VI.-A General Account of the Birhors.

By Sarat Chandra Roy, M.A.

I.-HABITAT.

THE hills and jungles that fringe the Chōta Nagpur plateau on Local Extent. its east and north-east, form the principal home of the Birhōrs. This line of hills runs from the Ramgarh thānā in the Hāzāribāgh district on the north along the Oṛmānjhi, Angāṛā, Rānchi, and Būnḍū Police circles (thānās) on the east of the Ranchi plateau up to and beyond the Tāmāṛ thānā which marks the south-eastern limit of the Ranchi district. Here and there in these hills and jungles extending roughly over an area of over seventy miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, the Birhōrs either wander about in small scattered communities tracking game and collecting rope-fibres and honey, or camp in tiny leaf-huts, making rude wooden vessels and plaiting ropes and weaving them into hunting-nets and carrying-nets. Several groups of Birhōrs are met with beyond the north-eastern margin of the plateau in the jungles and hills further north in the Hāzāribāgh district north of the Dāmōdar, where they muster strong; and a few scattered groups have strayed into the Manbhūm district on the east and the Singhbhum district on the south. A few stray groups of Birhōrs are also found in the jungles and hills of some of the northern and north-western thānās of the Ranchi district and the tributary States further to the west. The nature of the country occupied by the tribe may be roughly described as a long succession of ranges of wooded hills separated by open valleys. These valleys alone are fit for cultivation, and are dotted over with villages sparsely inhabited by agricultural tribes and castes more civilized than the Birhōrs.

The Birhōrs themselves generally select comparatively open Flora and Fauna. spaces on the wooded hill-tops and slopes, or the edges of the jungles for their taṇḍās or settlements. These jungles and hills support a tropical flora, among which are timber trees like the sal (Shorea robusta) and the gamhār (Gmelina arborea), wild fruit trees like the jāmūn (Eugenia Jambolana), the bair (Zizyphus Jujuba), the mahua (Bassia Latifolia), myrobolans of different varieties and a few kinds of wild yams and tubers, besides bamboos and fibrous creepers like the chop (Bauhinia scanden). Shrubs bearing edible berries, such as the pial (Buchania Latifolia), are not numerous. And thus the natural vegetation of these hills and jungles affords but scanty food for the Birhōrs. Among the fauna of these woods the deer, the porcupine, the hare, the rat, and the monkey are the more important from the Birhōr's point of view, as their flesh is highly prized by him for food. The tiger, the leopard, the hyena, the bear, the wolf, the blue cow or nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) are also met with here and there in these jungles. Among birds, the peacock, the pigeon, the plover, the partridge, the snipe, the teal, and parrots are worth mentioning. As may be expected in these surroundings, the Birhōr has developed into a keen hunter with strong powers of scent, sight and hearing, and has acquired an intimate knowledge of the haunts and habits of different birds and animals, and the medicinal properties of various roots and herbs.

The climate of these parts is characterized by oppressive heat Climate. in the summer season, severe cold in the winter and a heavy rainfall during the monsoon. The maximum temperature in summer has been known to exceed 110° in the shade and the minimum in winter has fallen below 40°. The annual rainfall varies from 50 to 65 inches, so that in the rainy months, the Birhōr can no longer move about in pursuit of game but must perforce stop in kumbas or leaf-sheds, eking out his scanty store, if any, of dried corolla of the mahua (Bassia latifolia) flower with some edible leaves or roots or yams gathered in the jungle, or with grain exchanged for, or purchased with,

the sale-proceeds of ropes made of chop fibre, or rude vessels made of wood. Thus, the flora and fauna of his habitat havelargely determined the nature and quantity of his food, the size of his food-groups or tanḍās, the character and material of his dwellings, and have influenced his occupation, material culture, and even social organization.

As their name of Birhōr, or 'jungle-folk', suggests, the tribe live in a state of almost primitive culture well calculated to rejoice the heart of the anthropologist. They wander about, or settle down for a time, in small groups of from three to about ten families, earning a precarious subsistence by hunting, by collecting chop creepers and making them into ropes for barter or sale in the nearest villages or markets, and by gathering bees'-wax and honey when available. Although the most cherished occupation of all the men of thetribe is hunting, the Birhōrs are, according to their mode of living, divided into two main divisions, known respectively as the Uṭhlūs and the Jaghis. Except in the rainys eason, the Uṭhlu (migratory) Birhōrs move about from jungle to jungle in small groups with their families, their scanty belongings, and their gods or bhuts, represented by stones and wooden pegs and carried in baskets by one or two young bachelors, who walk at the head of the party. Other boys carry fowls meant for occasional sacrifices to the gods, the men follow with their hunting nets and tools and weapons, the women carry palm-leaf mats, wooden mortars and pestles, and both men and women carry bamboo-baskets containing their scanty store. of dried mahuă flowers and any grain they may have laid by, and the girls carry earthen pots for cooking and carrying water. They stop and hunt at one place for about a week or a fortnight (except in the rainy months which they spend at one place), and then move on to another jungle, and similarly camp and hunt there, and again move on to still another jungle, and thus wander about in search of food until they come back to their original

starting point in about two years' time, and start once more on a similar tour along the same route.

The Jaghi (settled) Birhōrs, on the other hand, are those families that, tired of toilsome wanderings, have settled down for a comparatively long period, generally on some hill-top or the borders of some jungle. Some Birhōrs of this latter class may clear some land in the jungle for purposes of more or less permanent cultivation, but the majority are landless. Birhōrs, both Uṭhlu and Jaghi, however, sometimes rear a scanty crop of maize or beans by burning a patch of jungle, scratching the soil and sowing in the ashes. Even the landed Jāghi Birhōṛs rarely stop at one place for any considerable length of time. The slightest ill-treatment, real or supposed, by the landlord of the place or by people of the neighbouring villages or the growing scarcity of chop creepers in the jungles makes them migrate to some more suitable place, or fall back to their old Uthlu or nomad life. Indeed, there is no Jaghi settlement I have seen that is more than fifteen or twenty years old, although I have heard of a few that are older. Some Jaghis have been known to revert to their old nomad or Uthl life out of sheer ennui. And even some landed Jaghi families leave their ṭānḍās and rove about with their scanty belongings and lead an Uthlu life from after the paddy harvest in December until the rains set in by about the middle of June. Generally, a Jāghi Birhōr after his marriage with an Uthlu wife sooner or later joins the group of his Uṭhlü father-in-law and takes to a nomadic life. And this is one reason why Jaghis now-a-days are averse to marrying their sons and daughters to Uṭhlu. The Uthlūs by reason of their greater exclusiveness have retained more of their primitive customs aud usages than the Jaghis who come more frequently in contact with the Hindus and Hinduized tribes of the valleys. Still an analysis of the culture even of the Uṭhlūs will reveal certain traits that do not appear to have evolved from within and cannot be attributed to race, but betray evident traces of social environmental influences.

III.—THE TANDA AND ITS HOUSES.

The settlements of Jaghi groups as well as the temporary encampments of Uṭhlů groups are both known as ṭānḍās. A tāṇḍā usually consists of about half-a-dozen or more huts. In a tāṇḍa of the Uṭhlū Birhōrs, the huts are mere improvised leaf-sheds in the form of low triangular kūmbās or straw-shelters, such as their neighbours, the Mundas and the Ora ons, erect near their rice-fields to guard them when the crops are ripening. Each family erects its separate shed or sheds made of branches and leaves. Each of these sheds has one opening, sometimes provided with a door made of branches and leaves. The houses in a Jāghi ṭāṇḍā are a little more pretentious. Although the roofs of their huts are generally made of branches covered over with leaves, the Jaghi huts have often better walls, some of which are made of branches plastered over with mud, and some even wholly made of mud. Their huts usually possess slightly raised floors. Although each family has generally only one hut, it is partitioned off into at least two compartments, one serving as the lumber-room in which their possessions, consisting generally of one or more iron axes, hunting nets, rope-making tools, and a few earthen pots in which dried corolla of the mahuă flower and perhaps grains are stored and where the ancestor spirits are worshipped, and another and a larger one forming a kitchen and sleeping-room combined.

A corner of the larger room is, if required, staved off as a pen for fowls or for goats or cattle, if the owner happens to possess any. In some taṇḍās there may be one or two comparatively well-to-do Birhōr families who have mud-walls to their huts and even a separate shed or lean-to for cattle. Some clans, such as the Lūdāmbā, erect close to their dwellings a miniature hut or kūmbā to serve as a spirit-hut (bōngā-kümbā). In this hut there is a small bamboo-box called bonga-peți or spirit-box in which a little arua rice in a small bamboo-tube, a little vermilion, and other puja requisites are kept. Some clans have also their thāns, or spirit-seats, adjoining the settlement, where lumps of clay, pieces of stone, and wooden pegs represent the tutelary spirits of the clan. These spirits receive sacrifices of fowls and goats