The village festival origin

At a Glance

Central figures: Thakur Jiu, the creator; Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, the first man and woman; Marang Buru, the mountain spirit; and the seven original Santhal clans whose manjhi headmen carried the first seeds.
Setting: The Santhal heartland of what is now Jharkhand and West Bengal, in the time after the great dispersal when the clans settled the forested plateau country and needed to know when to plant and when to stop.
The turn: After a season of failed crops and quarreling clans, Marang Buru sent word through the bonga spirits that the people had forgotten to give back before taking - and that no grain would grow until they remembered.
The outcome: The seven manjhi headmen gathered at the sal tree on the hill above the river, performed the first collective offering of new rice and rice beer, danced until the ground was hard, and the rains came the following morning.
The legacy: The Sohrai festival, observed after the autumn harvest, and the Baha festival held in spring when the sal trees flower - both understood as renewals of the original pact between the Santhal people and the spirits of the land.

The sal tree on the hill had not flowered. Every other sal in the forest had opened its clusters weeks ago - pale yellow, smelling of warm dust and honey - but this one stood bare. The headman of the Murmu clan noticed it first because his house was closest to the hill. He said nothing for three days. On the fourth day he walked to the river and spoke to it.

The river did not answer, which was itself an answer.

The Year the Ground Refused

That year the rain came late, then came wrong. It fell sideways, in sheets that flattened the young rice before the stalks had hardened. The Soren fields flooded. The Tudu fields cracked. The Hansda clan lost a bullock to something in the water - not a crocodile, not a snake, something nobody could name. The Kisku headman’s wife dreamed of red ants pouring out of a cooking pot, and she woke screaming, and nobody in the village slept after that.

Each clan blamed another. The Hembrom said the Murmu had plowed too close to the sacred grove. The Murmu said the Mardi had taken water from the wrong stream. The Mardi said nothing, which made the others angrier.

By the time the rains stopped, there was almost nothing in the fields. The granaries were low. Children sat quiet on the packed-earth floors of the houses, and quiet children are the worst sign of all.

Marang Buru’s Message

The bhumka - the priest who could hear the bonga spirits - climbed to the top of Marang Buru at dawn. He went alone, barefoot, carrying nothing but a brass plate with turmeric paste and three grains of old rice. He sat on the flat stone where the ancestors had always sat and closed his eyes.

What Marang Buru said to him, or how, the bhumka never explained in detail. He came down the hill before noon looking ten years older. He gathered the seven manjhi headmen under the dead-looking sal tree and told them what he had been told.

The spirits were hungry. Not for blood - the Santhals do not give blood to their bonga - but for attention. For the first portion. For the acknowledgment that the rice comes from somewhere and goes to someone and is not simply a thing that humans take because they are hungry. The people had planted and harvested and planted again without once stopping to say: this came from you, and we know it.

You have eaten without looking up, the bhumka said. Marang Buru says: look up.

The Sal Tree on the Hill

The seven headmen argued for a day and a half - which, by Santhal standards of argument, was brief. The Soren manjhi wanted to make the offering at the river. The Hansda manjhi wanted the sacred grove. The Murmu manjhi said the sal tree on the hill, the one that had not flowered, and eventually the others agreed because the tree’s refusal to flower seemed to be part of the same silence.

They brought what little they had. Each clan carried a basket: new rice from the thin harvest, rice beer brewed by the oldest woman in each household, sal leaves folded into cups, mahua flowers dried in the sun. The Kisku headman brought a rooster, white, with a red comb that stood up like a flame. The Tudu headman brought river fish wrapped in leaves.

The bhumka drew a circle in the dirt around the sal tree with turmeric water. He placed the brass plate at the roots. Each manjhi set his basket inside the circle. The bhumka poured the first cup of rice beer onto the ground - not onto the roots, but onto the bare earth beside the tree, where the bonga could reach it.

He spoke the names. Thakur Jiu first, because Thakur Jiu made everything. Then Marang Buru, because Marang Buru held the land. Then the bonga of the river, the bonga of the sal forest, the bonga of the fields that had failed. He named each one. He did not skip any.

The Dancing

What happened next was not planned. The Mardi headman’s daughter, who was fourteen and had not spoken during the quarrels, began to stamp her feet. Not in anger. In rhythm. Her bare feet hit the packed earth under the sal tree and made a sound like a drum played with the flat of the hand.

The other women joined. Then the men. The Santhals are dancers the way fish are swimmers - it is what their bodies know how to do. They danced in a line that became a circle that became a spiral around the tree. The bhumka kept pouring rice beer, one cup after another, onto the ground. The rooster crowed. The sun moved across the sky and nobody stopped.

They danced until the earth under the sal tree was beaten smooth and hard as fired clay. They danced until their feet bled and the blood mixed with the turmeric water and the spilled rice beer. The old women sang a song that had no words anyone could remember learning - it was simply there, the way the river was there.

At some point in the late afternoon the sal tree flowered. Not slowly, the way trees flower. All at once, as if it had been holding its breath.

Rain Before Morning

The clouds came in from the east after dark. By the time the last dancers had stopped and the fires were lit and the remaining rice beer was being passed around, the sky was sealed shut with black cloud. The rain that fell that night was straight and warm and steady. It soaked into the cracked fields. It filled the river. It drummed on the roofs of the mud houses and the sound was so even and so constant that the children, who had been quiet for weeks, finally slept.

The bhumka did not sleep. He sat under the sal tree in the rain with his brass plate on his knees. The turmeric paste had washed away. The three old rice grains were gone - taken by ants, or by something else.

In the morning the seven manjhi headmen agreed: this would happen every year. After the harvest, before the new planting, the clans would gather, pour the first portion onto the ground, and dance until the earth remembered them. In spring, when the sal trees flowered, they would gather again, because the flowering was the land’s answer.

The Murmu manjhi asked the bhumka what to call it.

The bhumka said it did not need a name. The people would know when it was time. They would feel it in the ground under their feet.

They called it Sohrai anyway, because Santhals are practical people, and a thing without a name is hard to remember to do.