The Bullroarer Atlas

SASIA-006 - secondary catalog

Munda / Ranchi District

India - Bihar and Orissa - Chota Nagpur - South Asia

Play / practical

Another notched, saw-toothed wood blade of the same Naga type, blackened with age and tapering to a narrow tail where only a wisp of thread...
Representative image. Another notched, saw-toothed wood blade of the same Naga type, blackened with age and tapering to a narrow tail where only a wisp of thread remains — shown generically for the hur-hur, which Roy reports Munda boys in Ranchi District made in both notched and perforated forms. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1953.10.127) Image source

hur-hur English

Source term: Bull-roarer

Etymology. hur-hur, the Munda name for the toy bull-roarer, imitates the instrument's whirring sound. (high confidence)

Among the Munda of the Ranchi District, the bull-roarer had dwindled to a boys' plaything. In his 1927 note "The Bull-Roarer in India," the Ranchi ethnographer Sarat Chandra Roy reported that Munda boys swung bull-roarers of both kinds — the perforated sort, with a hole bored for the string, and the notched sort, cut with a neck to tie it on, the same form he had found among the Santal in Monghyr. Roy held that the instrument survived among the Munda, Ho, and Santal only in a very few villages, and there merely as a children's toy; it was among the neighboring Oraon, who kept perforated bull-roarers of semur-pod valves in the bachelors' dormitory that women were forbidden to enter, that he saw the old ceremonial and magical use still alive.

Munda boys have been found using Bull-roarers of both varieties, notched as well perforated.

S.C. Roy, "The Bull-Roarer in India," summarized in Man in India vol. 7 (1927), p. 63
Object
Roy reports Munda boys in Ranchi District using both notched and perforated bull-roarers.
Function
Children's toy/plaything bull-roarer; no ritual function stated for Munda in the checked summary.
Map confidence
medium - Khunti/Ranchi District representative Munda-area anchor; Roy names Ranchi District but no Munda village.
Source location
Man in India vol. 7 printed p. 63 | Roy, JBORS XIII (1927), pp. 54-61

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