The first Santhal couple

At a Glance

• Central figures: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, the first man and first woman; Thakur Jiu, the creator god who shaped them; Lita, the horse who carried them; Marang Buru, the mountain spirit who taught them handi (rice beer).
• Setting: The Santhal oral tradition of eastern India (Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha), beginning at Hihiri Pipiri - the place where the first couple was set down on the newly formed earth.
• The turn: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, after being created and placed at Hihiri Pipiri, did not know how to be man and wife until Marang Buru came down from his hill and gave them rice beer, and the knowledge that followed it.
• The outcome: The couple bore seven pairs of sons and daughters, who married each other and became the ancestors of the seven original Santhal clans, spreading outward from Hihiri Pipiri across the land.
• The legacy: The seven Santhal clans - Murmu, Kisku, Hembrom, Marndi, Soren, Tudu, and Baske - each trace descent from one of these seven pairs, and the brewing of handi remains central to Santhal ritual life.

There was water and nothing under it and nothing above it. Thakur Jiu looked at the water. He reached down and pulled mud from the bottom - red mud, dense and wet - and he shaped two birds. A Has and a Hasil, a goose and its mate. He set them on the water and they floated. The birds needed somewhere to stand, so Thakur Jiu sent down a worm to bring up more earth. The worm went down and came back and went down again, and what it brought up Thakur Jiu spread flat on the water’s surface. The earth held. Grass came. Trees came. The Has and the Hasil walked on it and found it good.

But earth with only birds was not enough. Thakur Jiu took more of the red mud and shaped two figures. He shaped them carefully, with heads and arms and legs, with fingers and toes, with eyes that could open. He set them in the sun to dry.

The Day Horse and the Figures in the Sun

The figures lay drying on a flat stone. Thakur Jiu had made them well - the man broad across the chest, the woman with strong shoulders - but they were still only clay. A Day horse came by, the great horse that runs across the sky, and it saw the figures and did not know what they were. It put its hoof through the man’s chest. The clay cracked apart.

Thakur Jiu came back and found the damage. He did not curse the horse. He gathered the pieces, mixed them with fresh mud, and shaped the figures again. This time he set the horse Lita to guard them. Lita stood over the two clay bodies while the sun baked them hard, and nothing came near. When the clay was firm and red-brown and warm to the touch, Thakur Jiu breathed into them.

The man opened his eyes first. Then the woman. They sat up and looked at each other and at the flat new earth stretching in every direction. They did not know each other’s names. They did not know their own.

Thakur Jiu named the man Pilchu Haram. He named the woman Pilchu Budhi. He set them down at a place called Hihiri Pipiri - the first place, the starting place, the navel of the earth where the ground was firmest because it had dried first.

Hihiri Pipiri

Hihiri Pipiri had everything a man and a woman might need except the knowledge of what to do with it. There were sal trees and mahua trees and rice growing wild in the wet places. There were tubers in the ground and fish in the streams. Pilchu Haram ate. Pilchu Budhi ate. They slept on opposite sides of a clearing. They woke and ate again.

They did not touch each other. They did not speak much. They were like two people living in the same village who have no occasion to meet. Thakur Jiu watched this and understood the problem. He had given them bodies and breath and a place. He had not given them the means to come together. Creation was not yet finished.

So Thakur Jiu went to Marang Buru.

Marang Buru Comes Down

Marang Buru lived in the hill - not on it, inside it. The hill was his body or his house or both. When Thakur Jiu asked for help, Marang Buru came down to Hihiri Pipiri carrying a pot. Inside the pot was handi, rice beer, thick and white and smelling of ferment.

He found Pilchu Haram sitting under a sal tree, doing nothing particular. He found Pilchu Budhi near the stream, also doing nothing particular. He called them both to him and poured the handi into two cups made from sal leaves.

Drink, he said.

They drank. The handi was warm in their stomachs and it changed something behind their eyes. They looked at each other and for the first time they saw each other - not as two separate figures placed on the same ground, but as man and woman, as pair, as the two halves of the thing Thakur Jiu had intended. Pilchu Haram reached out and took Pilchu Budhi’s hand. She did not pull away.

Marang Buru left the pot and walked back into his hill.

That night Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi lay together for the first time. The earth at Hihiri Pipiri was still warm from the sun that had baked it into being, and they slept on it as husband and wife.

Seven Sons, Seven Daughters

In time Pilchu Budhi bore children. Seven sons and seven daughters, one pair after another, until the clearing at Hihiri Pipiri was full of small voices. The children grew fast. They ate the wild rice and the tubers and the fish. They learned to climb the sal trees and to call the birds down.

But there was a difficulty. Seven sons and seven daughters, and all of them brother and sister. How could they marry? The earth needed more people. The clans needed to begin.

Thakur Jiu thought about this for a long time. Then he gave each pair a separate name and a separate mark, and he declared that the seven pairs were not siblings but founders - each one the root of a new line. Murmu. Kisku. Hembrom. Marndi. Soren. Tudu. Baske. The seven paris, the seven clans. Each pair went out from Hihiri Pipiri in a different direction, carrying seed rice and a pot for brewing handi and the name Thakur Jiu had given them.

They settled in the hills and the river valleys. They cleared land. They planted. They built houses of mud and thatch and bamboo. They married between clans - Murmu to Kisku, Soren to Hembrom - so that the lines would cross and strengthen rather than fold back on themselves. The rule held. A Santhal does not marry within the paris. That was set at the beginning and has not changed.

The Pot and the Horse

Two things remained from the first days. The pot Marang Buru left at Hihiri Pipiri - handi was brewed from it ever after, and no Santhal ceremony begins or ends without rice beer poured from a pot, because without the handi the first couple would never have come together and none of this would exist. The second was the horse Lita, who guarded the clay figures while they dried. The Santhals honored the horse afterward. When a manjhi - a village headman - holds council, the horse has a place in the story he tells of how things began.

Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi stayed at Hihiri Pipiri. They grew old there. Their children’s children spread across Chotanagpur, across the Rajmahal Hills, across the red-soil plains of what is now Jharkhand and Bengal and Odisha. But the place where they first opened their eyes - where the clay dried in the sun, where Marang Buru poured the first cup - that place is still the center of the Santhal world, whether or not anyone alive can walk there and point to the exact stone.