The flood story
At a Glance
- Central figures: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, the first man and woman; Thakur Jiu, the creator god; Lita and Lipi, the brother and sister who survived the flood.
- Setting: The Santhal homeland of eastern India - Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha - in the time before the Santhal clans existed; an oral tradition preserved among Santhal elders.
- The turn: Thakur Jiu, seeing that the descendants of the first couple had become drunk on rice-beer and forgotten him entirely, sent a flood to swallow the earth.
- The outcome: Lita and Lipi alone survived by sheltering on the peak of Harata mountain; from their union the twelve Santhal clans descended, and the world was repopulated.
- The legacy: The Santhal bonga offerings made before brewing rice-beer and the reverence paid to Harata mountain, which Santhal elders remember as the place where the world began again.
The rice-beer had been fermenting for three days when the trouble started. Not in one village but in all of them - every settlement that Pilchu Haram’s children had built across the hills and the river flats. The people drank and they danced and they coupled in the open air, and when the bhumka stood up and said the name Thakur Jiu, someone laughed at him and pushed him into the mud.
Thakur Jiu watched this. He had made the earth by pulling red clay from the bottom of the primordial water. He had shaped Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi from that same clay, breathed life into them, given them the knowledge of fire and seed and the fermentation of rice. And now their grandchildren’s grandchildren did not remember his name, or remembered it only to spit.
The Warnings Nobody Heard
He sent a bird first. A small white bird - some say a crane, some say a heron - that circled the villages crying out in a voice like a woman’s voice. The people threw stones at it. Then Thakur Jiu sent a dream to every elder in every village on the same night. The dream showed water - black water, rising past the doors, past the roofline, past the top of the tallest sal tree. The elders woke sweating but told no one. They were afraid of looking foolish.
Then the bhumka in the largest village, the one who had been pushed into the mud, cleaned himself off and walked to the center of the settlement. He said: Thakur Jiu is angry. He will wash the world. The people need to stop drinking and make offerings.
They laughed at him again. Someone handed him a gourd of rice-beer and said, Drink, old man, and stop your noise.
The bhumka walked out of the village that evening and did not come back.
The Water Rises
The rain began the next morning. Not ordinary monsoon rain - this was rain that came from every direction, rain that fell sideways and upward, rain that tasted of salt and iron. The rivers rose in an hour. The low fields vanished under brown water by midday. By evening the water was at the doors.
The people moved to higher ground. The water followed. They moved to the hilltops. The water followed. They climbed into the trees and lashed themselves to branches with vine-rope, and the water rose past the roots, past the trunk, past the lower branches. One by one the trees went under.
There were two among all the people who had listened to the bhumka. Lita, a young man, and Lipi, his sister. When the old priest left the village, they had followed him partway and asked what they should do. He told them: go to Harata mountain. Take a rooster and a hen with you. Take fire in a clay pot. Take seed-rice in a gourd. Go now.
They went. They climbed Harata mountain while the rain was still just rain, before the rivers broke their banks. They carried the rooster under Lita’s arm and the hen under Lipi’s. The fire burned in its clay pot, sheltered with a broad leaf. The seed-rice rattled in its gourd.
The Peak of Harata
The water came up the mountain. It swallowed the foothills, the lower slopes, the middle slopes. Lita and Lipi climbed until there was nowhere higher to climb. They stood on the peak of Harata with water on every side, stretching flat and brown to the horizon. No trees. No rooftops. No other hilltops. Nothing.
They stayed there seven days. The rooster crowed each morning and the hen laid an egg in the dust, and they ate the egg and drank rainwater from the hollow of a rock. The fire burned low but did not go out. On the seventh evening the rain stopped, suddenly, the way a voice stops mid-sentence. The clouds pulled apart and Lita saw the moon, and it looked the same as it always had.
The water began to go down. Slowly - a hand-span a day. Brown mud appeared on the upper slopes, then on the lower slopes. Dead trees. Dead animals. The stink of everything that had drowned. By the time the water was fully gone the mud had dried and cracked and a few green shoots had come up, because the earth remembers what it is supposed to do.
The Brother and the Sister
Now there was a problem. Lita and Lipi were brother and sister. There was no one else. Thakur Jiu spoke to them - not in a dream, not through a bird, but directly, the way you speak to someone standing in front of you. He said: you must marry. The world needs people again.
Lipi said nothing. Lita said nothing. It was not a thing either of them wanted.
Thakur Jiu told them to go to opposite sides of the mountain. Each would build a fire and place a stone on the fire. If by morning the two stones had come together on their own, the marriage was sanctioned and neither of them bore the fault of it.
They did this. Lita went to the eastern slope and Lipi to the western slope, and they each built a fire and placed a flat river-stone on the coals. In the morning Lita walked to the top of the mountain and found both stones lying side by side, warm, touching edge to edge.
So they married. It was Thakur Jiu’s doing, not theirs. Santhal elders are specific about this. The union was not chosen. It was required.
The Twelve Clans
Lipi bore children. Many children, over many years. From these children came the twelve paris - the twelve clans of the Santhal. Murmu, Kisku, Hansda, Hembram, Marandi, Soren, Tudu, Baske, Besra, Pauria, Chore, Bedea. Each clan traces itself back to one of those children. Each child had a different temperament, and the clan carries that temperament still. The Murmu are priests. The Kisku were once kings. The Hansda are wild geese - restless, wandering people.
The rooster and the hen made chickens. The seed-rice, planted in the first cleared patch of mud, made a field. The fire in the clay pot lit the first hearth in the first house that Lita built at the foot of Harata mountain.
Before any rice-beer is brewed in a Santhal village, a small offering is poured on the ground. Some of it goes to Thakur Jiu. Some goes to Marang Buru, the mountain spirit who held Harata above the water. The offering is quiet and quick and nobody explains it to outsiders, but the people who pour it know what the rice-beer cost their ancestors, and they pour it anyway, every time.