The Bullroarer Atlas

SASIA-008 - secondary catalog

Oraon / Kurukh

India - Chota Nagpur - Ranchi - South Asia

Restricted

Roy's own photograph of Oraon bull-roarers of three sizes, suspended by their handles from a crossbar in the youth dormitory he documents.
Roy's own photograph of Oraon bull-roarers of three sizes, suspended by their handles from a crossbar in the youth dormitory he documents. S. C. Roy, Oraon Religion and Customs (1928), illustration 16 Public domain Image source

kher-chukna (dormitory strings, "foot-scrapers"); bhurka (toy) English

Source term: bull-roarer

Etymology. kher-chukna, "foot-scrapers," is the Oraon name for the strings of bull-roarer slats hung in the bachelors' dormitory; the toy form is called bhurka. (high confidence)

In the bachelors' dormitories of the Oraon, where it is a sin for women to enter, the anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy found hundreds of thin bamboo slats threaded on strings and hung in rows from the beams, and in some of them perforated bull-roarers cut from the valves of semar (silk-cotton) pods. Roy's findings were summarized in Man in India in 1927, among papers read at the Indian Science Congress at Lahore that January. He argued that the company the bull-roarer kept among the Oraon, and certain practices still attached to it, left no reasonable doubt of its old magical and religious significance for the tribe. Among the neighboring Hos, Santals, and Mundas the instrument turned up only in a very few villages, and there merely as children's toys. The sacred mystery of the bull-roarer, Roy granted, was no longer remembered by the Oraon nor preserved in their folklore, and whatever significance it once held was much attenuated from former times.

Hundreds of thin slats of bamboo threaded in strings are to be seen hanging in rows from the beams of some of the Qraon Bachelors' dormitories, where it is a sin for women to enter.

Summary of S. C. Roy, "The Bull-Roarer in India," Man in India, vol. 7 (1927), p. 63
Object
A perforated slat of wood or bamboo, holed at one end, hung in the youth dormitory.
Function
Sacred emblem of the bachelors' dormitory, hung in strings over the akhra dancing-ground at festivals to scare away spirits that possess dancers
Map confidence
medium - Ranchi/Chota Nagpur regional anchor for Oraon dormitory evidence
Source location
Roy summary, Man in India vol. 7 printed pp. 63-64 | Roy 1928, pp. 62-63 and plates; Elwin 1947, p. 293

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