Ho

The Ho are a Munda people of the Kolhan, the iron country of old Singhbhum, whose name means human in their Austroasiatic tongue. Neighbours called them the Larka Kol, or fighting Kols. Copper was smelted there between the ninth and twelfth centuries, and the Ho displaced the Bhuiya inhabitants by the seventeenth century.

Through the 1700s they fought the rajas of Chota Nagpur and Mayurbhanj, and neither the Mughals nor the Marathas ever penetrated their hills, leaving them effectively autonomous. After Chota Nagpur passed to the East India Company in 1765, the raja of Singhbhum became a British feudatory in 1820, but taxation and the dispossession of manki headmen fed the Kol rising of 1831 to 1833.

Ho life centred on rice, the village dancing ground or akhra, and the Sarna religion of sacred groves, whose rituals were led by a deuri priest.