Songs of Confrontation and Survival

Exploring the Moral World of the Sapha Hors from the Santal Parganas

Abstract

This article analyses the Sapha Hors, a sect that emerged in the Santal Parganas in the wake of the Santal defeat in the hul of 1855. Based on oral history and archival sources, it provides an insight into how the sect committed itself, at its inception, to an agenda of self-purification, developing in the process a unique identity through an engagement with a diverse cultural environment in the Santal Parganas—a melting pot of evangelical missionary ideology and local Hindu traditions, with an interesting range of cultural symbols, moral precepts, and modes of worship from which the Sapha Hors could borrow, exercising their own discretionary agency. The songs of the Sapha Hors, wrapped in an enigmatic language of pacifism, best articulate the self-representation of the sect during its struggle to adjust to colonial and post-colonial challenges over the course of a long historical journey, which began in the 1870s. The article attempts to revive indigenous voices and their self-reflexive insights into life and struggle, which are fast disappearing from streamlined “mainstream” versions of indigeneity.