Munda

The Munda are an Austroasiatic people of the Chota Nagpur Plateau, centred on Jharkhand and extending into Odisha and western Bengal, speaking Mundari, which gives the Munda branch its name. Munda speakers reached Odisha from Southeast Asia some four thousand years ago; words in Vedic texts of 1500 to 500 BCE show their forebears reached the upper Gangetic world before pressure pushed them east into the hills.

They call themselves horoko, meaning men; Munda, a Sanskrit-derived title for the village headman, became the name of the whole people under British census-taking. They honoured the sun deity Singbonga, kept the Sarhul and Sohrai festivals, and raised carved stone slabs, patthalgari, over graves and village boundaries.

Dispossession by landlords and moneylenders under colonial rule drove the Kol rising of 1823 to 1833, in which Munda manki headmen joined before it was suppressed.