Thakur Jiu creates the world

At a Glance

• Central figures: Thakur Jiu, the supreme creator; the swan, the crab, and the tortoise he shaped from red mud; Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, the first man and woman; Marang Buru, the mountain spirit; Jaher Era, the sacred grove spirit.
• Setting: The Santhal oral tradition of eastern India - Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Odisha - told by manjhi and village elders as the foundational account of how the earth and the Santhal people came to be.
• The turn: Thakur Jiu pulled red clay from beneath the primordial water and, through successive acts of shaping and sending creatures downward, built the earth on the back of a tortoise.
• The outcome: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi were formed from the same red clay, given breath, and set down on the new earth at a place called Hihiri Pipiri, where the Santhal people began.
• The legacy: The annual Sohrai festival and the reverence for the sacred grove - the jaher - where Santhal communities still gather to honor the spirits Thakur Jiu placed in the world.

There was water. It had no shore, no bottom anyone had found, no color but its own weight. Thakur Jiu stood on it. He looked at it. He looked at the sky, which was also nothing yet. He decided the water alone was not enough.

He reached down into it with both hands and pulled up a fistful of red mud from underneath. This mud was heavy and warm and smelled like the inside of the earth, though the earth did not exist yet. He squeezed it. He shaped it. He set it on the water and watched it sink.

The Swan, the Crab, and the Tortoise

He tried again. This time he shaped the mud into a swan. He blew on it and the swan opened its eyes and shook water off its wings. He shaped the mud into a crab. He blew on it and the crab moved its legs and clicked its claws. He shaped the mud into a tortoise, broad-backed and patient, and blew on that too.

The swan flew upward and circled. There was nothing to land on.

Thakur Jiu sent the crab down into the water. Go to the bottom, he said. Bring back what you find. The crab went under. It was gone a long time. When it came back it carried a lump of red clay between its claws - a bigger lump than Thakur Jiu had pulled up before. The crab set it on the surface and it stayed for a moment, then broke apart and sank.

So Thakur Jiu took the tortoise and turned it on its back. He spread the clay across the tortoise’s shell. He pressed it flat. He smoothed it with his palms. The clay held. It dried in the wind the swan made with its circling. That is what we are standing on.

Hihiri Pipiri

The earth was flat clay on a tortoise’s shell and it was bare. No grass, no trees, no hills. Thakur Jiu breathed on it and things grew. First sirom grass, thin and quick. Then sal trees, pushing up through the clay, cracking it into soil. Then creepers, vines, bamboo. The forest filled in so fast that by the time the swan landed there was a branch for it to sit on.

Water ran off the edges of the clay and pooled in low places. Rivers formed. Thakur Jiu named none of them yet. He was working.

He went to a place where the ground was slightly higher than the rest and the air was still. He called this place Hihiri Pipiri. It is the center. That is where he sat down and did the next thing.

Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi

He took two fistfuls of the same red clay - the clay from the bottom of the water, the clay the crab had carried up. From the first fistful he shaped a man. The man had legs, arms, a chest, a face. He lay on the ground at Hihiri Pipiri and did not move. Thakur Jiu leaned down and breathed into the man’s nostrils. The man opened his eyes. This was Pilchu Haram.

From the second fistful he shaped a woman. Same clay, same care, same breath. She opened her eyes. This was Pilchu Budhi.

They looked at each other. They looked at the forest. They did not know anything yet - not how to eat, not how to speak, not how to find water. Thakur Jiu showed them. He walked them to the river and showed them how to cup their hands. He walked them to the sal trees and showed them which fruit to pull down. He showed Pilchu Haram how to strip bark. He showed Pilchu Budhi how to dig roots with a stick. Then he left them there.

They were not alone, exactly. The swan was in the trees. The crab was in the river. The tortoise was underneath everything, holding it steady. But Thakur Jiu had other work.

The Spirits in the Grove

He set bonga in the world - spirits, not shaped from clay but breathed into particular places. A bonga in the river. A bonga in the hill. A bonga in the largest sal tree in the forest, the one whose roots went deepest.

He placed Marang Buru in the mountain. Not on it - in it. Marang Buru was the mountain’s awareness, the thing that made it more than rock. When the Santhal people later stood at the foot of a hill and felt something press against them - that was Marang Buru, noticing.

He placed Jaher Era in a grove of sal trees and told her to stay. The grove became the jaher, the sacred place where the Santhal would gather to speak to the spirits. Jaher Era did not move from that grove. She is still there.

The bonga were everywhere after that. In the water, in the termite mound, in the space between two stones. The world Thakur Jiu made was not empty even where it looked empty.

Pilchu Haram’s Children

Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi had children at Hihiri Pipiri. Seven sons and seven daughters, some say. Others say more. The children married each other - there was no one else - and their children spread out from Hihiri Pipiri into the forest, along the rivers, up into the hills where Marang Buru waited.

Each family carried a gotra, a clan name, and each clan had its own bonga watching it. The clans became the Santhal - the people who knew where they had come from because the elders told them, standing in the jaher under the sal trees, at the festivals when the telling was required.

Pilchu Haram grew old. Pilchu Budhi grew old. They did not leave Hihiri Pipiri. The earth stayed on the tortoise’s back. The rivers kept running off the clay. Thakur Jiu did not return to that place, but his breath was still in the clay, in the man and the woman, in every child born from them. The Santhal know this because the manjhi tells it, and the manjhi heard it from the manjhi before him, back and back to the first one who stood at Hihiri Pipiri and remembered.