hills, and became the ancestor of the Male. Risley thought the story an echo of a Munda and Ho tale.

History

Risley (1891) records that before British rule the hill people kept their own order: each tappa, a group of hills, had a sardar over the village headmen (manjhis), and the sardars held lands in the plains from the zamindars in return for keeping the peace and guarding the passes. About the middle of the eighteenth century the zamindars killed several headmen at the yearly feast, and the hill people gave up guarding the passes; after the famine of 1770 their raids on the plains grew. From 1778 the British, first under Captain Brown and then Augustus Cleveland, Collector of Bhagalpur, paid allowances to the sardars, raised a corps of hill archers from among them, later the Bhagalpur Hill Rangers, and from 1782 had serious cases tried by an assembly of hill chiefs, a system made law by Regulation I of 1796 and ended in 1827. By Risley's time Santal settlement below the hills had cut the Male off from the plains.

Faith and Worship

Risley (1891), following Lieutenant Shaw (1795), describes the Sun as Dharmer Gosain, represented by a roughly hewn post before each house and worshipped as the harvest begins; Raksi, worshipped before liquor is distilled from the new mahua; Chal or Chalnad, the god of a group of ten villages, a black stone under a tree; Pau Gosain, god of the roads; Bara-Dwari, the village god, worshipped in Magh; Gumo Gosain, the main post of the house, on which goat's blood is sprinkled for the ancestors; and Chamda Gosain, for whom a family may offer twelve pigs and twelve goats and set up three bamboos hung with black and red streamers.

Customs

Free courtship is allowed and girls marry when grown, to men of their choice. A marriage broker (sithu) settles the bride-price; at the wedding the bride's father gives her hand to the groom, the sithu dips the groom's little finger in vermilion to make five dots on the bride's forehead and then uses hers to mark him, and the couple eat from one dish (Risley 1891). Divorce is allowed with the sanction of the village elders, the bride-price being returned according to who seeks it, and a sal leaf is torn in token of separation.