Khond

The Khonds are a Dravidian tribal people of the forested Eastern Ghats, chiefly in the highlands of inland Odisha. They speak Kui and Kuvi, tongues closest to Gondi and traditionally written in the Odia script. Their society is organised into totemic clans led by headmen.

Their economy combines hunting and gathering with podu, slash-and-burn cultivation. They worshipped the earth deity Dharni together with mountain and river spirits, and the Meriah rite, in which a purchased victim was sacrificed to secure the fertility of the soil, made them notorious to early British administrators.

During the Company's war against the raja of Goomsur from 1835, the Scottish officer Samuel Charters Macpherson entered the previously unmapped Khond hills in 1837. He recorded their language and institutions, and prepared the reports on which the later campaigns to abolish the sacrifice were based.