The ancestor spirits

At a Glance

• Central figures: The bonga - ancestor spirits of the Santhal dead - and the living families who must feed them, speak to them, and keep them housed in the bhitar, the inner room of the Santhal home.
• Setting: The Santhal villages of Jharkhand and West Bengal, in the landscape of sal forests, red laterite soil, and rice paddies where the boundary between the dead and the living is measured in a doorway.
• The turn: A young wife neglects the bhitar and the offerings owed to her husband’s ancestor spirits, and the bonga withdraw their protection from the household.
• The outcome: Illness, failed crops, and a dead calf force the family to call the ojha - the village diviner - who reads the cause in oil and water and prescribes the restoration of the ancestors’ place.
• The legacy: The continuing Santhal practice of maintaining the bhitar as the seat of ancestor spirits, fed at every harvest and consulted before marriages, land sales, and journeys - the oldest obligation in Santhal domestic life.

The calf died on a Thursday. It had been healthy at dawn - Suren had watched it nurse - and by the time the sun cleared the sal trees it was on its side in the mud, legs stiff, eyes already clouded. His wife Jhano stood in the doorway and said nothing. The chickens were quiet. Even the dog kept its distance from the small body.

That was the third thing. First the rice had come in short, nearly a third less than the year before, though the rains had been good and the neighbors’ fields had done fine. Then Suren’s mother had fallen sick with a fever that would not break, lying on her mat for nine days, barely drinking. Now the calf. Suren sat on his heels in the yard and looked at the dead animal and knew what his mother would say if she could sit up and say it.

The Bhitar

Every Santhal house has an inner room. It is not large. In Suren’s father’s time it held a clay pot, a few stones arranged in a particular way, and a small space on the mud floor where rice beer was poured and offerings of rice and chicken blood were placed at the proper times. This was the bhitar - the room where the ancestor spirits lived.

Not symbolically. The bonga were there. Suren’s father spoke to them before planting. He spoke to them before his children were born. When Suren’s older brother died as a boy, his father sat in the bhitar for three days, and when he came out he said the boy was with the others now, and that the others were not angry, and that the house would hold.

When Suren’s father died, the manjhi - the village headman - came and helped Suren perform what was necessary. The father’s spirit was brought into the bhitar with the rest. Rice beer was poured. A white chicken was killed. The names were spoken aloud, as many generations back as Suren could remember, which was four.

Then Suren married Jhano, who came from a village two days’ walk south, near the colliery. She had been to the mission school. She did not say the bhitar was wrong. She said nothing about it at all. But the room began to fill with other things - a tin trunk, bags of seed, a plastic bucket. The stones were still there, underneath. The clay pot was still there. But Jhano did not pour for the ancestors, and after a while Suren stopped doing it too. It was not a decision. It was a forgetting.

The Ojha’s Reading

Suren’s uncle Mangal came from the next village when he heard about the mother’s fever. He looked at the bhitar. He looked at Suren. He did not need to say much.

“Call Damu,” Mangal said.

Damu was the ojha, the diviner, a thin man with a scarred lip who lived alone at the edge of the sal forest. He came the next morning carrying a brass plate, a small pot of mustard oil, and a cup of water. He sat in the yard. He poured the oil into the water slowly, watching how it moved, how it broke, how the shapes formed and dissolved on the surface.

“The bonga are not in the house,” Damu said.

He did not mean they had left. He meant they had been pushed out. The clutter in the bhitar, the months without offerings, the silence where there should have been names spoken aloud - these things had told the ancestor spirits they were not wanted. And when the bonga withdraw, the protection they carry withdraws with them. The rice fails. The body sickens. The animals die.

Damu looked at Suren. “How long since you poured for them?”

Suren could not say exactly. A year. Maybe longer.

Damu named what was needed. A red chicken, not white this time - red for restoration. Fresh rice beer brewed by someone in the household, not bought. The bhitar cleared of everything except the stones and the pot. And the names spoken. All of them, back as far as memory reached.

The Red Chicken

Jhano did not argue. She had watched the calf die. She had nursed her mother-in-law through nine days of fever. Whatever she had learned at the mission school, she had also grown up Santhal, and she knew what a bonga could do when it was hungry.

She brewed the rice beer herself. It took two days. She cleared the bhitar, carrying the trunk and the seed bags and the bucket into the main room where they should have been all along. The mud floor of the inner room was swept and smoothed. The stones were cleaned with water. The clay pot was washed and set back in its place.

Damu came again at dusk. Mangal was there. Two other elders from the village came, men who remembered Suren’s father and grandfather. Suren held the red chicken. Damu spoke first - not a prayer exactly, but an address, the way you would speak to someone you had offended and needed to make right with.

He named the grandfather. He named the great-grandfather. He named the great-great-grandfather and the brother who had died as a boy. He named Suren’s father last. Each name was followed by a pause, as if to let the named spirit hear itself called.

Suren cut the chicken’s throat. The blood fell onto the stones. The rice beer was poured into the clay pot until it overflowed onto the mud floor. Rice was placed beside the pot - a small mound, enough for the spirits, not a feast but a recognition.

What Came Back

Suren’s mother sat up the next morning. She asked for water, then rice, then complained about the light. Within three days she was walking. The fever did not return.

The next planting, the rice came back full. Suren did not measure it against the neighbors, but his own fields gave what they had given before the silence in the bhitar. He did not buy another calf right away. That took time.

Every month after that, on the day Damu had specified, Suren poured rice beer in the bhitar and spoke the names. Jhano learned them too. Before their first child was born, Suren sat in the inner room and told the ancestors. Before he sold a piece of land at the eastern edge of the village, he sat in the inner room and told them that as well.

The bonga do not ask for much. They ask to be housed, fed, and spoken to. They ask that their names not be forgotten. The inner room is small. It does not need to be large. It needs to be kept.