The Bullroarer Atlas

ASEXP-002 - ethnographic attestation

Muria Gond / Markabera village, Bastar

Bastar - Central Provinces - South Asia - Central India

Play / practical

Elwin's own drawing of the Markabera bull-roarer, a spiral-carved rod one foot nine inches long with a hooked tip and its cord knotted through...
Elwin's own drawing of the Markabera bull-roarer, a spiral-carved rod one foot nine inches long with a hooked tip and its cord knotted through a toggle handle — the Muria Gond village instrument illustrated as his figure 142. Verrier Elwin, The Muria and Their Ghotul (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1947), fig. 142 Public domain Image source

Source term: Bull-roarer

When Verrier Elwin came to the bull-roarer among the Muria Gond of Bastar, he found nothing secret in it: "I have not been able to discover any religious or magical significance in them; they are only used as toys." The Jhoria of the western parganas, he wrote, made them for amusement. The Muria cut theirs from bamboo slats twelve to eighteen inches long, notched at one end where a string was tied and sometimes pointed at the other, then whirled them to raise a roaring noise. Elwin photographed one at Markabera and printed it as Figure 142 in his 1947 monograph on the Muria and their ghotul, placing it in the chapter on dance and song among the eighteen instruments of the tribe. In a footnote he added that the bull-roarer, common across the world, is rare in India, though S. C. Roy had recorded it in the Uraon dhumkuria and among the Santal, Ho and Munda.

I have not been able to discover any religious or magical significance in them; they are only used as toys.

Elwin 1947, The Muria and Their Ghotul, p. 529 (chap. XX, Dance and Song)
Object
Bull-roarer illustrated as Figure 142 in Elwin's monograph on the Muria and their ghotul; collected from Markabera village, Bastar.
Function
Elwin records the Muria bull-roarer as a toy/amusement with no religious or magical significance.
Map confidence
low_medium - Muria territory centroid (Narayanpur/Kondagaon, northern Bastar); Markabera village not located in modern databases.
Source location
Figure 142 (list of figures) | Elwin 1947, p. 529; fig. 142 (p. 544)

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