The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-101 - museum specimen

Maria Gond

India - Bastar, Chhattisgarh - South Asia

Function not recorded

A carved chevron-patterned blade slung on a cord from an upright stick handle — a South Asian piece, tentatively identified as Thado, held by...
Representative image. A carved chevron-patterned blade slung on a cord from an upright stick handle — a South Asian piece, tentatively identified as Thado, held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general form; not the Maria/Muria Gond burunga from Gotpal documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1928.69.683) Image source

Burunga (halbi); ait (Hill Maria, per Grigson) French

Source term: bull-roarer

Burunga: the Halbi-language name recorded for this bull-roarer (rhombe) among the Maria/Muria Gond of Bastar.

A bull-roarer and its cord-tied wooden blade collected at Gotpal in Bastar among the Maria, who call themselves Muria, where it carries the Halbi name Burunga. It reached the Quai Branly from the Musee de l'Homme, gathered by the ethnomusicologist Genevieve Dournon on the same Bastar fieldwork she published in 1980 as a record of Muria and Maria music. That published corpus runs to ghotul songs, marriage duets, jew's-harps, flutes and bison-horn dances, but never the whirled blade itself: no ceremony, no women's prohibition, no use of any kind was set down for the Burunga, which survives here as a named object without a recorded role.

Rhombe et son bâton

Rhombe and its stick

Quai Branly API object 274061
Object
Quai Branly object 71.1979.20.19.1-2: rhombe and stick of the Maria/Muria Gond, local name Burunga (halbi), from Gotpal.
Function
Quai Branly API identifies a Maria/Muria Gond rhombe and stick named Burunga (halbi); no use or gender language is recorded.
Map confidence
high - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Quai Branly object record 274061 (inv. 71.1979.20.19.1-2); provenance cross-ref CREM-CNRS collection CNRSMH_E_1980_009_001 | Grigson 1938, p. 183 and glossary

View source Open this point on the interactive map