SASIA-005 - secondary catalog
Ho Singhbhum children's bull-roarer
Bihar and Orissa - Chota Nagpur - South Asia - East India
Play / practical
biur-biur English
Source term: Bull-roarer
Etymology. biur-biur, the Ho name for the toy bull-roarer, imitates the instrument's whirring sound. (high confidence)
Among the Ho of Singhbhum District, the bull-roarer had dwindled to a child's plaything by the 1920s. Sarat Chandra Roy, the Ranchi ethnographer who turned up the few Indian specimens he could find and presented some to the Patna Museum, reported the instrument surviving among the Ho, Munda, and Santal only in a very few villages, and there merely as children's toys. The Indian examples were not all bored through for the cord: the Santal one Roy found in a Monghyr village was notched at the neck to take the string rather than perforated, and Munda boys used both kinds. He recovered no ritual behind the Ho toy. Only among the neighboring Oraon did traces of ceremonial use still cling, with hundreds of thin bamboo slats threaded on strings hanging in rows from the beams of the bachelors' dormitories, where it was a sin for women to enter.
As for the Mundas, the Hos and the Santals, the use of the Bull-roarer occurs only in a very few villages amongst them, and that too merely as children's toys.
S.C. Roy, "The Bull-Roarer in India" (meeting summary), Man in India vol. 7 (1927): 63-64
- Object
- Bull-roarer use reported among the Hos of Singhbhum District; Roy says Ho, Munda, and Santal use survived only in a few villages as children's toys.
- Function
- Children's toy/plaything bull-roarer; no ritual function stated for Ho in the checked summary.
- Map confidence
- medium - Chaibasa / Singhbhum District regional anchor; Roy names Singhbhum District but no Ho village.
- Source location
Page references
Man in India vol. 7 printed p. 63 | Roy, JBORS XIII (1927), pp. 54-61
- Toy / secular survival