The origin of music and dance

At a Glance

• Central figures: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, the first man and woman; Marang Buru, the mountain spirit; the bonga spirits of the forest who first showed the rhythm to the Santhal ancestors.
• Setting: The Santhal homeland of Jharkhand and West Bengal, in the earliest time after the creation of human beings, when the earth was still being learned.
• The turn: Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, unable to express their joy at the harvest, heard the bonga spirits drumming and singing in the sal forest and brought the sound back to the village.
• The outcome: The Santhals learned to make drums from hollowed sal wood, to sing in call-and-response, and to dance in lines - men and women together - at every turning of the year.
• The legacy: The dong dance and the tamak’ and tumdak’ drums, which remain central to Santhal festivals including Sohrai, Baha, and Karam.

The rice had come up. Pilchu Haram stood at the edge of the field and looked at it - green, thick, bending a little in the wind that came down from Marang Buru’s hill. He had put the seed in the ground and the rain had come and now this had happened, and he did not know what to do with the feeling in his chest. It was too large to keep inside and too strange to speak. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out that was the right shape.

Pilchu Budhi was behind him, pulling weeds from the edge of the field. She straightened up and watched him standing there with his mouth open and his arms at his sides. She knew the feeling too. The rice was the first thing they had grown. Before the rice, they had eaten roots and whatever the forest gave. Now the earth had given back more than they put in, and neither of them had a word for that.

The Sound from the Sal Forest

That night they could not sleep. They lay on the packed earth of their shelter and stared at the dark. The frogs were loud. The jackals were loud. Everything in the forest had a sound except them.

Then Pilchu Haram heard it. Not the frogs, not the jackals. A beating, low and steady, coming from deep in the sal trees. Not an animal sound. It had a pattern. It went dha-dhin dha-dhin dha, and then it paused, and then it went again.

He sat up. Pilchu Budhi was already sitting. She had heard it too.

They did not speak. They got up and walked toward the sound. The moon was half-full and the sal trees threw long shadows. The sound got louder as they walked. Then they heard voices - not words they recognized, but voices rising and falling over the drumbeat, weaving in and out of each other like water around stones in a stream.

They came to a clearing. The bonga spirits were there.

The Bongas in the Clearing

The bonga were not easy to look at. They kept shifting - now like people, now like light between leaves, now like shapes the eye could not hold. But their hands were solid enough. Two of them sat on the ground with hollowed logs between their knees, striking the stretched hide with flat palms. The sound that came out was the sound Pilchu Haram had heard from the shelter, but here it went through the ground and into his feet and up through his legs.

Others stood in a line. They moved together - a step left, a step right, a dip of the shoulders. Their feet hit the ground on the beat. They sang. The one at the front called out a line and the rest answered. The song was in a language Pilchu Haram did not know, but the shape of it was clear: question, answer, question, answer.

Pilchu Budhi’s foot moved. She had not told it to. It moved again, hitting the ground on the beat.

Pilchu Haram looked at his wife. Her eyes were wide and her foot was moving and her face had changed. The feeling in her chest that had no word - it was coming out through her feet.

The bonga saw them. One of the drummers looked up. He did not stop playing. He looked at Pilchu Haram and then at Pilchu Budhi and he smiled. He tilted his head toward the line of dancers. Come.

They stepped into the clearing. Pilchu Budhi joined the line. Her body found the step - left, right, dip - as if she had always known it. Pilchu Haram sat beside the drummer and watched his hands. The drummer slowed. He played the pattern simply, one beat at a time, and waited. Pilchu Haram put his hands on the log. The hide was warm. He struck it. The sound that came out was rough and too loud, but the drummer nodded and played again, and Pilchu Haram followed.

They danced and drummed until the sky went gray. Then the bonga were gone. The clearing was empty. The logs were still there, warm where the drummers’ knees had pressed.

The First Drums

Pilchu Haram carried one of the logs back. It was heavy, hollowed from a sal tree, with animal hide stretched tight over one end with strips of sinew. He studied how it was made. The hide had been scraped thin. The sinew was wound in a pattern that tightened as it dried.

He found another sal trunk, fallen and half-rotted, and hollowed it with fire and a stone blade. Pilchu Budhi caught a goat and they used the skin. The first drum he made sounded dull and flat. The second was better. The third was close to the sound he remembered from the clearing.

He made two sizes. The larger one sat on the ground and he struck it with both palms. This became the tamak’. The smaller one hung from a strap and he hit it while standing. This became the tumdak’. When he played both together, the pattern came back - dha-dhin dha-dhin dha - and Pilchu Budhi’s feet began to move again.

The Song Pilchu Budhi Made

Pilchu Budhi could not forget the singing. The melody the bonga had used was not in words she knew, but she found that the shape of it - rising, falling, call, answer - could hold any words she put inside it.

She sang about the rice. She sang about how the seed went into the ground and the rain came and the green stalks pushed up and the grain appeared heavy at the top, bending the stalk down. She sang each thing as it was. Pilchu Haram played the drum and she sang, and when she reached the end of a line she paused, and he answered with the drum, and she sang the next line.

Their children heard it. The children of their children heard it. The song changed as it passed from mouth to mouth - new words for new harvests, new verses for births and deaths and marriages - but the shape stayed the same. Call, answer. Voice, drum. Feet on the packed earth.

What Marang Buru Gave

Marang Buru, the old spirit of the hill, heard the drumming from his summit. He came down to see. He found Pilchu Haram playing and Pilchu Budhi singing and a line of their grandchildren dancing in the clearing where the bonga had first danced.

He watched for a long time. Then he said one thing.

Play this at every season’s turn. When you plant, play. When you harvest, play. When you name a child, play. When you bury your dead, play. The bongas gave it to you because you needed it. Do not forget that you need it.

Then he went back up the hill.

The Santhals did not forget. At Sohrai, after the rice comes in, they play the tamak’ and the tumdak’ and dance the dong in long lines under the open sky. At Baha, when the sal trees flower, they sing the songs Pilchu Budhi first shaped. At Karam, they dance around the karam tree all night, feet striking the ground on the beat, the same beat the bonga played in the clearing when the world was new and the first man did not know what to do with the feeling in his chest.