The Bullroarer Atlas

SASIA-010 - ethnographic attestation

Punjabi Dalit communities historically recorded as “Chuhra”

India - Pakistan (undivided Punjab at time of source) - Punjab villages (undivided Punjab) - South Asia

Play / practical

A Naga bull-roarer of plain dark wood, its edges carved into diamond-and-cross openwork with saw-tooth notching along the mid-blade, both ends...
Representative image. A Naga bull-roarer of plain dark wood, its edges carved into diamond-and-cross openwork with saw-tooth notching along the mid-blade, both ends bare of any cord — shown for the general South Asian form, not the wooden ghirknu Punjabi village children whirled as a toy. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1953.10.108) Image source

ghirknu English

Source term: bull-roarer

ghirknu — Punjabi name for a wooden toy bullroarer.

The colonial name “Chuhra” hid a world of Punjabi Dalit communities—Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian—whose landless labour helped run the village fields while caste placed them at the bottom of rural society. Their children made their own noise: wooden ghirknu whirled as toys across Punjab. By the early 1920s the game was fading, but Roy found it had not quite disappeared.

...until five or six years ago bull-roarers made of wood and known as Gh[i]rknu were frequently used as toys by children in Panjab villages and even now they have not altogether gone out of use.

Roy, "The Bull-Roarer in India," JBORS XIII (1927), p. 61
Object
Wooden ghirknu; no dimensions or surviving specimen recorded.
Function
Children's village toy, declining but still remembered in the 1920s.
Map confidence
low - Regional anchor for undivided Punjab villages, no district named
Source location
Roy, JBORS XIII (1927), p. 61

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