’Art & Soul: Santhals’ art, life and death

BN Goswamy

Beneath a half-broken sky

Hidden by a mist, lies a scattered life

….

From a mahua tree, an owl

Flew away towards the hills

The earth is curled in fear

A young woman stands alone at a well

— Parimala Hansda, contemporary Santhal poet

There is the hunger

Stretched far on these hunger-rugged lands;

On these lands, naked black mountains stand,

And on these mountains, is desolation…

— Nirmala Putul, contemporary Santhal poet

SADLY, I do not know much about the Santhals. I did, of course, as a young IAS officer in Bihar, visit some Santhal villages long years ago; also saw some incredibly graceful singing and dancing in one of their festivals held in celebration of fertility. I also read once ‘The Hill of Flutes’ — an exquisite volume of Santhal poetry translated into English by my senior in the field, WG Archer, whom I greatly admired. I am not unaware either of the way some great names in contemporary art in India — Ramkinkar Baij, Jamini Roy, KG Subramanyan among them — responded to the ‘tribal’ art of the Santhals. But this is about the extent of it. I got cut off: both by time and by distance.

But, to recall some facts, in plain, factual terms: the Santhals are the largest group of the Munda people who are scattered over different states, ranging from Bihar and Odisha to Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. Their language, Santhali, as experts tell us, belongs to the Austroasiatic family. Seen from the outside — despite all the stresses and strains that tribal groups are subject to in a fast-changing world — they seem to be a happy people, content with rice farming and celebrating their festivals with great joie: singing and dancing for days, young women with their red-bordered plain saris in particular. Between sowing after the rainy season, and harvesting a few months later, festival after festival is celebrated: homage is paid to their gods and goddesses, and colourful fairs are held in village after peaceful village.

Two things brought me back to the Santhals recently, both on account of a copy of the ‘Taksha-shila Yearbook’ — that imaginatively conceived publication brought out year after year by a Delhi-based educational society — that landed on my table some days ago. This year it dealt with Indian folk and tribal art and the Santhals had a prominent presence in it. That publication apart, however, I am struck by two things in particular. One, the power of the myths that breathe through the tribe, perhaps every single member of it. I was fascinated in particular by the myth that surrounds their most favourite musical instrument, the dhodro banam, one of which was recently added to a distinguished collection. It is a beautifully crafted instrument: a type of lute, belonging to the sarinda family, with its lower part covered with skin, played with a bow in the manner of a violin, but in a vertical position. There are varieties of the instrument, each different from the others chiefly on account of the ornamentation on it. What joins them all, however, is the myth which begins with a gory event but ends on a note of delicacy. There were once, the story goes, seven brothers who, following some diktat, decide to kill their only sister to eat her. From among them, the youngest sibling, however, could not bring himself to eating his portion because of his love for the sister. Instead of eating it, therefore, he buried it in an ant-hill. From that very spot, as years went by, there grew a beautiful guloic tree from which a melodious sound was heard. One day a jogi, who used to pass that way for picking flowers, heard that melodious sound and decided to cut a branch of the tree to make an instrument from it: the first dhodro banam. To this day, the Santhals believe that the instrument is a gift from supernatural forces and that, through it, they can communicate with another world. It is for them more than a simple tool for producing music.

The second thing that greatly fascinates me is how a number of folk artists among them, called jadupatuas (magician painters), practise what might be called ‘painting the eyes in’. Chakkhu Daan is what it is called, quite literally, ‘the gift of the eyes’. One knows how special and exalted the ceremony, in general, the ritual, of painting the eyes of an idol in our tradition is. One knows it in the version of netramangalya, which Coomaraswamy described, with lucid passion, more than a hundred years ago; one knows it from the ritual with which the great Durga Puja festival in Bengal opens each year. To recall: on that day, everything else having been done in respect of fashioning clay idols of the Great Goddess on which kumhar-artists have been working for weeks, the master sculptor is called in, and he, brush and pigments in hand, delicately paints the all-seeing eye of the Goddess. In that magical moment, She comes to life, as it were. Taking off from this perhaps, the Santhal jadupatuas — part artists, part story-tellers, part singers, part magicians — have developed a routine, a ritual, of their own. When a death in the village happens, a jadupatua hastens to the home of the bereaved family, shows them a portrait, so to speak, of the departed: the figure complete except for the pupil-less eyes. He or she will be wandering eyeless in the other world forever, the family is told, till he or she ‘receives’ eyes. For a fee, and to the accompaniment of singing, the jadupatua then paints the eyes in. The departed is now on his way, the family is told.

Wondrously, so much comes together in all this: faith, myth, sorrow, relief, joy, reverence for the dead, a connection with the other world. One can almost hear notes emerging from the dhodro bonam somewhere in the distance. 

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