The Bullroarer Atlas

No. NAGA-007

Sema Sumi bird-scarer and doorway-derivative bullroarers

Naga Hills · present Nagaland · South Asia · Northeast India

Play / practical

Complete Sümi herumu rig with blade, cord, and cane handle.
Plate I. Complete Sümi herumu rig with blade, cord, and cane handle. Image source
Sümi hewu with its string attached, Pitt Rivers Museum 1923.84.909.
Plate II. Sümi hewu with its string attached, Pitt Rivers Museum 1923.84.909. Image source
Roy’s 1928 plate of six bullroarers used among the Nagas of Assam, including an eleven-inch Sema Naga example.
Plate III. Representative — not this record’s object. Roy’s 1928 plate of an eleven-inch Sema Naga bullroarer. Public domain · Image source
A pointed wooden Sümi Naga herumu blade tied by string to a very long cane handle.
Plate IV. Sümi herumu rig with a pointed, incised blade, its cord and long cane handle. Image source

herumu / hewu

Source term: bull-roarer

herumu / hewu — Sümi (Sema) Naga names for the bull-roarer, recorded on the PRM specimens

Sümi boys sent the hewu or herumu roaring over cultivated ground to scare birds from the crops — a working instrument of the fields rather than the men's house. Painted derivatives of the same form hung in house doorways — at Mishilimi, Shaw recorded, "to act as disinfectants in case of illness", the whirring blade's shape doing protective duty even when it never sounded.

bull-roarer used by boys for scaring birds from crops

Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1923, Accessions by Donation (presented by J. H. Hutton; Sema)

Particulars

Object
Bull-roarer plus painted doorway derivatives, Pitt Rivers Museum. The sounding rigs are PRM 1923.84.909 (vernacular hewu; J. H. Hutton coll.) and 1928.69.321-322 (herumu), preserving blades and complete corded assemblies; 1923.84.908 is a painted doorway ornament of the same form.
Function
Boys' bird-scaring instrument in the fields.

Source

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 1923.84.908 and 1923.84.909, 1928.69.321-322; Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1923; Shaw 1929 (ed. J. H. Hutton), pp. 156-157

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