ROY1928-001 - historical text
Khizabarui Khizami bullroarer
Naga Hills - Khizami area - South Asia - Northeast India
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
Khizabarui = Roy’s historical locality spelling; no secure modern equivalent is known.
A thirteen-inch bull-roarer from Khizabarui, an eastern Angami village of the Khizami, lived the double life these hills gave such things. Boys swung it on its cord for the sheer roar; carried up to the field-houses and hillside machans where families guarded the ripening crop, the same blade turned working tool, its noise flushing birds off the grain. Sarat Chandra Roy pictured it in 1928 among the bull-roarers J. H. Hutton had gathered across Angami country — game and bird-scarer in a single strip of wood.
Angami bull-roarer from Khizabarui. (Khizami sub-tribe) used as a toy or bird-scarer. (13 in.)
Sarat Chandra Roy, Oraon Religion and Customs (1928), Illustration 17 item 2
- Object
- Thirteen-inch bullroarer used both as a toy and to scare birds.
- Function
- Toy or bird-scarer
- Map confidence
- high - Chizami is a representative Khizami-region anchor; the historical Khizabarui locality is not independently geocoded.
- Source location
- Illustration 17 item 2
- Toy / secular survival