The Bullroarer Atlas

No. NAGA-002

Konyak Shiong boys' toy bullroarer

Naga Hills · present Nagaland · South Asia · Northeast India

Play / practical

Konyak Naga bullroarer from Shiong village, PRM 1928.69.606: a pale flat wooden blade, a cord loop at its end and a long slender stick laid beside it.
Plate I. Konyak Naga bull-roarer, Shiong village. PRM 1928.69.606. Image source
The complete Shiong rig: notched pale blade and long cane handle, still strung with plaited cord (PRM 1928.69.607).
Plate II. The complete Shiong rig: notched pale blade and long cane handle, still strung with plaited cord (PRM 1928.69.607). Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

When the Konyak wanted rain, the boys made it. At Tamlu, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was told in 1936, there was no real rain ceremony: the boys of the morung, the young men's house, cut bull-roarers from bamboo and swung them, and the sky answered with the same noise — thunder, then rain. At Wakching the morung boys whirled roarers of flat wood. This 43-centimetre blade from Shiong, fitted with a cane handle and worked with notches and incised decoration, was collected by J. P. Mills in October 1923, when the toy was already passing out of Konyak boyhood.

A boy's toy now becoming obsolete.

Cambridge Naga Database, record R10540 (Konyak, Shiong; coll. J. P. Mills, 18 October 1923; Pitt Rivers Museum 1928.69.606)

Particulars

Object
Wooden bullroarer with cane handle, notches and incised decoration
Function
A boys' toy at Shiong, becoming obsolete by 1923. In the Konyak villages of Tamlu and Wakching the morung boys whirled bull-roarers to bring thunder and rain.

Sources

  1. University of Cambridge, The Nagas database, collection listing C623, record R10540, Konyak, Shiong View · archived
  2. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, object 1928.69.606, J. P. Mills collection
  3. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Naga notebook six, 'Rain making,' Tamlu/Wakching, 28 August 1936, SOAS Library; Cambridge The Nagas, record R70361 View · archived
  4. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Naga diary one, 28 August 1936 (trans. Ruth Barnes); Cambridge The Nagas, record R67962 View · archived

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.