Tipra (Tripuri) Ker-puja bhemra bullroarer

bhemra / bhamra

bhemra / bhamra: the bamboo slat whirled at Ker-puja; Sri Rajmala calls it bhemrai or bhomrai.

Once the boundary of Ker-puja was proclaimed, the rite became a religious lockdown: nobody could enter or leave, and inside the sealed ground no one — not even the king — might wear shoes, light a fire, dance or sing. A household overtaken by a birth or a death paid a fine to cross the line. Into that enforced hush broke the bhemra, a broad bamboo strip whirled on a cord until it boomed bho bho, loud, deep and far-carrying — a ritualistic use of bull-roarers, the philologist Suniti Kumar Chatterji noted, 'not known in any Brahmanical worship.' On the rite's success, people believed, hung the fortune of Tripura's realm for the year to come.

[Ker-puja] is a picture of that age when there was no light, no sound, no living thing, no birth or death... In the silence of Ker-puja, as when sound first broke the deep silence at the dawn of creation, the bho bho of the bhemrai seems now and then to be creating sound in a soundless universe.

Sri Rajmala, vol. 1 (1929), editorial commentary, p. 145; working translation from the Bengali.

Particulars

Object

Broad bamboo slat pierced at one end and corded through the perforation; whirled by holding the free end of the cord.

Function

Sounded at Ker-puja, held first at the capital and then in every hill village.