The Ho: Living in a World of Plenty

Of Social Cohesion and Ritual Friendship on the Chota Nagpur Plateau, India

Eva Reichel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110666250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

The book is set in the anthropologically much-neglected multi-ethnic interior of Highland Middle India. It is the result of fieldwork done over a period of more than a decade among the Ho, an indigenous community of approximately one million people, who have shared cultural norms and the space of the hilly region of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with other aboriginal ( adivasi ) and artisan communities for ages. The book explores the structured tapestry of Ho people's relations and interrelatedness within their culture-specific sociocosmic universe ensuring their social reproduction in the present and affording them the means for and the awareness of living in a world of plenty. This world of abundance – with the Ho as its conceptual centre – includes the Ho's dead, their complex spirit world and supreme deity, and their tribal and nontribal fellow humans, and it manifests itself in manifold facets of their lives: socially, ritually, economically, and linguistically.

"This is an important piece of work. The ethnographic details in it are invaluable. The fieldwork is superb. What comes across so magnificently is that unique quality of the author's human and emotional contact and shared understanding with the people." MICHAEL YORKE: University College, London; Upside Films

1 Introduction: Living in a world of plenty

This book is based on more than sixteen months of fieldwork in the states of Odisha¹ and Jharkhand, India. The main fieldwork was done in 2006 and 2009 – 10 and complemented by research on shorter return visits every year or two throughout the period between 2005 and 2019. The study focusses on the Ho, a tribal community whose lives I was welcomed to join and document in participant observation.

Plate 3: Honouring Mother Earth.

Inside the sacred grove (desauli) during mage porob, a Ho festival performed at the village level in Pathan Sai (February 15, 2006). On the left are the village’s ritual guide (diuri) and one of his men (jom sim, assistant to the diuri) who is ritually entitled to blow a horn for the village feasts. The horns are those of either a jungle bison (oron sakowa), as shown in the photo, or a wild buffalo (bir-dirin). On the right are the village headman (munda) and one of his men. The blood of a black cock and a red-brown hen (see collage II, top left) has been offered to Mother Earth (ote enga) and the two guardian spirits of the village’s sacred grove, desauli and his wife jayer buri.

The book explores the tapestry of Ho people’s relations and relatedness within their culture-specific universe including the Ho's tribal and nontribal fellow humans, their dead, their spirit world and supreme God. I will show how social cohesion and ritual friendship in that part of the Chota Nagpur Plateau express and contribute to the Ho’s firm conviction of continuing a heritage entrusted to them by their deities and spirits, their forefathers and ancestors. As seen and represented from their perspective, these relations ensure their social reproduction in the present and afford them with the awareness and means to live in a world of plenty, of abundance (sumuki), and wealth (punji) – with the Ho as its conceptual centre. Ho people are embedded in a sophisticated sociocosmic order within which they claim to have been making a living “since ancient times” in a territory of which they consider themselves to be the autochthonous inhabitants, in any case the rightful and legitimate settlers. This claim applies especially to Kolhan (outlined in chapter 2), a region perhaps so called after the Ho, who are also known by exonyms including Kol and Larka Kol (Areeparampil 2002: 36; Dalton 1868: 3; Das Gupta 2011: 28; Majumdar 1950: 18; Hoffman and van Emelen 1990 [1950]: 1763).² The region overlaps modern India’s administrative border between the states of Jharkhand and Odisha (see map 3).

The Ho’s oral ‘history’

Ho, as this people’s language is called by others and by themselves, is a spoken language. In the absence of written texts, documents, and records produced by themselves about themselves, Ho maintain a strong sense of “oral history” (Assmann 2007: 51, 56, 66).³ This encompasses their creation myths and, as will be shown in chapter 4, their spirit world, as well as their 'histories' of migration and land acquisition, their claim to the status of original settlers in large parts of Kolhan, and the battles of old that their ancestors fought against foreign intruders and against local inhabitants driven out by the Ho. Understandings of Ho history are locally fed into Ho people’s collective memory and actively kept alive by being publicly negotiated, questioned, debated, and confirmed across generations and orally passed on to the younger ones (kaji-uju:). Ho people can be passionate storytellers and conversationalists indeed: in the course of my fieldwork I found myself several times in formal and informal situations in which Ho history, including the colonial encounter and tribal resistance, was constructed and reconstructed and in which, by the same mechanism, the Ho’s cultural identity was reproduced and recreated.

As far as attempts to reconstruct population history or identify the aboriginal inhabitants in the region of research, historians of the indigenous populations of the Chota Nagpur Plateau deplore the fact that reliable pre-Aryan,⁴ precolonial, and colonial ‘data’ are either missing, biased, fragmentary, speculative, “purely conjectural” (Das Gupta 2011: 31), or “guesswork” (Hoffman 2005: 7). Ho people, however, find orientation and meaning in their oral 'history' – or rather, 'histories'. The oral accounts that I was given were usually grounded territorially in the local environment and thus revealed regionally diverse centres of gravity.

The special long-term relationship between Ho and Munda, reflected in remembered intermarrying practices as well as in the knowledge that they used to be one ‘kind’ (jati), was locally emphasized in the Porahat area (Verardo 2003b: 10, 13), in the Chaibasa area, and in Ranchi, according to Munda and Ho informants there. However, this was not the case in the region of my fieldwork on the eastern fringes of Kolhan, in northwestern Mayurbhanj, where I only once came across two Munda households in one village. Also, the concept of status ranking between Ho and Munda and their self-identification as “paired categories,” with the Ho as “relative seniors” and the Munda as “relative juniors” (Pfeffer 2002: 215; 2003: 71) or the other way around (Parkin 1992; Bouez 1985; Pfeffer 1982),⁵ was unknown to Ho informants in the region of research.

The status concept of relative seniority structuring relations within the Ho tribe and within the Ho clan and subclan system (see chapter 3), however, is known, though not as an abstract notion, and attributed authority by local(‐ised) myths. The notion of seniority was explained to me in the language of elder brother and younger brother by the local village headman (munda) in the research area and had become part of the Ho’s oral 'history' in that region. Marriage rules are regionally qualified and modified by the fact that certain clans are classified as another clan’s ‘younger brothers’. For example, in the research area members of the Bari clan and the Alda clan are conceived of as the ‘younger brothers’ of the Purty clan, understood as their common ‘elder brother’, with the effect that intermarriage between these three clans is normatively proscribed (see chapter 4).

Another instance of the Ho’s oral 'history' concerns local knowledge of the conflictual encounter between Ho and Dhurwa in the area. This was never a topic where I enquired about it in the Chaibasa area, but it definitely was in the Jamda area where I did fieldwork, and it was the ritual guide (diuri) of the dominant Bage clan there who was authorized by his co-villagers to tell it. According to his oral account, Ho do not deny their having settled in a territory that was originally inhabited by others, at least with regard to the region that used to be known as Lagra Pir and Lalgar Pir (Tuckey 1920), part of Odisha today. He mentioned the community of the Dhurwa as having been in the area when the Ho, along with their cattle, migrated there from the northern and northwestern regions of the Plateau. Other Ho elders also passed on to me a history of the Dhurwa’s continuous fierce atrocities against the Ho, of their regularly seeking to capture Ho as human victims to be sacrificed at the time of her mut, the feast and sacrifice held by Ho people before the sowing of the main paddy crop.

Dhurwa are portrayed as having used the skin of sacrificed Ho persons for their drums (dama duman). Plate 4 shows a kettle drum (dama) which was captured from the Dhurwa by the Ho in one of the battles waged against them. Today it is kept in the house of the Ho diuri of Jamda and covered by the skin of a buffalo. A sacrifice of a red cock (ara sandi), two pigeons (dudlumkin), vermillion (sinduri), and ganja (hemp; Ho ganjae) is regularly offered by the diuri of Jamda to elicit the drum’s hidden divine powers before it is used in the course of the Ho’s annual village feasts in this area. On these occasions the drum becomes the material witness to the Ho’s oral 'history' of the adverse relations between Ho and Dhurwa, which is then narrated and passed on.⁶ Typically, Ho mention among the items offered in the sacrifice ganja, which as far as I know is not used in any other Ho ritual. This foreign (diku) element is referred to in Hindi, the notionally foreign (diku) language associated with the Dhurwa as a diku category.⁷

Plate 4: Dhurwa kettle drum.

This kettle drum (dama) is reported to have been captured by Ho from the Dhurwa (name spelt as indigenously pronounced: the aspirated ‘d’ indicates a non-Ho term and category). According to the Ho diuri of Jamda, the drum used to be beaten in the ‘old days’ before a fight to induce the Dhurwa’s gods to fill the Dhurwa fighters with strength and to protect them.

An upright standing stone (bid-diri) more than two metres tall stands in the field of the diuri of Jamda. It is similar in shape to, though not quite as tall as, the one in plate 5 below (top left). It is said to have been erected by the Dhurwa to commemorate the site before they fled the country to escape the recalcitrant Ho. The stone is considered to belong to the Dhurwa and will as such not be removed. To the Ho it is a fearful reminder and material document of a troubled past. A bid-diri may be erected in memory of a dead person, in memory of a person who has been missing for a long time or is assumed to be dead, or in commemoration of something of outstanding relevance, rarely with inscriptions in Devanagari, mostly without. While Ho acknowledge the Dhurwa’s presence in the area preceding the advent of the Ho, they at the same time conceive of themselves as original inhabitants in the sense that it was the Ho, they say, who came to settle and stay: they felled the trees to cultivate the land by hoeing the soil, eventually by using the plough, and not the Dhurwa.

By felling trees Ho have initiated a relationship with the regionally rooted spirits of the land, since trees are known to be inhabited by the spirits and deities assigned to a specif...