Birhor Tribe

A Birhor Kumba (leaf house)

One of the most threatened objects of material heritage in Jharkhand – the only state in India having the nomadic Birhor Tribe – is the temporary leaf shelter known as the Kumba constructed from the branches and leaves of the Saal tree (Shorea robusta). Ever since the last twenty odd years the government has been trying to  sedentarize and make this shy tribe live in cement houses with concrete roofs but they have attributed every ill attacking the tribe to these cement houses and have left one settlement after another to revert to their traditional leaf housing. It is even today not an uncommon sight to find a Birhor living in a leaf Kumba adjacent to, or even inside a cement building ! The word Kumbha means earthen pot, and was used traditionally in Indian scripture for the burial urn, and being made of earth was believed to contain the female principle (Satapata Brahmana, vi.3.I.39). It is obvious that the term was borrowed by Sanskritic cultures from prehistoric cultures like the Birhor.

The major problem of the Kumba is that it is of flimsy construction of leaves and twigs and does not have a long life and requires a regular renewal tradition to keep it going, and this is a very real problem if it is taken out of the socio-economic context of the tribe’s hunting and gathering economy which the sedentarization of the Birhor will destroy. After all the tribe’s socio-economy will change after sedentarization and the Kumba  must also become redundant. The only way in which such a tradition may be kept alive is by fostering in the Birhor pride for their cultural heritage. We must not make them feel their old way of life was foolish since it sustained them for so many thousands of years. After all, even a post-agricultural society needs agriculture and a post hunter-gatherer society requires the genius of the hunter-gatherer. 

Sunset in Sultana Birhor Tanda with leaf houses

Tribal Village Mural Painting Tradition

A Khovar village scene in the Barkagaon Valley

The village wall paintings of Hazaribagh are now world famous. The simple subject matter involves common design patterns which are both natural and symbolic and linked with the rock art. The village mural painting tradition is a matriarchal one, and for this reason it is a sacred tradition in an essentially original matriarchal indigenous order. The art is made by married women (Devi) during the marriage and harvest seasons. Young girls learn the art from their mothers and aunts. The marriage art is called Khovar after the Bridal room and bridegroom, and Sohrai is the other kind of village painting done during the winter harvest in which the paintings are painted using cloth swabs or chewed twigs of the local Saal forest tree used for brushing their teeth by the villagers.

A Kurmi Sohrai house in Bhelwara village

The art may be divided into as many as one dozen stylistic groups, but there are two major art forms- Khovar or the Comb-Cut art done during the marriage season, a type of sagraffito art using Reversed Slip pottery technique, in which dry black slip is covered with wet white slip and then designs are cut with fine combs revealing the under-coat in unique relief designs of black on white.   Sohrai is the painted art done during the harvest season in which the paintings are made on earth treated wall with the natural pigments of red, white, and black ochre using brushes. Only water is used as a dilutant.

Rock art Sites

Isco Rock Shelter

The prehistoric rock art of Hazaribagh is painted in some fourteen sandstone rock shelters in the hills of Sati, Mahadeva (Mahudi) and Satpahar Ranges of the Upper Damodar Valley. Authorities have dated the rockart to the Meso-Chalcolithic period (10,000 B.C). There is evidence of an older layer of rock art touching the Palaeolithic. Several microliths and polished stone axe-heads were found in the painted shelters with evidence of Palaeolithic habitation sites and heavy hand axes and stone tools in the hilly region above and alongside the rock art, with Black and Red Ware pottery and remains of an iron industry below. The rock art of the Mesolithic period evidences drawings of wild and domestic animals and the Chalcolithic evidences mandala designs and geometric forms in keeping with the chronology of Wakankar and Brooks (1976) in Central India. The oldest level of rockart I have found to be in Saraiya in the Satpahar Range discovered in 1994 by Erwin Neumayer and Justin Imam. This rockart has a shamanstic series of drawings painted in red haematite which I believe is of the Palaeolithic period, and the most priceless rockart of Hazaribagh.

Sites: Isco, Thethangi, Saraiya, Satpahar I,II, & III, Khandar, Raham, Sidpa, Gonda, Nautangwa.& Rockart Puja

Hazaribagh

Hazaribagh is the Headquarters of the North Chotanagpur Division. The old District has been greatly lessened into a number of smaller districts. The town is of middle size with a  number of satellite villages surrounding it. The charm of the village market in the centre is the produce of the countryside available there. Hazaribagh town is situated in a large clearing dotted with villages and surrounded by forests and many hills, each having a significant  role in determining the history of the place. To the north of the town is the National Park which is an attraction for visitors. The climate is pleasant at about seven hundred metres altitude, the rainfall moderate from July to September. The region is famed for its festivals, especially Ramnavmi, Karma, Dussehra and Sohrai in the harvest-time in autumn, and the great spring festival of the tribals, Sarhul, in the spring. Being an area rich in tribes both the tribal and non tribal festivals are celebrated in an atmosphere of traditional gaiety. The original name of the place is after two villages Okun and Hazari which the British found when they came here around 1770. A mango grove (Bagh) in the south part of the town belonged to a man named Hazari , and the British called the place Okun-Hazari, later the name “Hazareebaugh” being used in the early nineteenth century. An old British map of 1862 shows the plan of the town much as it is today, and great changes do not seem to have been made. The town is described in the Lonely Planet tourist handbook as “A pleasant, leafy town”, famous for the number and variety of its indigenous variety of trees, not a modern “Gulmohur town” of weedy floral fast-growing shade trees that is so common elsewhere.

The Hazaribagh region in Jharkhand is a heavily forested plateau with deep river valleys, and exotic forest tribes. This area has been found to have magnificent Mesolithic rock art (10,000 B.C) , that may be directly traced as the distant ancestor of a unique style of wall paintings in the villages of Hazaribagh