The seminar on Santhal Worldview provided the meeting ground primarily of eighteen scholars who have been part of the IGNCA’s pursuit of comprehending Santhal lifestyle in its integrity and completeness. An important aspect of the seminar was the active participation of Santhals themselves. In this coming together of representatives of the Santhal culture as also anthropologists, artists, ecologists, linguists and philosophers from universities, government and non-government organisations, many issues as those of language, identity, perceptions about sound, nature and culture as also cognitive systems surfaced for discussion.

The seminar on Santhal Worldview provided the meeting ground primarily of eighteen scholars who have been part of the IGNCA’s pursuit of comprehending Santhal lifestyle in its integrity and completeness. An important aspect of the seminar was the active participation of Santhals themselves. In this coming together of representatives of the Santhal culture as also anthropologists, artists, ecologists, linguists and philosophers from universities, government and non-government organisations, many issues as those of language, identity, perceptions about sound, nature and culture as also cognitive systems surfaced for discussion. More specifically, the basic themes of ecology, habitat and environment, sound and language, daily life, food and scheme of cooking, seed and womb in a holistic framework provided the groundwork for a meaningful exchange of ideas. These are central to the concern for investigating the layers of cultural knowledge and articulation of symbols. The face-to-face interaction between the Santhals and those who have set out to study them greatly resolved many problems of methodology and contents of research. The seminar was organised into three panels, Lifestyle and Worldview; Nature and Culture; and Religion and Language.

We began with the methodology of comprehending the lifestyle and worldview of a people. One of the several methods consist of delving into their vocabulary. The vocabulary, quite naturally, reflects their means of subsistence – agriculture and agricultural activities. This was followed with an insight into Santhal lifestyle within the context of agricultural activities and related system of beliefs. It opened up the complete vista of interrelationship between human beings and animals at one level and between human beings and the bongas or spirits at the other. The information called for looking into the fundamental themes which provide intelligibility and relevance to them. The concept of womb and seed, food, sound and language, among others, are important.

Cultivation and growth of plants inspires cohesive communities living in the lap of nature as the Santhals. They are given to deriving the design of life from what they see ‘out there’. The small seed of the vegetal world and large womb of the earth in which it is embedded provides the anchor for their understanding of the world and also beyond – the celestial and cosmological. This gets reflected in their rituals, myths and most importantly the gamut of words they use to communicate knowledge, existence and experience. This was amply illustrated through the soundscape developed by the centre. The acoustic environment, according to Santhals, consists of three kinds of sound : sade produced by striking two objects; rak or call of animals and aran or human sounds which are further divided into ror or speech and yar or song. Sounds signal rituals as also mundane orientations in space-time continuum.

The seminar provided an opportunity to share the experience, perspective, methods and models of analysis with the purpose of restructuring the knowledge base; develop an integrated, holistic database derived from complementarity of diverse disciplines; and foster dialogue between intellectual tradition of the academicians and tradition of wisdom of the Santhals themselves.

Nita Mathur

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