You are visitor number (per WebCounter) to our site! - please send us your feedback]
The Ritual Stealing of the Sacrificial
among the Kondhs of Orissa
The purpose of the present paper is to discuss a
crucial aspect of buffalo-sacrifice ritual as practised by the Kondhs, the
numerically largest tribal people among those living in the eastern
I will first of all describe the historical application of this ritual conduct on the occasion of the celebration of a syncretistic Hindu-Kondh religious festival, the Jura Parab of Bissamcuttack, and will subsequently pass on to discuss its function in the general economy of Kondh sacrificial rites, its anthropological meaning, its parallels in other tribal cultures of Orissa, and finally, its possible connection with archaic custom laws regulating the division of the meat of the animals killed in the hunt.
The Jura Parab festival of Bissamcuttack, a little town situated in the present Rayagada district of Orissa, was apparently (scholarly sources are not explicit as to this point) part of the festive proceedings of Dashahara, the great all-India royal festival held in the month of Ashvina (September-October). On that occasion the Dongria Kondhs, a sub-section of the Kondh tribe subject to the political authority of the thatraja (feudal ruler) of Bissamcuttack, went down to town from the Niyamgiri Hills, their main area of settlement, in order to perform a series of buffalo-sacrifices in the ruler’s capital. The Dongrias carried in procession their sataris, tall bamboo poles decked as umbrellas (cf. Sanskrit chhatra) that are still today posted before the earth goddess’ representative stones by most of Kondh communities during the celebration of the Meria, a major buffalo-sacrifice festival specifically dedicated to the earth goddess. After reaching Bissamcuttack, the Dongrias paid homage to a sacred sword symbolizing Niyamraja, their mythic tribal ancestor.[2] This sword, along with other six, is still today placed against a block of stone representing aniconically goddess Markama, the most popular Shakta divinity worshipped in Bissamcuttack. During the epoch of the thatrajas, who founded the Bissamcuttack fort in the first half of the eighteenth century,[3] Markama was venerated in an open-air shrine lying on the jungle fringe outside the town. The Hindu population, speaking Oriya and Telugu, worshipped her as a form of Durga, the goddess of the army and of the State; likewise, the goddess acted as the thatraja’s tutelary deity.[4] After the disappearance of the local line of Hindu rulers, the Kondhs’ yearly homage to the Goddess and the sacred sword at Dashahara was continued in many Dongria villages through the offering of a newly-made wooden sword to Durga Penu — a Kondh female deity modelled after Durga — that is still today made on that festive day.[5]
The most noticeable feature of Jura Parab was the role of “flesh-robbers” assigned to the Kondhs in the sacrificial drama that used to be enacted in Bissamcuttack on that occasion. In Kuvi, the language spoken by most of Dongria Kondh tribal communities, the word juria means a dacoit or robber, while any ritual practice consisting in taking away something by force is called jura.[6] Both terms ultimately derive from the Sanskrit root cur-, whose meaning is to steal, rob. During the Dashahara celebrations, indeed, Dongria tribesmen literally snatched away chunks of flesh from the buffaloes they themselves had offered in sacrifice at the most important Shakta shrines in the capital. The priests of Markama temple maintain that the Dongrias used to bring five buffaloes to Bissamcuttack every year at the time of Dashahara in order to immolate them at the shrines of Markama, Bhairavi, Thakurani, Durga, and Niyamraja. This tradition was continued till the end of the thatrajas’ rule in the 1930’s. The five animals were previously donated by the thatraja to five different Dongria villages, whose inhabitants were bound to feed them for three years before leading them to sacrifice. This practice was obviously related to the all-Kondh tradition in the matter of buffalo-sacrifice to the earth goddess, based on a three-year ritual cycle and called Meria like the human-sacrifice rite it replaced in the mid-nineteenth century. The Dongria villagers were accorded by the thatraja the right to be the first to slaughter their own buffaloes in honour of the aforesaid Hindu deities, whereas the thatraja’s Hindu subjects should offer goats, sheep, etc., but in no case a buffalo. The Hindus killed their sacrificial animals in separate ceremonies, and this was done only after the Dongrias had slain the sacrificial buffaloes in their standard Meria fashion. In each of the shrines at which a buffalo was being offered, a Hindu pujari, allegedly from a military caste, struck the animal’s head with a tangi (a ceremonial arc-shaped axe-blade), thus imitating the sacred signal being customarily made by a Kondh jani during the Meria sacrifice to impart the people surrounding him the order to slain the buffalo. At the Hindu pujari’s signal, the Dongrias gathered at Bissamcuttack jumped upon the buffalo and tore it into pieces using their knives and axes. The buffalo’s flesh was quickly cut off and taken away, each assailant appropriating whatever meat he could lay his hands on in the course of a free-for-all scramble. That is why the ceremony was known as Jura Parab, i.e. a festival involving robbery.[7]
The rationale behind this religious custom was the legend about the victory of the Hindu raja of Bissamcuttack over his elder brother Niyamraja, the deified first ancestor of the Dongria Kondh tribe. It is narrated that, after the former annexed his brother’s kingdom in the Niyamgiri Hills by profiting by his absence, he offered him, in a mood of contrition, to choose any one day in the year on which he would be allowed to come to Bissamcuttack and claim the property of his choice from his younger brother’s kingdom. Niyamraja agreed to the proposal and chose the day of Dashahara.[8] This legend, thus, formed the mythic background for the Dongrias’ annual ceremonial visit to the main Shakta shrines of Bissamcuttack (along with Niyamraja’s), where they came and, after paying some homage, claimed the meat of the buffaloes the thatraja had formerly granted them so that they could immolate the animals in his capital according to their own ancestral custom.
From the anthropological viewpoint, what appears of great interest in this dead tradition is that the ritual practice consisting in stealing the sacrificed buffalo’s meat was not at all confined, as in this particular case, to the ritual exchange and the mutual cultural legitimisation that every year, during the Dashahara celebrations, reasserted on the religio-symbolic plane the alliance between the Dongria Kondhs and the Hindu thatrajas of Bissamcuttack. On the contrary, the theme of the stealing of the sacrificial buffalo’s flesh by Kondh clan-groups attending a Meria sacrifice in a village other than their own is fully inherent in the Kondh cultural tradition. This ritualised theft, as I will illustrate later, is often accompanied by a violent reaction enacted by the agnatic groups offering the sacrifice to counteract the appropriation of buffalo-flesh — culturally perceived as a virtual act of robbery — by Kondh visitors belonging to other clans and villages.
The ritual motif of the “fight for flesh”, indeed, surfaces from the Dongria Kondhs’ observance of the Meria buffalo-sacrifice in their own villages, on which occasion the religious interaction with the Hindu community, forming the socio-political raison d’être of the Jura Parab, is totally absent. On the fifth day of the Meria celebrations,[9] after a share of buffalo-meat has been already distributed among the inhabitants of the host village and their external clan-kin, the Dongria outsiders invited to the festival assemble near the village priest’s house and ask him to part with a portion of meat that must have been kept ready for them from the previous day (the sacrifice day). Mock quarrels take place among the outsiders and the priest till the latter ultimately gives a piece of meat to everyone.[10] Although this part of the festival ends in a feast at which the now pacified guests cook the buffalo-meat they have obtained from the priest and feed with it the inhabitants of the host village, besides themselves, as a token of social obligation, one may none the less trace this socio-ritual conduct back to a putative older practice consisting in a symbolic assault on the priest’s house, where some meat is stored from the sacrifice day, by members of clans not related to the sacrificing village’s agnatic groups. The ritual dispute, as in the case of the mock robbery that, in times gone by, used to be staged by the Dongria Kondhs in the city of Bissamcuttack on the occasion of the Jura Parab, is aimed at obtaining from the host community a share of the sacrificial buffalo, embodying sacred and magical virtues, for the benefit of the claimants’ own villages.
The record of a Meria buffalo-sacrifice held in
The Kutia Kondhs, representing, along with the Dongria, the most traditional sub-section of the Kondh people, have yet retained little traces of the free-for-all scramble that, among other Kondh sub-sections, is still today associated with the division of the victim’s flesh and blood. To quote Hermann Niggemeyer’s field notes recording the celebration of a Biha — the Kutia Kondh buffalo-sacrifice festival observed in the planting season — in village Belgarh in the 1950’s,[13] “[Soon after the sacrificial buffalo had been decapitated, as it is customary in the Kutia tradition] they [the outsiders] all rush[ed] to the buffalo to collect blood in pots or cut a piece of flesh or skin. They left immediately and went to their own villages to set it down at their darni [the earth goddess’ stones] ... While the buffalo was being tied up and during the killing, several Kutia Kondh men and women fell into trance. The goddess came to them and asked to drink blood, so they rushed headlong to the buffalo to satisfy her; but friends immediately bound them with saris to keep them safe from the other men’s flashing axes. Then immediately the killing was over, people fetched a little blood for them and put it on their lips; they also bent their knees and, immediately, they came out of trance.” In this case the ritualised inter-clan battle for the possession of buffalo-flesh relics is just outlined as a serious life danger to all, but it does not actually take place. In fact, the custom among the Kutia Kondh buffalo-sacrificers, who never eat themselves the meat of the sacrificed buffalo, consists in distributing the latter among the guests from other villages and patrilineal clans on the day following the sacrifice day as if it were the meat of the additional buffalo that, among other Kondh groups, is butchered at the so-called funeral feast for the buffalo immolated in honour of the earth goddess.[14]
On the basis of mid-nineteenth century British sources, Barbara M. Boal infers that the womenfolk of the sacrificing Kondh villages of the Ghumsar Maliahs might have been invested with the ritual office of flinging stones and earth at the other villages’ representatives from the days of human sacrifice, and that this rite, on the analogy of the present buffalo-sacrifice ritual, might have been performed as soon as the outsiders ran off bringing stripes of human flesh to their respective villages. Moreover, in the days of human sacrifice a furious domestic battle with stones and mud took place on the arrival of the flesh-takers to their respective villages, usually resulting in the partial or full destruction of each village’s male youth dormitory.[15] The latter custom, which has not been fully explained so far, yet became obsolete after the suppression of human sacrifice, while the ritual aggression of the external flesh-takers by the women of the sacrificing village, who hurl stones and clods at them, has been continued in the buffalo-sacrifice ritual after the latter replaced the human-sacrifice one. At the climax of the Meria ritual as observed some decades ago in certain South Maliah Kondh villages of Kandhamal district, parties of outsiders still used to race off the sacrificing village with their brass pots filled with buffalo-flesh; while doing so, they were pelted with stones and clods by the women of the sacrificing village. Such a ritual encounter between a host agnatic group on one side, and the non-agnatic groups of guests competing for the possession of the flesh on the other, reproduces the mock battle which started at this stage of the Meria (human) sacrifice before the latter was suppressed by British colonial authorities.[16]
Among the Maliah Kondhs living in the area of Koradagada (southeastern part of present Kandhamal district) there is a tradition running that, in the days of human sacrifice, the first morsel of flesh taken from the still living victim was endowed with a great magical power. Its effectiveness, when it was buried in the fields or at the village darni, was thought to be far greater than that of any other morsel taken subsequently to it. This, it is believed, was the true reason for the violent free-for-all scramble engaged at the time of slaying the human victim by all those who longed for being the first to cut off a portion of his or her flesh. Yet, the winner of the sacred competition, in case he was an outsider, was exposed to a big danger: the same magical vitality that was believed to be attached to the first strip of flesh cut off from the victim’s body was, in fact, fancied to pass on to the person who had conquered it, so that other men attending the sacrificial rite often tried to kill that man in order to cut up pieces of his flesh. This was attempted for the very same purposes underlying the immolation of a human victim. To prevent the triumphant external flesh-taker from being torn to pieces, or anyway injured, by the overexcited inhabitants of the sacrificing village, a group of warriors from his own village had to escort him back home.[17]
The theme of the assault on outsiders trying to
take flesh-relics away from the sacrificial ground is also present, in similar
forms, in the ritual of a festival known as Toki
Parab, which is observed every year by the Kandha-Paraja tribe of Kalahandi
and Nawarangpur districts of Orissa. The Kandha-Parajas are culturally and
linguistically related to the Kondhs despite their being unscientifically
classified as a component of the so-called Paraja (Oriya for “subject”) group
of tribes. The
To meet death while contending in a wild brawl for the body relics of a sacrificed buffalo is, likewise, a rather common phenomenon at the great Gotr[20] feast of the Gadabas, a tribe of southwestern Orissa split up in two sub-sections, the one speaking an Austro-Asiatic language (Gutob), the other a Dravidian one (Ollari). Referred to by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf as the Great Memorial Feast,[21] the Gotr is sponsored by wealthy householders and their respective agnates, belonging to different villages, to honour the deceased of the past generation through a mass slaughter of buffaloes and cows. Buffaloes, offered by either the patrilineal descent groups sponsoring the Gotr ceremonies and their respective affinal groups, invited to the ceremony and competing with the former for higher ritual status, are regarded on this occasion as the bearers of the malevolent aspect of the souls of the deceased, still roaming about this world, to the Land of the Dead, where they will be regenerated acquiring the status of benevolent ancestral spirits. This sacred event is publicly acknowledged through the installation of “seats”, represented by menhirs and flat stones, for the now pacified departed, which is done at the care of each donor’s external paternal kinsmen. At the close of the ritual the latter, in return, will be allowed to run away with the live buffaloes specifically allotted to them, within whose bodies the soul-substance of as many dead relatives of theirs, commemorated at that particular Gotr, is believed to be revived. These external agnates will also take away pieces of flesh of all the buffaloes they manage to slaughter during the memorial feast.[22]
The twofold competition at the Gotr, which generally sets against each other two rival parties of agnates at one level, and the agnates and the affinals of the families sponsoring the Gotr at another, is usually so much overcharged with social disputes and inter-clan feuds as to favour, in some cases, the non-accidental wounding or murder of one or more men participating in the wild struggles breaking out around the dying buffaloes. As with the Meria ritual, the aim of this form of free-for-all scramble is, thus, to get flesh-relics from the sacrificial buffalo. Again on the analogy of the Meria ritual, the starting signal for the slaughtering each buffalo consists in an axe-blow, which, however, does not cause the animal’s death. Soon after, all Gadaba men participating in the sacrificial rite attack the buffaloes, slit their bellies open, thrust their arms into them, and tear out the entrails from the still living animals. Sometimes the object of this ritual action is to extract some coins, with which the buffaloes have been previously fed, from the intestines. Any one who has conquered a piece of entrails ties it up in his waist cloth. In addition to this, each assailant secures in his waist cloth whatever flesh he could obtain during the group butchering of the agonizing buffaloes that follows the division of the entrails. The meat and bits of entrails are then brought to the sacrificers’ respective villages for consumption. The donor’s paternal kinsmen who were able to cut up the largest quantity of entrails are regarded as the heroes of the day in that it is believed that their crops will yield ample harvest that year.[23]
In the tribal areas of southwestern Orissa there
is only one more instance of a regular mode of sacrificing buffaloes comparable
from a phenomenological viewpoint, free-for-all scramble included, to the Kondh
one, namely, the one prescribed by the custom law of the Bondos, an
Austro-Asiatic-speaking tribe settled in the Malkangiri Hills, on the
circumstance of the wedding of a well-to-do couple, known as Sebung wedding. On that occasion, a
buffalo offered by the groom, and serving as the bride price, is killed in
front of the groom’s house by the assembled guests who hack it to bits with
knives while it is still alive. As the animal dies there is a wild struggle to
cut off bits of the tail and scraps of flesh from the mouth. Special importance
is also given, as in the Gotr ritual
of the Gadabas, to extracting and taking away the entrails of the buffalo.[24]
According to Verrier Elwin, this might also have been the old custom among the
Hill Saoras, the Austro-Asiatic speaking tribe of Orissa whose main area of
settlement borders on the Kondhs’ one to the south. “In former times — he
writes — I think it is possible that the Saoras killed their buffaloes in Kondh
fashion: one man struck the animal to the ground with a blow from the sharp
edge of his axe, and then the entire company fell upon it and cut it to pieces
with their knives. This is still done occasionally by the Saoras, notably in
the case of a buffalo which is dedicated to [the solar god] Uyungsum and
sacrificed three years afterwards, but the modern practice is to kill the
animal with a blow on the back of the neck with the blunt side of the axe.”[25]
To conclude this merely sketched
historico-comparative analysis of the flesh-stealing theme associated with the Meria tradition, I may further point out
the importance of meat-distribution systems working on a competitive kinship
basis for the strengthening of clan relations in tribal societies of tropical
Yet, the ritual motif of a violent contest whose
prize consists in the flesh of sacrificed buffaloes only features in a few
meat-distribution systems of tropical
Formerly it might have been so with the Kondhs as well. The issue of the immunity of a Kondh who causes an injury or kills someone during the wild struggles occurring at some buffalo-sacrifice festivals cannot be discussed here for lack of information. Further researches would tell us whether or not such an immunity exists among the Kondhs; the discovery of its existence as an old Kondh institution would bespeak a link between the Meria ritual and the archaic tribal norms regulating the social appropriation of the meat of the animals killed in the hunt. Such norms about immunity are known to have been applied in ancient hunting societies carrying out on a competitive kinship basis the distribution of the meat of the animals killed by the hunters. It is, however, clear enough from the technique used by the Kondhs to slaughter and dismember their buffalo-victims that, on such occasion, they imitate in a ritual way, more or less consciously, a group of hunters killing all together a prey that cannot escape and, soon after, butchering it on the spot.
Thus, although the water-buffaloes slaughtered at
the Meria sacrifice are tame animals,
the Kondhs seem to treat them as animals of prey. The sacrificial animal, the
Kondhs seem to mean with their ritual behaviour, was anciently the hunted
animal. In
In most of tribal meat-division systems the status of a hunter — and, by consequence, of his clan — within his own territorial community is reflected by the major or minor share of meat of the animals killed in the hunt that is allotted to him. Such a status is an ever-changing one, being not so much based on a principle of social hierarchy as on individual or group merits such as physical strength, intelligence, bravery, and ability in using weapons. These are the very same qualities that, in the Meria tradition, are normally required of a Kondh party of outsiders going to a village other than their own to carry out the dangerous ritual theft of portions of flesh of the sacrificial buffalo purchased by their ritual rivals, the members of local patrilineal clans. It is, indeed, their representatives’ personal valour that determines the major or minor amount of buffalo-meat conquered by a Kondh clan or village in the course of the ritual contest occurring while a buffalo-victim is being slain. A pre-established hierarchical order for the distribution of the meat such as that prescribed for Vedic sacrifices plays no part in the Kondhs’ ceremonial taking of possession of the sacrificed buffalo’s meat, which is, on the contrary, achieved on a free competitive basis. The distribution of the meat at the Meria, in fact, takes place on a plane of tribal equality and in the absence of caste prerogatives. The division of the sacrificed animal among the members of the larger inter-village community is apparently accomplished by the Kondhs in a way similar to the division of the hunted animal. This distributive system re-fashions, year after year, the status held by each Kondh agnatic group within the social organization, but yet such a cyclic shift in each clan’s socio-ritual position never results in social hierarchisation. This apparently happens because the ritual dismemberment of the body of the sacrificial buffalo was modelled after the institution of the division of the meat inherited by the Kondhs from some pre-existing hunting society.[33]
All this, in the ultimate analysis, leads to a strengthening of inter-village and inter-clan relationships.[34] The ceremonial stealing of flesh-relics from the sacrificial buffalo by parties of Kondh outsiders is a means for them to claim a socio-ritual status equal to that of the sacrificing village’s agnatic groups. An identical claim, symmetrically raised by the latter, will be faced by the external clans presently taking buffalo-flesh from the host village at the time when they will be offering a buffalo-victim in their own villages. On that occasion, in fact, the former “plundered ones” will act in the ritual as the “plunderers”, and vice versa. Lastly, the ceremonial stone-battle that accompanies the flight of the flesh-takers to their own villages may be a device to incorporate the element of clan feud, and of hostility in general, into the ritual. The performance of this rite may also reflect the historical fact that, in pre-British times, Kondh war-making brotherhoods, though socially and politically bound together by virtue of the cyclic celebration of Meria sacrifices and the stipulation of the relative peace-pacts, were apparently at constant warfare. Clan feuds are still now very common among the Kondhs as a continuation of their ancestral warlike customs.