The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-050 - museum specimen

Chakhesang Naga

Nagaland (Phek), NE India - South Asia - Northeast India

Play / practical

A pale wooden slat painted with bold black zigzags and a cross-hatched band toward its squared tip, twisted cord tied at the knobbed grip — a...
Representative image. A pale wooden slat painted with bold black zigzags and a cross-hatched band toward its squared tip, twisted cord tied at the knobbed grip — a Konyak Naga bull-roarer held by the World Museum Vienna, shown for the general Naga-hills type; not the Chakhesang Naga instrument from Phek documented here. Weltmuseum Wien (VO 126758) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

athapuka = Southern Sangtam name for a toy bull-roarer of light wood, the cord tied to a swinging stick; threm-threm (Lhota) = a boys' toy bull-roarer; kampi (Konyak) = a bull-roarer swung to induce rain.

A bull-roarer of the Chakhesang Naga of the Phek hills in northeast Nagaland, collected by Henry Balfour during his 1922-23 tour of the Naga Hills and now in the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Chakhesang were classed as "Eastern Angami" until 1946; wherever the instrument was recorded across these hills it was a boys' plaything, not a cult object. Among the neighbouring Angami it was "used as a toy by boys or for scaring birds" from the growing crops; the Southern Sangtam, one of the three peoples who later joined to form the Chakhesang, called their light-wood toy roarer the athapuka, and old men would stop children swinging it for fear the noise drew tigers. No spirit, secret society, or taboo against women attaches to it in any Naga source.

used as a toy by boys or for scaring birds

J.H. Hutton, field documentation of an Angami bull-roarer (Khonoma), 1922 — Univ. of Cambridge, "The Nagas" online database, rec. r10541
Object
Bull-roarer of the Chakhesang Naga, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1923.85.354; Henry Balfour coll.).
Function
A boys' toy and bird-scarer wherever the Naga record speaks: the Angami swung it "as a toy by boys or for scaring birds," and the Southern Sangtam athapuka was a children's roarer old men curbed for fear its noise drew tigers (Hutton).
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
1923.85.354; Cambridge "The Nagas" db recs. r10539 (Southern Sangtam athapuka, 1923.85.448), r10541 (Angami, Khonoma, 1923.84.958)

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