The Bullroarer Atlas

SASIA-003 - ethnographic attestation

Kolkata urban toy provenance

Calcutta - Kolkata - South Asia - East India

Play / practical

A wood blade shaped like a spearhead, its narrow end bound in twisted cord — again a Naga instrument shown for the general South Asian type,...
Representative image. A wood blade shaped like a spearhead, its narrow end bound in twisted cord — again a Naga instrument shown for the general South Asian type, not the toy bull-roarer with an urban Calcutta provenance. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1953.10.101) Image source

Source term: toy bull-roarer

A toy bull-roarer from Calcutta entered the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1924, given by F.A. Richards of the Indian Civil Service. It came in a single donation of South and East Indian objects that also included a child's ribbon-buzzer of doubled palm-leaf that hummed when whirled on a cord, from the Madras Presidency; five floss-silk Brahman rosaries from Srirangam; and chank-shell beads excavated from Iron Age stone-circle graves near Adugattur in North Arcot. The museum recorded it plainly as a toy, with no maker and no rite, nothing beyond the city it came from.

toy bull-roarer, Calcutta. Presented by F.A. Richards, M.A., I.C.S.

Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report 1924, Accessions by Donation
Object
PRM 1924.42.7: a Kolkata toy bullroarer with a 230 mm bamboo blade, string, and separate 414 mm handstick.
Function
Object/toy evidence but urban cultural context is weak
Map confidence
medium - Calcutta/Kolkata source-place anchor from the museum report provenance; representative urban toy anchor, not the Oxford museum location or a named cultural-territory point.
Source location
1924 annual report; PRM 1924.42.7

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