Singbonga and Dharmes
सिंगबोंगा · धर्मेस
Also Singbonga, Dharmes, Dharti Aayo, Sarna Burhia, Sing Bonga.
indigenous
Who this is
These are the high gods of the Sarna faith, which is the religion of the Munda, Oraon, Ho, Kharia and Santhal of the Chhotanagpur plateau, and they are not forms of any god of the Sanskrit pantheon. Singbonga is the sun god and the creator in the Munda and the Ho account, and Dharmes is the creator in the Kurukh account of the Oraon; the two are not two names for one being and they are listed together here rather than merged for that reason. Beside them stands the earth, called Dharti Aayo or Ikir Bonga, and the grove herself, called Sarna Burhia or Sarna Mata, who is honoured in the sacred grove the village has never cut. Whether Sarna worship belongs inside Hinduism is not an open question to the organisations that keep it: the Sarna Dharma Code demand has been pressed on the Census and on the states for decades, and this entry records what is worshipped without filing it under somebody else’s religion.
How to recognise them
No image and no icon, and that is the substance of it rather than an omission. What is honoured is the sarna sthal itself, a stand of sal trees that the village has never cut, with a cluster of unworked stones at its foot; Singbonga is the sun and is addressed in the open. The things actually brought are the first flower of the sal, the first grain of a harvest, the handia brewed for the day, and a fowl offered by the pahan. A grove that has been built over or a stone that has been given a face is a grove the village has lost.
Family and companions
The relations are told differently by each of the peoples who keep them and the tellings do not all agree, so no single family tree is given here. In the Munda account Singbonga is the maker of the first pair and of the world, with Nage Era and Buru Bonga among the bongas of the water and the hills under him. The Oraon account gives Dharmes the same place and sets Chala Pacho, the grandmother of the grove, beside him. The Santhal account is its own again and names Thakur Jiu as the creator and Marang Buru, Jaher Era and Moreko Turuiko among the bongas of the jaher, the Santhal grove, which is why the Santhal spring festival is Baha and not Sarhul.
How they are worshipped
Sarhul, which the Munda call Ba Parab and the Oraon Khaddi, at the sal flowering in spring; Karam at the Bhadrapada Shukla Ekadashi; and for the Santhal, Baha in Phalguna and Sohrae in Pus and Magh, neither of which this almanac computes.
By the pahan, the village priest, in the grove and on the village’s behalf, and not by a household at a shrine of its own; the Oraon call him pahan and the Santhal naeke, and the pahnain is his wife, who has her own part in the rite. He fasts before the day, honours the earth and the grove, sets three earthen pots of water overnight and reads the water left in them for the rains, and the flower or the grain he has accepted is then taken to every house. Nothing of the new season is eaten before he has done it. The dancing at the akhra, the village dancing ground, to the mandar and the nagara is part of the rite and not an entertainment after it, and the handia is offered before it is drunk.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The grove the village never cut
When a Munda or an Oraon village was founded on cleared forest, a stand of the original sal was left standing and never felled, and that stand is the sarna sthal. It is not a temple built for a god; it is the piece of the old forest that was spared, and the god is held to be in it because it was spared. The practical consequence has been large: across Jharkhand the groves are the last primary sal anywhere near many villages, and a dispute over a grove is a dispute over a religion and over a forest at once. The Kendriya Sarna Samiti and the village bodies have fought both kinds of case, and the entry records this because a reader who sees only the festival date will not know that the grove is the thing.
Why Sarhul is not a Hindu spring festival
Sarhul is the day the sal comes into flower and the pahan has honoured the earth, and until he has done so no sal flower is picked and no new leaf of the season is eaten. It is not read by a tithi in the village: it is read by the tree. The Jharkhand gazette fixes the state holiday on Chaitra Shukla Tritiya because a state needs a date, and the Ranchi jatra keeps that date, and this almanac prints it with the gazette named as the authority for it. Those are two different kinds of fact and they are kept apart on purpose. A calendar that printed Sarhul as its own festival on a tithi of its own reckoning would be doing in software what the Sarna organisations have objected to in the census form for thirty years.
Karam, the one day two religions hold at once
A branch of the karam tree is cut and planted upright in the akhra and the village sings and dances round it all night, and on the morning after it is carried to the river and set in the water. In a Munda, Oraon, Ho or Santhal village that is a Sarna festival and the pahan honours the branch. In the same villages the Sadan Hindu castes keep the same night as their own, and tell over the same branch the katha of Karma and Dharma, two brothers who quarrelled over whether work or fate carries a life; the women fast for their brothers and offer the jawa, the barley sprouted in baskets. Chhattisgarh and western Odisha keep it that second way. Neither community is held to have taken the day from the other, and this almanac prints one line for it rather than two, because printing the two communities of one village as two rows on a calendar would be worse than one honest row.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh
- The religion of the Munda, Oraon, Ho, Kharia and Santhal of the Chhotanagpur plateau. Jharkhand gazettes Sarhul and Karma as state holidays and Ranchi gives Sarhul the largest jatra, from Siram Toli through the city; the Sarna Dharma Code, a separate religion column on the census, has been a live demand of the state assembly and of the village bodies for decades.
- Odisha
- The Munda, Ho, Oraon and Santhal of Sundargarh, Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar keep the same groves and the same two days, and western Odisha keeps Karma with the Karam katha beside them.
- Bengal
- The Santhal, Munda and Oraon of the Jangalmahal and the north Bengal tea districts keep the jaher and the sarna, and Baha and Sohrae are kept there on the Santhal reckoning rather than the Jharkhand gazette’s.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own