Spirits of forest and field

At a Glance

• Central figures: The bonga - spirits of the sal forest, the rice fields, the rivers, and the hills - and the Santhal people who live alongside them; the manjhi (village headman) and the naeke (village priest) who maintain the relationship between human and spirit.
• Setting: Santhal villages of the Rajmahal Hills and the plains of Jharkhand and West Bengal, where the boundary between settlement and sal forest marks the boundary between human order and bonga territory.
• The turn: A young naeke neglects the seasonal offerings at the jaher than (sacred grove), and the bonga of field and forest withdraw their presence from the village.
• The outcome: Crops fail, cattle sicken, and the village falls into disorder until the naeke performs the proper rites and restores the covenant between the Santhal and the bonga.
• The legacy: The ongoing Santhal practice of maintaining the jaher than at the edge of every village, and the seasonal festivals - Baha, Sohrai, Karam - through which the bonga are fed and the land kept in balance.

The sal trees at the edge of Domdih village stood in a rough circle, and inside that circle the ground had been swept clean for as long as anyone could remember. No one built there. No one grazed cattle there. Children knew without being told that the grove was not for climbing. Three flat stones sat under the largest sal, and on certain days the naeke placed rice beer and flowers and the blood of a white chicken on those stones. He spoke to the stones as if someone were listening. Someone was.

This is how the Santhal have always understood the arrangement. The bonga are not gods in the way outsiders use that word. They are presences - in the grove, in the river, in the paddy, in the hill where the dead are taken. They do not ask for worship. They ask for attention.

The Jaher Than

Every Santhal village has its jaher than, or it is not a village. It sits at the edge of the settlement, where the cleared land meets the forest, and it belongs to neither. The grove is the bonga’s house. The naeke is the one who keeps the door.

Inside the jaher than live the principal bonga of the village. Jaher Era is the chief among them - the spirit of the grove itself. Gosain Era oversees the moral order. Marang Buru, the great mountain spirit, is honored there too, though Marang Buru’s true home is in the Rajmahal Hills and he cannot be contained in any single grove. There are others. Their names vary from village to village, and some families keep particular bonga the way other families keep particular debts - quietly, carefully, across generations.

The stones are not carved. They are not decorated. They sit in the earth, and the naeke knows which stone belongs to which bonga because his father’s father told his father, who told him. If the naeke dies without passing on the knowledge, the village has a problem that no outsider can solve.

The Naeke Who Forgot

In Domdih there was a naeke named Sona Murmu. He had learned the names from his uncle, who had been naeke before him. Sona was young when the responsibility came to him, and he was restless. He had been to the town. He had seen the market, the cinema hall, the road that went to Dumka. The grove seemed small to him, and the rites seemed long, and the bonga seemed like something his uncle had believed in because his uncle had never been anywhere.

The first year Sona cut the Baha festival short. He poured the rice beer but did not stay to sing. The second year he did not slaughter the chicken for Jaher Era at planting time. He swept the grove but placed no offering on the stones. The third year he did not go to the grove at all during the rains.

The paddy that year came up thin. The stems were pale and fell over in the wind. The cattle developed sores on their legs that would not heal. Two children in the village broke out in fevers that the medicine from the town could not touch. The well, which had always been good, tasted of iron.

The elders sat with the manjhi under the meeting tree and talked about it. They did not blame Sona directly. They said, the bonga are not being fed. A bonga that is not fed does not punish - it simply goes. And when the bonga of the field goes, the field does what a field does without a spirit in it. It dries. It sickens. It forgets how to grow.

Sona Goes Back

Sona’s mother told him what the elders had said. She did not argue with him. She put a clay pot of rice beer by the door of their house and a garland of sal flowers beside it and said nothing else.

He went to the grove before dawn. The sal trees were the same. The stones were the same. But the ground felt different underfoot - dry, loose, as if something that had been holding the soil together had let go. He knelt by the largest stone and placed the rice beer and the flowers and sat there. He did not know what to say. His uncle had always spoken to the bonga in a particular way, a cadence that moved between Santhali and something older, and Sona had not listened carefully enough.

He said what he could. He named Jaher Era and Gosain Era and Marang Buru. He said, I did not come, and I am here now. He poured the rice beer onto the stone and watched it run into the cracks and disappear into the earth.

Nothing happened. The grove was quiet. A koel called from somewhere in the canopy. Sona waited.

He came back the next day, and the next. On the fourth day he brought a white chicken and did what his uncle had done, though his hands were clumsy and he had to ask old Churki Murmu from across the village how to hold the bird properly. Churki showed him without comment.

On the seventh day the well water tasted clean again. The children’s fevers broke. The cattle still had sores, but they were eating.

The Bonga Return

The Santhal do not say the bonga “forgave” Sona. That is not how it works. The bonga are not people. They do not hold grudges. They are presences, and when they are tended they are present, and when they are not tended they withdraw. The arrangement is old and it is simple and it requires maintenance the way a house requires maintenance.

Sona performed the full Baha festival the following spring. He went to the grove with drums and sal flowers and rice beer, and the village came with him. The unmarried girls danced. The manjhi sat beside the stones and watched. The sal trees were in bloom, and the flowers dropped onto the swept ground and onto the stones and into the pots of rice beer, and nobody swept them away because the flowers were the point.

By the following harvest the paddy stood thick and green and the heads were heavy. The cattle were well. The village was what it had been.

What Holds

The jaher than still stands at the edge of Santhal villages across Jharkhand and West Bengal. In some places the sal forest has been cut for mining or road-building, and the grove is a small square of trees surrounded by bare red earth. In some places the naeke’s line has been broken and the knowledge of which stone belongs to which bonga has been lost. In some places the festivals continue. In some they do not.

Where the grove stands and the naeke pours and the drums are played at Baha and Sohrai and Karam, the arrangement holds. The bonga are fed. The field grows. The water is clean.

Where it does not, the Santhal know what has happened. The bonga have not died. They have gone somewhere else, waiting - in the forest, in the hill, in the river - for someone to sweep the ground and place the flowers and sit with them again.