W. A. BARLOW by W. A. Barlow

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 14, 1907

W. A. BARLOW

By W. A. Barlow

Santalia and the Santals—No. 3

W. A. BARLOW

Among the nine million inhabitants of India variously described as aborigines, jungle tribes, demon worshipers, or animists, the Santals are the largest tribe. The Santali-speakers, including both heathen and Christian Santals, number 1,830,143.

Their origin is obscure, but they differ as widely from their Hindu and Mohammedan neighbors as one race of human beings can differ from another. These aboriginal peoples, who are believed to have been the inhabitants of India before the Aryan invasion, have been divided by ethnologists into three groups—the Dravidian, the Kolarian, and the Tibeto-Burman. Mr. H. H. Risley, whose “Tribes and Castes of Bengal,” recently published by the Bengal government, is now regarded as the authoritative work on the subject, describes the Santals as “typical examples of the pure Dravidian stock.” They are dark, often almost jet black in color, with coarse, often curly, black hair, sturdily built, with fine muscular development, and broad, but not unpleasant features, wiry and vigorous, perhaps lazily inclined, but capable of great endurance, and very fond of a free, active, open-air life.

Santal traditions tell of an Adam and Eve, Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi by name, who sprang from two eggs laid by a wild goose. Later, when a deluge of rain-fire destroyed the inhabitants of the earth, a single pair was preserved in the cleft of a mountain.

If the Brahman looks upon the Santal with supreme contempt, regarding him as the offscouring of the earth, little if any higher than the beasts of the field, the Santal repays his scorn with interest. The independent spirit of the Santals has saved them from the common fate of the aboriginal tribes of India, that is, from becoming absorbed into the Hindu system, to become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the more highly civilized races. They are not as a rule cringing or obsequious or prone to self-abasement, but to those who speak their language they are frank and genial. They do not grovel on the ground, nor wipe the dust off your shoes with their foreheads. They stand erect, and look you in the face. In their own language the word for a Santal means a man.

It can not be said that civilization apart from Christianity improves the Santal. The tendency is for him to lose his few virtues and to acquire new vices. The exclusiveness of past ages is breaking down, and where the Santals have not been influenced by Christianity, there is a distinct tendency toward moral and physical degeneracy through more intimate contact with the Hindus.

The suggestion that the Santals are of Mongolian origin is refuted by ethnologists on the ground that the Santal skull belongs to a different type from the Mongolian, as it approaches the dolichocephalic, or long headed, the Mongolian being typically brachycephalic, or short headed.

The tribe is divided into twelve sub-tribes, or septs, of which seven have existed from the beginning, being descended from the sons of Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, or Adam and Eve. Five more have been subsequently added. Each sept has a password, or shibboleth, peculiar to itself. These septs, again, are subdivided into an almost indefinite number of sub-septs.

The religion of the Santals is little more than a fetish. They are demonolaters. When things are going well with him, the Santal is very little concerned with religion; but when any trouble comes, when there is severe illness in the family, or an epidemic in the village, when the cattle are being carried off by disease, or the crops are dying from want of rain, the Santal believes that these calamities are due to the ill will of the demon-gods, whose anger must be appeased by means of sacrifice. He offers up his fowls, sheep, goats, buffaloes, and as late as 1878 a human sacrifice is known to have been offered.

On the outskirts of each village is a grove of sal-trees, often the finest trees in the neighborhood, for they are not as a rule allowed to be cut down. This grove is sacred to the principal demons, or borgas, each of whom is represented by a piece of quartz, daubed with red paint, at the foot of one of the trees.

In this grove, at festival times, the men of the village assemble,—the women have nothing to do with religion,—and sacrifices are offered by the village priest in the name of the community. (I may say here that the village priest of Babolmohal, where we have our Seventh-day Adventist Santal Mission No. 2, is the chief's youngest son, and I call him Raska, or Joyful. He is a very bright young man, and his work is to look after his father's cattle. It was through this young priest Raska that I secured land on which to start our mission school.) Combined with this there is a form of religion in some respects similar to the ancestor-worship of the Chinese. In the main street of the village a rude shed is found, a thatch supported by five posts, one in the center and one at each corner. At the foot of the central post is a stone or roughly carved piece of wood, sacred to the names of the deceased village chief or head man. Here, too, sacrifices and offerings of various kinds are offered by the villagers. But these by no means exhaust the list of demons. Everything mysterious, everything disastrous, is due to demon agency. Borgas people earth, and air, and water; and every family has its household demon as well, whose name is kept a secret by the head of the house till just before he dies. Then he whispers it to his eldest son. The object of this secrecy is not to give offense to other demons, who are all consumed with jealousy, by letting them know which demon is specially honored with this family's patronage. This demonology also explains the curious custom of giving each child two names, its real or “inner” name, which is kept secret, and its “upper” name by which it is known to the

public.

If the demons were to learn the child's real name, it would give them too much power over it. Another reason is that the child is probably named after some relative whom it is not considered correct etiquette for some members of the family to mention by name.

When preaching to a crowd of Santals, if you ask them if their offerings and sacrifices to the stocks and stones, where they believe the borgas dwell, can do them any good, they will reply, “No, but they can do us a great deal of harm.” That, in a word, is the sum and substance of Santal theology, their body of divinity. They never dream of a god as one who could do them good; such an idea never entered their minds. A god of love would be a contradiction in terms. Their gods are evil, and only evil, and continually evil, and their only idea of worship is the propitiation of their anger by means of sacrifice. Nor has the ill-will of the demons any relation to the evil conduct of men. A demon is a born demon, naturally malignant, and respite from his evil influence is only to be obtained by satiating his thirst for bloody sacrifices. The description of the human sacrifices that once were offered by the Santals and other tribes is of the most revolting nature, because the more blood spilled, the greater suffering inflicted, the better the gods were pleased, and the more efficacious was the sacrifice.

Of the future life the Santal's ideas are exceedingly hazy. Every male must have a number of marks burned upon the extensor surface of the left forearm between the elbow and the wrist, and every female must have the arms and chest tattooed. These ceremonies, it is said, facilitate entrance to the spirit-land, and secure the comfort of the spirit there. After death the body is burned, but a number of charred bones are carefully preserved in an earthenware pot by the nearest relative until it is convenient for him, accompanied by other relatives, to carry them to the sacred river of the Santals, the Damoodah, to the waters or sands of which they are committed with ceremonies that signify that all has now been done that filial duty and a desire for the well-being of the deceased demand.

The Santals speak of Jom-Raj as the king of death, at whose summons they must leave this world, but this is evidently borrowed from Yama, the Hindu god of death. There is a myth among the Santals that in the future world all departed spirits are engaged in grinding the bones of the dead, from which the bodies of new-born infants are supposed to be made; and only two excuses will procure exemption from this toil—if men say they are preparing tobacco for chewing, or if the women plead that they are nursing babies.

Simultala, India.