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Chapter 9: The Other Odisha
In the summer of 2013, in twelve villages scattered across the Niyamgiri hills of Rayagada district, something happened that had never happened before in the history of Indian democracy. The Supreme Court of India had ruled, on April 18, that the Dongria Kondh — a tribal community of roughly eight thousand people living in the forests of a mountain range that a London-listed mining company wanted to tear open for bauxite — would get to decide their own fate. Not the state government. Not the central government. Not Vedanta Resources and its billionaire chairman Anil Agarwal. The gram sabha — the village assembly, every adult member voting — would determine whether mining could proceed.
Over three months, between July and August 2013, twelve gram sabhas convened. The police were present in force. Vedanta’s representatives had been working the area for years, promising jobs, roads, hospitals. The Odisha state government, which had signed the memorandum of understanding with Vedanta and stood to gain royalties, was not a neutral party. The central government’s environment ministry had already given conditional clearance.
All twelve voted no. Unanimously. Every single gram sabha rejected the mine.
The Dongria Kondh did not reject the mine because they had read environmental impact assessments or consulted lawyers, though both of those things had happened in the background. They rejected it because Niyamgiri is where Niyam Raja lives — the mountain deity who governs their world, their law, their seasons. To mine Niyamgiri was not an economic question for the Dongria Kondh. It was, in a precise and non-metaphorical sense, an act of killing god.
In January 2014, the Ministry of Environment and Forests rejected the project entirely. A community of eight thousand people, with no electricity, no paved roads to most of their villages, no representation in any legislature, had defeated a company with a market capitalization of billions of dollars and the backing of a state government hungry for investment.
This is a story about what happened on one mountain. It is also a story about what is happening across an entire parallel civilization that exists within the borders of Odisha — one that shares the same geography as the Odisha of temples and rice fields and Rath Yatra, but inhabits a fundamentally different world. A world of different gods, different languages, different ways of knowing. A world that mainstream Odia identity has, for centuries, treated as backdrop rather than foundation.
The Numbers and the Silence
Start with the census figures, because the scale of what is being discussed here is routinely underestimated.
Odisha has 62 recognized Scheduled Tribe communities. As of the 2011 census, the tribal population stood at 9,590,756 — roughly 22.85 percent of the state’s total population. That is nearly one in four people. Odisha has the third-highest proportion of tribal population among Indian states, behind Mizoram and Nagaland (where tribal communities form the overwhelming majority) and ahead of every other large state. In absolute numbers, only Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra have more tribal residents, and those are states with vastly larger total populations.
Of these 62 communities, 13 are classified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — PVTGs, the government’s designation for communities so small, so isolated, so economically fragile that they face genuine risk of extinction as distinct peoples. Odisha has the highest number of PVTGs of any state in India. These thirteen communities — the Bonda, Birhor, Chuktia Bhunjia, Didayi, Dongria Kondh, Hill Kharia, Juang, Kutia Kondh, Lanjia Saora, Lodha, Mankirdia, Paudi Bhuiyan, and Saora — represent some of the most endangered human communities on earth. Their combined population is roughly 240,000, spread across eleven districts, mostly in the forested hills of southern and western Odisha.
Here is what those numbers mean, translated into a systems perspective. Odisha contains within its borders a linguistic diversity — with Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan language families all represented among its tribal communities — that most entire countries do not possess. It contains cosmological systems, agricultural technologies, metallurgical traditions, and artistic practices that predate every temple in Puri by thousands of years. It contains, in the Koraput region, what geneticists and archaeobotanists have identified as one of the secondary centers of origin for Asian cultivated rice — meaning that the tribal communities of southern Odisha were among the human groups that independently figured out how to domesticate rice, one of the foundational achievements of human civilization.
And yet. When people say “Odia culture,” they almost never mean any of this. They mean Jagannath. They mean Odissi. They mean Rath Yatra and pakhala and Sambalpuri sarees. The tribal world exists in the mainstream Odia imagination as a kind of backdrop — picturesque, vaguely pitied, occasionally celebrated during festivals or tourism campaigns, but fundamentally separate from “real” Odia identity. The tribal person in the mainstream Odia mental model is someone who needs to be developed, brought into modernity, given education and healthcare and roads. Rarely is the tribal person imagined as someone who possesses knowledge systems that the mainstream world lacks and cannot recreate.
This silence is not accidental. It is structural. It is the product of centuries of caste hierarchy, colonial ethnography that classified tribal peoples as “primitives,” post-independence development policy that treated forests as resources to be extracted rather than homes to be respected, and a modern economy that values minerals more than the people who live above them. Understanding tribal Odisha requires understanding each of these layers. But first, it requires meeting the people themselves.
The Kondh World
The Kondh — also spelled Khond, Kandha, Kandh — are Odisha’s largest tribal community and one of the largest tribal groups in all of India. They are found primarily across the districts of Kandhamal (which takes its name from the Kandha people), Rayagada, Kalahandi, Koraput, Boudh, and parts of Ganjam. The Kondh are not a single homogeneous group but a constellation of sub-communities — the Kutia Kondh, the Dongria Kondh, the Desia Kondh, the Kuttia — each with distinct practices, though sharing a common linguistic and cosmological root.
Their language is Kui, with the southern variant known as Kuvi. Both belong to the Central Dravidian family — a linguistic fact that immediately complicates any simple narrative about Odia identity, because it means the largest tribal group in this “Odia-speaking state” does not speak an Indo-Aryan language at all. Kui and Kuvi are Dravidian, placing the Kondh in linguistic kinship with Tamil and Telugu speakers rather than with the Odia-speaking plains. The Kandhamal district today has a 55 percent Kondh population, and in many of its hill villages, Kui is the first language and Odia is learned, if at all, as a second language in school.
The Kondh cosmology centers on a divine couple: Bura Penu, the supreme sky god and source of all good, associated with the sun; and his consort Tari Penu (also called Dharni Penu), the earth goddess. In the Kondh understanding, the universe was created by and through these two — Bura Penu representing light, the sky, benevolence, and Tari Penu representing the earth, fertility, and the darker, more demanding forces of nature. All other deities in the Kondh pantheon descend from this primordial pair. It is a cosmology of balance — sky and earth, light and dark, giving and demanding — and every major Kondh ritual is, at its root, an attempt to maintain that balance.
Which brings us to the meriah sacrifice — the most controversial, most written-about, and most misunderstood aspect of Kondh history.
The meriah was a human sacrifice performed to Tari Penu, the earth goddess, for agricultural fertility. The victim — called meriah in Odia, toki or keddi in Kui — was typically a person purchased or acquired from another community, sometimes years before the sacrifice. The victim was treated well, even revered, during the period before the ritual. The sacrifice was performed twice a year, at sowing and at harvest. The victim’s blood and flesh were distributed among the fields. Private sacrifices also occurred, performed by individual families during times of extreme distress or illness.
The British first became aware of the practice around 1836, and what followed was one of the most complex collisions between colonial power and indigenous belief in Indian history. Major S.C. Macpherson, the British officer in charge of the “Meriah Agency” established specifically to suppress the practice, led a campaign that combined military force, diplomacy, and what today would be called cultural intervention. The Kondh did not simply submit. The suppression of the meriah sacrifice triggered one of the longest tribal rebellions in Indian history.
The Kondh Rebellion, spanning roughly from 1835 to 1856, was not a single uprising but a series of resistances led by multiple leaders. Dora Bisoi of Ghumsar launched the first major resistance, and after his capture and betrayal to the British in 1837, the rebellion was sustained by Chakra Bisoi, who waged a guerrilla campaign across the Kandhamal and Boudh hills for over two decades. Chakra Bisoi was never captured. After October 1856, he simply vanished — no record of his death, no record of surrender. Tribals from Ghumsar, China ki Medi, Kalahandi, and Patna joined the resistance. The Kondh fought with swords, bows, arrows, and the tangi — a war axe. They were joined by Saora fighters and other tribal groups. Radhakrishna Dandasena, from a non-tribal background, also joined the rebel coalition.
The British eventually succeeded in suppressing the meriah sacrifice, and it was replaced with buffalo sacrifice — a substitution the Kondh accepted, and the meriah festival, held between March and May, continues today with buffaloes as the offering to the Earth Goddess.
But the deeper question that the meriah episode raises is one that no colonial administrator and few modern commentators have been willing to sit with honestly. From the outside, human sacrifice is — obviously, unambiguously — an atrocity. From the inside of Kondh cosmology, it was the most sacred act a community could perform: the offering of the highest possible value (a human life) to the force that made all other life possible (the earth). The meriah was not a victim in the Kondh understanding; the meriah was the most honored being in the community, the chosen bridge between the human world and the divine. This does not make the practice acceptable by any modern ethical standard. But it does mean that the British suppression of the meriah was not simply the rescue of victims from savages — it was the violent destruction of a cosmological system from the outside, by a power that understood nothing of the system’s internal logic and had no interest in doing so.
The parallel to modern events is uncomfortably direct. When Vedanta proposed to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite, the Dongria Kondh — a sub-group of the larger Kondh community — said that the mountain was their god. The mining company and the state government treated this as a quaint cultural objection to be managed through compensation packages and corporate social responsibility programs. The Supreme Court, in its 2013 ruling, was the first institution to take the claim seriously — to treat the Dongria Kondh’s relationship with their mountain as a legitimate right rather than a charming superstition.
Beyond cosmology, the Kondh are sophisticated agriculturalists. Podu, or shifting cultivation — clearing a patch of forest, burning the vegetation, cultivating for a few years, then moving on to let the land regenerate — is often dismissed by government officials and development economists as “primitive” or “destructive.” In reality, it is a highly adapted system for hilly terrain with thin topsoil, one that mimics natural forest regeneration cycles and maintains soil fertility without chemical inputs. The Kondh also practice terraced hillside farming. Their staple is mandia — finger millet, or ragi — supplemented by tubers, forest greens, and whatever the forest provides. Mandia is one of the most nutritionally complete grains on earth: high in calcium, high in iron, high in fiber, slow to digest. The Green Revolution, which transformed Indian agriculture around rice and wheat, systematically devalued millets and the communities that grew them. Only in the last decade has mainstream nutrition science begun to rediscover what the Kondh always knew.
And then there are the tattoos. Kutia Kondh women traditionally bear intricate facial tattoos called khoda — geometric patterns on the forehead, nose, and chin, applied between the ages of twelve and fourteen as a rite of passage into womanhood. The method was brutal by modern standards: a lemon thorn pricked the skin, and a mixture of soot and gudakhu (tobacco-lime paste) was rubbed into the wounds, which were allowed to get infected so the marks would become larger, darker, more permanent. The tattoos served multiple functions simultaneously. They were markers of beauty. They were tribal identification — a way to recognize one’s own people. They were, according to Kutia Kondh belief, maps for the afterlife: the tattoos ensured that community members would recognize each other in the spirit world after death. And they were, in a grimmer function, a form of protection — the tattoos made young women less attractive to abductors from rival communities, and later, during the colonial period, to British soldiers and feudal landlords who preyed on tribal women. An entire philosophy of identity, aesthetics, spirituality, and survival, inscribed permanently on the skin.
The tradition is dying. Young Kutia Kondh women, exposed to television and the beauty standards of mainstream Indian culture, increasingly decline the tattoos. The last generation of tattooed faces is aging. Within a few decades, the practice will exist only in photographs and ethnographic records.
The Saora Universe
Move southeast from Kondh territory into the hills of Ganjam, Gajapati, and Rayagada, and you enter the world of the Saora — also spelled Sora, Savara, Sabara. The Saora are a Munda ethnic group, which means their linguistic and cultural roots are entirely different from the Dravidian Kondh. They speak Sora, a language of the Munda branch of the Austroasiatic family — the same linguistic family that includes Khmer and Vietnamese, a connection that gestures at deep prehistory and migration patterns spanning thousands of years.
The Saora are famous for two things: their wall paintings and their shamans. Both are windows into one of the most sophisticated spirit-world cosmologies in all of tribal India.
The paintings are called iditals (also spelled ittal, idital, or, in the terminology popularized by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, ikons). They are murals painted on the inner walls of houses — not decorations, but functional objects. An idital is, in the most literal sense, a house for the spirits. When a Saora family needs to communicate with a deity or an ancestor — when someone is ill, when a crop has failed, when a death needs to be mourned properly — the community’s ritual painter (the ittalmar) creates an idital on the wall. The painting depicts the spirit world in extraordinary detail: human figures, horses, elephants, the sun and moon, the tree of life, scenes from daily labor, the dead among the living, all rendered in a white pigment made from rice paste against the dark mud walls of the house.
But the idital is not simply painted and left. After the ittalmar finishes, the kuranmaran — the shaman, almost always a woman — performs a ceremony, entering a trance state and acting as a medium between the deity being invoked and the painter. Through the shaman’s mouth, the spirit instructs the painter to add more elements. The painting is not an artistic creation; it is a collaborative act between the living and the dead, mediated by a woman in trance.
This is where the Saora cosmology becomes genuinely extraordinary. The Saora believe in a complex, layered spirit world in which the dead do not simply depart. They continue to live, in an underworld that mirrors the world of the living. The dead farm, they eat, they marry, they have disputes. And they interact constantly with the living — through dreams, through illness, through the shaman’s trances. A Saora funeral is not a farewell. It is the beginning of a new kind of relationship.
The kuran — the female shaman — is the central figure in this relationship. During a trance, her soul descends to the underworld, climbing down what is described as terrifying precipices, while her body becomes a vehicle for the dead to speak through. One by one, the spirits of the deceased speak through the shaman’s mouth. The living crowd around, arguing with the dead, weeping at their accusations, laughing at their jokes. A Saora seance is not a solemn ceremony. It is a raucous family reunion across the boundary of death.
Becoming a kuran is not a choice. The spirits select their intermediaries through affliction — unexplained illness, persistent misfortune, disturbing visions. When the community recognizes these signs, the person (almost always a woman) is understood to have been chosen for service. It is a calling in the truest sense: not sought, not desired, not refused.
Verrier Elwin — the British-born anthropologist who became an Indian citizen, spent decades living among tribal communities in central and eastern India, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1961 — produced the most detailed study of Saora religion ever written. His 1955 book The Religion of an Indian Tribe runs to 597 pages of text with 73 drawings and 72 photographic plates. It was described by contemporaries as “the most detailed account of an Indian tribal religion that ever flowed from an anthropologist’s pen.” Elwin documented the Saora spirit world with the care of someone who understood that he was recording a way of knowing the world that was internally coherent, philosophically profound, and under existential threat.
That threat has only intensified. The Lanjia Saora, the hill-dwelling sub-group that maintained the idital tradition most strongly, have been affected by displacement from development projects, road-building, and the general pull of modernity. More significantly, large-scale conversion to Christianity and Hinduism among the Saora has struck directly at the root of the idital tradition. The paintings are inseparable from the Saora spirit world. When a Saora family converts, the spirit world that the paintings serve ceases to exist for them. The walls go blank.
Today, Saora motifs have been commercialized — printed on sarees, featured in government-sponsored craft exhibitions, displayed in galleries. This is presented as cultural preservation. In reality, it is a form of taxidermy. The motifs survive. The living function — the trance, the spirit’s instructions, the negotiation between the living and the dead — is what is dying.
The Bonda: The Naked People of the Mountains
In the hills of Malkangiri district, in the far southwestern corner of Odisha where the state borders Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, live the Bonda. Their population, as of the 2011 census, is approximately 12,000. They are a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. They are one of the most isolated human communities on earth.
The Bonda are divided into two sub-groups: the Upper Bonda (roughly 6,700 people), who live in the highest, most inaccessible hills and have maintained near-total isolation from mainstream society, and the Lower Bonda (roughly 17,000), who have had somewhat more contact with the outside world. It is the Upper Bonda who are the subject of most anthropological attention, because their way of life represents something increasingly rare: a community that has, until very recently, existed almost entirely outside the gravitational pull of the modern state.
Bonda women are immediately recognizable — or rather, they were, in the photographs and documentaries that brought them to outside attention. They shave their heads. They wear heavy bead necklaces called ringa, made of hundreds of strands of colorful beads, along with thick metal rings covering their necks and brass bangles on their arms. Their traditional clothing consists of a short length of cloth covering the waist, with the torso largely uncovered. Colonial ethnographers called them “the naked people” — a designation that says far more about colonial anxieties than about Bonda culture. The ornaments are not merely decorative. The heavy metal rings and bangles are believed to offer protection from injuries and animal attacks during forest foraging and hunting.
The Bonda speak Bonda, a South Munda language of the Austroasiatic family. With roughly 12,000 speakers, it is critically endangered — one of the many languages worldwide that, without active intervention, will cease to be spoken within a generation or two.
One of the most discussed aspects of Bonda society is their marriage system. Bonda women traditionally marry men who are significantly younger than themselves — five to ten years younger, sometimes more. The practical logic, as explained by the community, is straightforward: if a woman marries a younger man, he will be able to earn and care for her when she is old. But the effect on social dynamics is profound. Bonda society is, in certain respects, women-centric. The women are the visible, assertive public face of the community. The men — younger, often quieter in mixed company — defer to their elder wives in many domestic and social decisions.
The Bonda have historically been described as fierce, independent, and hostile to outsiders. This reputation is not entirely unearned. They resisted British contact. They resisted post-independence government intervention. They regarded — and many still regard — the outside world with deep suspicion. This suspicion is not irrational. The outside world, when it has come to the Bonda hills, has brought alcohol (which has devastated many families and contributed to violence within communities), missionaries (who have sought to convert them, disrupting traditional belief systems), roads (which have opened previously inaccessible areas to exploitation), and a market economy that their subsistence-based way of life is not equipped to navigate.
The Bonda Development Agency was established in 1977 to “develop” the Bonda. Concrete houses have replaced some traditional huts. Electricity has reached some villages. Cooking gas, drinking water facilities, latrines — the standard kit of government development schemes — have arrived. The nature-dependent daily life of the Bonda is increasingly market-driven. Traditional alcoholic beverages, brewed using indigenous methods and consumed as part of social and ceremonial life, are being replaced by commercially produced liquor.
Think about what “development” means in this context through the lens of systems thinking. The Bonda had a system: a way of organizing marriage, economy, spirituality, and social life that was internally consistent and sustainable for centuries. “Development” — as actually practiced, not as theorized in policy documents — is the replacement of one system with another. The new system (market economy, concrete housing, commercial alcohol, missionary religion) is not a patch or upgrade to the old system. It is a wholesale replacement. And it arrives without documentation, without training, without the centuries of gradual adaptation that allowed the old system to achieve its internal coherence. The result, predictably, is a community in the worst possible position: the old system broken, the new system not yet functional.
The Juang: The Leaf-Wearers
In the forests of Keonjhar and Dhenkanal districts, in the northeastern part of Odisha, live the Juang — one of the oldest tribal communities in the state, classified as a PVTG, and historically known by a name that captures both their distinctiveness and their vulnerability: the Patuas, the leaf-wearing people.
The name comes from the Juang’s traditional clothing: garments woven from sal leaves. In a region where textile technology had existed for centuries among neighboring communities, the Juang wore leaves. This was not poverty in the way outsiders understood it. Sal leaves are abundant, renewable, and the Juang’s relationship with the sal forest was so intimate that wearing its leaves was as natural as wearing cotton would be to a community that farmed cotton. But to colonial administrators and later to government officials, the leaf clothing was a sign of “primitivism” that needed to be corrected. Today, the Juang wear cloth purchased from markets. The leaf clothing exists only in memory and in ethnographic accounts.
The Juang speak Juang, a Munda language of the Austroasiatic family. Their population is small — a few tens of thousands — and concentrated in some of the most forested, least accessible areas of their home districts.
The most remarkable institution of Juang society was the majang (also called mandaghar) — the youth dormitory. This was not simply a building. It was a comprehensive system of education, socialization, and controlled courtship, architecturally embodied in a rectangular structure standing prominently in the center of every Juang village.
In the majang, unmarried boys and girls gathered in the evenings. They sang. They danced. They made music. They told stories. The majang served simultaneously as a community hall for youth, a courthouse for village elders (the barabhai), a guest house for visitors, a granary for communal grain storage, a repository for musical instruments, a venue for ritual performances, and — in the most fundamental sense — a school. Everything the young needed to know about being Juang — the songs, the dances, the stories, the proper conduct between men and women, the spiritual practices, the agricultural knowledge — was transmitted through the majang. It was, in the language of modern education theory, an immersive, experiential, community-based learning environment. The entire curriculum was the culture itself.
The Juang creation myth is grounded in the landscape they inhabit. They believe they are the first human beings to be born on earth. Their ancestors were born from a Rusi couple — a saint and his spouse — who lived at Rusi Tangar, a hillock near Gonasika in Keonjhar district. Gonasika is where the river Baitarani originates, and for the Juang, it is not merely a geographical feature. It is the birthplace of humanity.
The Juang’s entire world — their economy, their spiritual life, their identity, their social institutions — depends on the sal forest. The sal provides food, medicine, building material, fuel, clothing (historically), and the spiritual landscape in which their gods and ancestors dwell. Deforestation is not an environmental issue for the Juang in the way it is for an urban environmentalist. It is an existential crisis. When the forest goes, the Juang do not merely lose resources. They lose the physical substrate of their entire civilization.
The majang system has largely collapsed. Young Juang men now leave their villages for wage labor. Young women are pulled toward the economy of nearby towns. The communal structure that the majang sustained — the nightly gathering, the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, the carefully managed space between young men and women — has no equivalent in the world of mobile phones and market economy. The building may still stand in some villages. The social institution it housed is dying.
The Santal World
If the Bonda and Juang represent the smallest and most vulnerable end of Odisha’s tribal spectrum, the Santals represent the other extreme. The Santals are one of the largest tribal communities in all of India — over seven million people across Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, and Assam. In Odisha, they are concentrated in the northern districts of Mayurbhanj and Balasore, where they form a significant portion of the population.
The Santals are remarkable in the context of tribal India for several reasons. They have their own script. They have one of the great anti-colonial rebellions in Indian history. They have a sophisticated social and religious system that has been documented more thoroughly than almost any other tribal culture in South Asia. And they have produced, in Pandit Raghunath Murmu, one of the most consequential intellectual figures in the history of India’s tribal communities — a man whose invention changed what it means to be Santal.
Murmu was born in 1905 in Dandbose village near Rairangpur in the Mayurbhanj princely state (now in Odisha). He was a schoolteacher. And in 1925, at the age of twenty, he created the Ol Chiki script — a writing system designed specifically for the Santali language.
This requires context to appreciate. The Santali language belongs to the Munda branch of the Austroasiatic family. For centuries, it existed only as a spoken language. When Santals needed to write — for official documents, for religious purposes, for communication with the state — they used other scripts: Bengali, Devanagari, Odia, Roman. Each of these scripts was designed for a different language and failed to capture the full range of Santali phonology. Using someone else’s script to write your own language is a daily experience of linguistic colonization — a constant reminder that your language is not important enough to have its own writing system.
Murmu changed that. The Ol Chiki script has 30 letters, each designed to evoke natural shapes from the Santal world. Each letter’s name is a common Santali word, and the letter’s shape derives from a simple drawing of that word’s meaning. It writes left to right. It has print and cursive forms. It is, by any typological standard, a complete and functional writing system. Murmu published the first book in Ol Chiki, Horh Sereng, in 1936.
The significance of this act is difficult to overstate. A tribal schoolteacher in a remote princely state of eastern India, working without institutional support, without linguistic training (in the formal academic sense), without precedent in his community, sat down and invented a writing system. He did what Sequoyah did for Cherokee, what King Sejong’s scholars did for Korean — he gave his people a script of their own. The political and cultural consequences were enormous. Ol Chiki became a rallying point for Santal identity. It was adopted by Santal communities across state boundaries. In 2003, the 92nd Constitutional Amendment included Santali in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, recognizing it as one of India’s official languages. December 22 is celebrated as Parsi Jitkar Maha — the day the Lok Sabha passed the resolution.
But Santal history in India begins with blood long before it arrives at recognition.
On June 30, 1855, two Santal brothers — Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu (no relation to Raghunath, though the shared surname is common among Santals) — assembled roughly ten thousand Santals and declared war on the British East India Company. They claimed to have been visited by Thakur Bonga, the great spirit, who instructed them to drive out the dikus — the outsiders: the moneylenders, the zamindars, the British. Sidhu and Kanhu, along with their brothers Chand and Bhairav, each assumed the title of suba (leader), and the Santal Hul — the Santal rebellion — began.
The causes were the standard litany of colonial exploitation — usurious moneylenders who trapped Santals in debt bondage, zamindars who encroached on Santal land, a British legal system in which Santals had no standing and no recourse. The Santals’ response was not petitionary. They attacked. Thousand-person squads hit zamindars, moneylenders, and Company officials across the Santhal Pargana region. By July 11, they had reached Colgong (modern Kahalgaon). By July 17, they had severed road and rail connections to Bhagalpur. They routed a company of Paharia Rangers and inflicted a humiliating defeat on East India Company troops at Narayanpur, killing several officers and 25 sepoys.
The turning point came on July 24, when fifty Company troops, supported by 200 soldiers from the Nawab of Murshidabad and thirty elephants, confronted five thousand Santals near Maheshpur. The battle lasted ten minutes. A hundred Santals died. The technological mismatch — bows and arrows against muskets and elephants — was absolute. The Governor-General declared martial law on November 8. Sidhu was captured in August, betrayed by other Santal leaders, and later hanged. Kanhu was captured in late November and executed on February 23, 1856. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Santals died during the rebellion — most from disease, hunger, and malnutrition rather than direct combat.
The Santal Hul was one of the great anti-colonial uprisings in Indian history. It led, decades later, to the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act of 1876 and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 — laws that, for all their limitations, established the principle that tribal land could not simply be appropriated by outsiders. That principle, though violated constantly in practice, remains the legal foundation of tribal land rights in India to this day.
The religious life of the Santals centers on the sacred grove — the Jaher, a cluster of sal trees at the edge of every Santal village where the deities reside. The supreme deity is Marang Buru (“Great Mountain”), the creator. Jaher Era (“Lady of the Sacred Grove”) is the principal female deity. The bongas — spirits of various kinds, benevolent and malevolent — populate every aspect of Santal life. The naeke (village priest) mediates between the community and the spiritual world; the manjhi (headman) governs secular affairs. The social unit is the ato — the village — and Santal villages have a remarkably democratic internal structure, with decisions made in open assembly.
The Santal festival calendar is among the richest in tribal India. Baha, the flower festival, celebrated in February or March, marks the arrival of spring. Young boys erect ceremonial sheds at the Jaherthan (the sacred grove) for the deities. Men, women, and children dress in traditional attire, offer flowers to Marang Buru and Jaher Ayo, and dance to the beating of the madal and tamak drums. Sohrai, the principal harvest festival, celebrates the abundance of the fields. Karam, observed on the eleventh day of the lunar month of Bhadra, honors the deity of strength, youth, and vitality.
Santal music and dance form what is arguably the most sophisticated musical tradition among Odisha’s tribal communities. The rhythmic complexity of Santal drumming, the call-and-response structure of their songs, the synchronized group dances that can involve hundreds of participants — these are not “folk performances” in the diminished sense that urban audiences understand the term. They are high art, refined over centuries. And they connect to a broader artistic tradition: the Chhau dance of Mayurbhanj, a semi-classical form that fuses martial, tribal, and Hindu dance traditions, draws heavily from Santal movement vocabulary. Mayurbhanj Chhau — the mask-less variant, distinct from the masked Chhau of Purulia and Seraikella — is recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Its roots in Santal dance are acknowledged in anthropological literature but rarely in the mainstream cultural narrative.
Gadaba and Paraja
The Koraput region of southern Odisha is home to a concentration of tribal communities that, taken together, constitute one of the most culturally dense areas in India. Among them, the Gadaba and the Paraja deserve particular attention — the Gadaba for a linguistic puzzle that has baffled scholars, and the Paraja for a novel that brought their suffering to national attention.
The Gadaba are found across Koraput, Malkangiri, and parts of Ganjam. Their population is modest but culturally vibrant. What makes the Gadaba linguistically unusual is that they speak two distinct languages from two entirely different language families: Gutob, a Munda (Austroasiatic) language, and Ollari, a Dravidian language. This is not bilingualism in the ordinary sense. It is a community that appears to straddle one of the deepest linguistic divides in South Asian prehistory. The most likely explanation is historical merger — two originally distinct communities, one Munda-speaking and one Dravidian-speaking, fused over centuries into a single tribal identity while retaining both languages. But the details are uncertain, and the Gadaba language situation remains an active area of linguistic research.
Gadaba women are known for their heavy brass neck rings — weighing between 500 and 700 grams, so tightly fitted that they cannot be removed without the help of a blacksmith. During festivals, the women dress in their distinctive Kerang sarees reaching halfway to the knee, add rings on their fingers, brass bells on their toes, heavy bangles on their hands, and multiple necklaces, and perform the Dhemsa dance. The Dhemsa is one of the most recognized tribal dances in Odisha — a synchronized group performance with rhythmic footwork and swaying upper-body movements, performed during harvest festivals and other celebrations. The dance is inseparable from Gadaba identity. To watch a Dhemsa performance is to see a community’s entire aesthetic and social philosophy expressed in movement.
The Paraja, meanwhile, were made famous — or rather, their suffering was made visible — by one of Odia literature’s greatest novels.
Gopinath Mohanty was born in 1914 and spent his early career as an officer in the Odisha Administrative Service, posted to the undivided Koraput district. It was there, living among the Kondh and Paraja communities, that he learned their languages and began to document their lives. His novel Paraja, published in Odia in 1945, is the story of Sukru Jani, a Paraja farmer, and his family’s descent into debt bondage.
The system Mohanty depicted was the gothi — a form of bonded labor in which a debtor was compelled to work for his creditor until the debt was repaid. In practice, since interest rates were usurious and the debtor had no legal recourse, the gothi was a form of slavery. A man might borrow a small sum to pay for a wedding or a funeral, and find himself and his sons laboring for the moneylender for years, even decades. The debt was hereditary. The bondage was, for all practical purposes, permanent.
Paraja is not a political tract. It is a novel of devastating quiet — the slow, grinding destruction of a family’s dignity and autonomy by economic forces they cannot understand or resist. Mohanty won the Jnanpith Award — India’s highest literary honor — in 1973 (for a different novel, Mati Matala), and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955. He wrote twenty-four novels, ten collections of short stories, and five books on the languages of the Kondh, Gadaba, and Saora tribes. He remains one of the few Indian writers of any language to have immersed himself in tribal life deeply enough to write about it from the inside.
The Paraja, like other tribal communities in Koraput, have been buffeted by forces far beyond their control. Bauxite mining — the same mining economy that threatened the Dongria Kondh on Niyamgiri — has transformed the landscape and economy of the Koraput region. And anti-Maoist security operations, which swept through the southern Odisha tribal belt from the 2000s onward, placed tribal communities in an impossible position: caught between Maoist insurgents who claimed to fight on their behalf but also conscripted their children and used their villages as bases, and security forces who treated every tribal village as a potential enemy camp.
The Tribal Aesthetic
Tribal art in Odisha is not an aesthetic category. It is a technology of meaning.
Consider the range. Saora iditals: spirit houses painted on walls, created in collaboration with the dead through the medium of a woman in trance. Kondh wall art: geometric patterns encoding cosmological knowledge. Santal alpona: floor designs created for ritual occasions, erased and remade in a cycle that mirrors the impermanence the designs themselves represent. Kutia Kondh facial tattoos: permanent inscriptions of identity, beauty, and spiritual navigation on the skin of the living. Bonda bead-work: hundreds of strands of colored beads, worn as a second skin, serving as both adornment and protection.
And then there is Dhokra.
Dhokra metal casting — the lost-wax technique named after the Dhokra Damar tribe — is one of the oldest metallurgical traditions in the world. The technique dates back over four thousand years. The famous Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro, one of the most iconic artifacts of the Indus Valley Civilization, was made using the same basic process. In Odisha, Dhokra is practiced in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Dhenkanal, and Rayagada districts. The craftspeople create figures of animals, deities, musicians, dancers — objects that function simultaneously as art, as ritual implements, and as repositories of mythological narrative.
The process is extraordinary in its precision. A clay core is shaped by hand. Wax threads — rolled by hand to exact thicknesses — are applied to the core in intricate patterns. A clay mold is built over the wax. The whole assembly is heated. The wax melts and drains out (hence “lost wax”), leaving a hollow cavity in the exact shape of the desired design. Molten brass or bronze is poured into the cavity. When it cools, the clay mold is broken open, and the metal figure emerges. Each piece is unique. The wax mold is destroyed in the process of creation. There is no mass production. There is no replication.
Now consider how these traditions enter the mainstream. A Saora motif appears on a saree. A Dhokra figurine sits on a shelf in a Delhi apartment. A Gadaba dance is performed at a state-sponsored cultural festival. In each case, the aesthetic — the visual pattern, the physical object, the bodily movement — is extracted from the system of meaning that gave it life, and placed into a new context where it functions as decoration. The idital motif on the saree is no longer a house for the spirits. The Dhokra figurine is no longer a ritual object. The Dhemsa dance is no longer a harvest celebration. They are content. They are product.
This extraction is not new. Mainstream Indian art has been influenced by tribal aesthetics for decades — in painting, in sculpture, in textile design, in architecture. But the influence has flowed in one direction. The aesthetic moves from tribal to mainstream. The economic benefit does not flow back. The Dhokra artisan in Keonjhar, whose technique is four thousand years old, earns a few hundred rupees per piece. The urban gallery that sells “tribal-inspired art” charges thousands. The GI tag, the craft exposition, the government subsidy — these are bandages on a structural wound. The wound is that the mainstream economy values the product of tribal knowledge while devaluing the knowledge system that produces it.
The Collision
What modernity is doing to tribal Odisha can be stated in a single sentence: it is replacing a dozen different ways of being human with one.
But the details matter, because the collision takes many forms, and each form destroys something different.
Mining and displacement. The southern and western districts of Odisha sit on some of the richest mineral deposits in Asia. Bauxite in Niyamgiri and Koraput. Iron ore in Keonjhar and Sundargarh. Chromite in Jajpur. The people who live above these deposits are, overwhelmingly, tribal. The story of mining in tribal Odisha is the story of displacement dressed in the language of development.
The Kalinganagar firing of January 2, 2006, is the most concentrated expression of this collision. Police shot and killed fourteen tribals, including three women, who were protesting the construction of boundary walls for a Tata Steel plant. The protesters were members of the Ho community, who constituted roughly eighty percent of the tribal population in the Kalinganagar area. They had been promised rehabilitation. The rehabilitation had not materialized. They blocked the boundary construction. The police opened fire.
The POSCO saga, which lasted over a decade before the South Korean steel giant finally withdrew from its proposed twelve-billion-dollar project in Jagatsinghpur district in 2017, demonstrated the same pattern at a larger scale. Local communities — farmers, fisherfolk, people whose families had lived on the land for generations — resisted acquisition of their land. The state government, which had signed the memorandum of understanding and stood to gain from the investment, treated the resistance as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a legitimate objection to be addressed. Activists alleged that the government was proceeding with acquisition without properly recognizing forest dwellers’ rights under the Forest Rights Act of 2006. After over a decade of sustained protests, legal battles, and documented human rights abuses, POSCO walked away.
The Forest Rights Act. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 was supposed to be a turning point. It recognized, for the first time in Indian law, that tribal communities had rights over the forests they had inhabited for generations — rights to cultivate, to collect forest produce, to protect and manage community forests. On paper, it was revolutionary. In practice, implementation has been throttled by bureaucracy, lack of awareness among tribal communities, and resistance from the forest department, which has historically treated forests as government property to be managed by officials rather than communities.
Religious conversion and communal violence. The 2008 Kandhamal riots were the bloodiest expression of a tension that has been building in tribal Odisha for decades. On August 23, 2008, Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, a prominent Hindu leader who had been campaigning against Christian missionary activity among the Kondh, was assassinated at his ashram. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) claimed responsibility for the killing. But the Sangh Parivar blamed Christian missionaries, and the retaliation against Christian communities — many of them Dalit Panas who had converted — was swift, organized, and devastating. Over a hundred people were killed, many hacked to death with axes and machetes. At least three women were gang-raped. Nearly 56,000 people were displaced. More than 5,600 houses and 300 churches were burned.
The Kandhamal violence exposed a fault line that runs directly through the tribal question. The Kondh of Kandhamal are predominantly Hindu or follow traditional Kondh religion. The Pana community — historically classified as Dalits, not tribals — had undergone significant conversion to Christianity. The violence was framed as a Hindu-Christian conflict, but its deeper dynamics were about identity, resources, and the competition for Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste benefits. Missionaries offered education, healthcare, and social mobility to communities that the Hindu mainstream had never served. This made conversion both attractive to the recipients and threatening to those who saw it as cultural erosion. The Maoists, meanwhile, had built a base in the area by articulating exactly the grievances that mainstream politics had ignored. Three forces — Hindutva, Christianity, and Maoism — converged on a tribal landscape, and the tribals themselves became casualties of everyone’s cause.
The Maoist insurgency. For years, Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Kalahandi, and surrounding districts were part of India’s “Red Corridor” — areas where Maoist insurgents maintained significant presence. The Maoists articulated genuine grievances of tribal communities: land alienation, exploitation by moneylenders and contractors, police brutality, the failure of development to reach the people it was supposed to serve. But they also conscripted tribal youth, used tribal villages as bases, executed suspected “informers,” and brought counter-insurgency operations that treated entire populations as suspects. The construction of the Gurupriya Bridge in 2018, connecting the previously inaccessible “cut-off area” of Malkangiri, is often cited as a turning point — enabling not just military access but the arrival of schools, healthcare, and markets. By early 2026, with the surrender of key Maoist leaders and the neutralization of most cadres, the southern Odisha tribal belt has been effectively declared Naxal-free. But the scars remain. A generation of tribal youth grew up in the crossfire between insurgents and security forces. That is not the kind of damage that the arrival of a road or a government scheme can repair.
Migration. The most visible sign of the collision is the emptying of tribal villages. Tribal workers from Odisha migrate seasonally to brick kilns in Telangana, diamond-polishing units in Surat, construction sites in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Nearly eighty percent of the tribal population is rural and dependent on agriculture, but the quality of land and the absence of irrigation make sustainable agriculture possible only during the monsoon months. The rest of the year, they work elsewhere. They are among the most vulnerable workers in the Indian economy — far from home, without union protection, without social networks, without access to the welfare schemes they are entitled to in their home states. Close to half the migrant workers from some Odisha districts who travel to Telangana to work in brick kilns belong to Scheduled Tribes. They come with their families, including children who drop out of school for the season.
The education gap is severe. Literacy rates among PVTGs remain far below state and national averages. Schools in remote tribal areas are often staffed by teachers who do not speak the community’s language. The medium of instruction is Odia, which is a second or third language for many tribal children. The dropout rate is catastrophic. Healthcare is worse. Infant mortality among tribal populations stands at 41.6 per thousand live births — significantly higher than the national average. Among PVTG children, the prevalence of underweight was observed at over 75 percent, stunting at over 55 percent, and wasting at 60 percent. Among the Juang, over two-thirds of women do not receive crucial antenatal checkups. These are not the statistics of a developing country. They are the statistics of a forgotten country that exists within the borders of a developing one.
What Is Owed
Here is the uncomfortable truth that mainstream Odia culture has never honestly confronted.
The debt runs in the opposite direction from what the development narrative assumes.
Take rice. The Jeypore tract of southern Odisha — deep in tribal territory — has been identified by geneticists as one of the secondary centers of origin of Asian cultivated rice. The tribal communities of Koraput maintain nearly 100 to 130 varieties of traditional rice — varieties that exhibit archaic traits, representing a transitional species between wild rice and modern cultivars. These varieties yield less than modern hybrids, but they possess something the hybrids do not: resilience to climatic variation, resistance to local pests, adaptation to specific soil conditions accumulated over millennia. As climate change disrupts the high-yield monocultures that feed modern India, the genetic diversity preserved by tribal farmers in Koraput may turn out to be more valuable than any bauxite deposit. The tribal communities did not stumble onto this diversity. They created it, through thousands of years of selection, cultivation, and seed-saving — a form of biotechnology practiced without microscopes or laboratories.
Take Jagannath. The foundational deity of Odia identity — the center of the Rath Yatra, the presiding god of the Puri temple, the figure around which Odia cultural identity has cohered for centuries — has tribal origins that mainstream Odia culture acknowledges reluctantly, if at all. The Skanda Purana and the Niladri Mahodaya describe Jagannath as a “Sabara Devata” — a deity worshipped by the Sabaras (Saora), the ancient tribal inhabitants of the region. The Daitas, the non-Brahmin servitors who hold hereditary privileges in the Jagannath temple including the exclusive right to serve the principal meals to the deities, are believed to descend from the ancient Sabara tribe. The wooden icon of Jagannath — non-anthropomorphic, non-zoomorphic, carved from a neem log and replaced approximately every twelve years — is, in form and material, closer to a tribal ritual object than to the stone murti of mainstream Hindu worship. The Sabaras were tree worshippers who danced and sang before their deity — the Kitung, or Jaganta, or God. The most sacred figure in Odia Hinduism may be, in origin, a tribal god adopted and Brahmanized over centuries.
Take metallurgy. The Asur and Kol communities of the Chotanagpur plateau, including regions of what is now Odisha, were smelting iron by approximately 1300 to 1200 BCE — more than a thousand years before any of the “civilized” kingdoms that would eventually claim dominion over these lands. The Asur maintained hereditary traditions of bloomery iron smelting using indigenous furnace designs and reduction techniques that were sophisticated enough to produce usable iron from low-grade ores. The Agaria, the Lohar, the Birjia — these communities were India’s original metallurgists. The iron that built the plowshares, the weapons, the tools of civilization in eastern India was first smelted by tribal hands. The great irony of modern Odisha is that mining companies extract iron ore from tribal land using industrial technology, and the tribal communities — the descendants of the people who figured out iron in the first place — are employed, if at all, as unskilled laborers.
Take medicinal knowledge. Ethnobotanical surveys across Odisha have documented hundreds of plant species used by tribal communities for medicinal purposes — species whose properties were identified through generations of observation and experimentation. Traditional healers, known as vaidyas, maintain pharmacopoeias that modern medicine is only beginning to investigate. In the Jajpur forests alone, surveys identified 68 folk medicinal species used by tribal communities. In the Gandhamardan Mountain area of Bargarh, 70 plants from 65 genera are employed for medicinal purposes. These are not random folk remedies. They are the product of systematic, long-term empirical investigation conducted without the apparatus of modern science but with the same underlying method: observe, test, remember, transmit.
The question that all of this raises is not whether tribal communities “need development.” Of course they need healthcare. Of course they need education. Of course they need roads and clean water and protection from exploitation. The question is whether development can be designed in a way that does not require the destruction of knowledge systems that took thousands of years to build.
This is not a rhetorical question. It is a design problem. And it has solutions, if anyone is willing to implement them. Bilingual education that starts in the child’s mother tongue and adds Odia as a second language rather than the reverse. Healthcare systems that incorporate traditional healing knowledge alongside modern medicine rather than dismissing it. Agricultural policy that values the genetic diversity of tribal farming alongside the yield-per-hectare metrics of the Green Revolution. Land rights that are enforced, not merely legislated. Forest rights that are real, not bureaucratic fictions.
But implementing any of these solutions requires something that neither the Indian state nor mainstream Odia society has been willing to provide: a genuine acknowledgment that tribal Odisha is not a problem to be solved but a civilization to be learned from. That the arrow of knowledge runs in both directions. That the people who figured out rice, and iron, and the Jagannath deity, and hundreds of medicinal plants, and art forms that connect the living to the dead, are not primitive communities awaiting the gift of modernity. They are repositories of human knowledge that, once destroyed, cannot be recreated — any more than a burned library can be unburned, any more than an extinct language can be unextinguished.
Nearly ten million people live in this other Odisha. They speak languages from three different language families. They worship gods that predate every temple in the state. They farm in ways that modern agriculture is only now beginning to understand. They make art that connects realms of existence that modern culture does not even believe in.
The question is not whether they will survive. Some will, some will not. The thirteen PVTGs — 240,000 people, the most fragile of the fragile — face genuine extinction as distinct cultures within a generation. The larger communities — the Kondh, the Santals — will persist, but in increasingly diluted forms, as the pressures of market economy, mass media, migration, and religious conversion erode the practices and institutions that made them distinct.
The real question is what the rest of Odisha — and the rest of India — will have lost when the other Odisha is gone. Not the picturesque dances and the photogenic bead necklaces. Those can be preserved in museums and cultural exhibitions. What cannot be preserved is the way of knowing that produced them: the cosmology that saw the mountain as a living god, the agriculture that bred a hundred varieties of rice, the metallurgy that mastered iron before the rest of the subcontinent, the art that painted houses for the dead, the shaman who argued with ghosts. These are not cultural artifacts. They are civilizational achievements. And they are disappearing faster than anyone is willing to count.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.