Santal

The Santal are the largest of the Munda-speaking Austroasiatic peoples of eastern India, concentrated on the Chota Nagpur Plateau and adjoining western districts of Bengal. They call themselves Hor Hopon, children of humans; Santal is an outsider's name from the settlement of Saont in Midnapore. Linguistics traces their forebears to migration from Indochina several millennia before the common era, and folklore remembers a slow westward drift from Hihiri onto the plateau.

They lived as clan farmers in villages led by a majhi headman, each with a sacred jaher grove where the bonga spirits, headed by Marang Buru, received seasonal sacrifice. Long absent from written records, they appear in East India Company documents as Soontars in 1795.

After the Bengal famine of 1770 emptied the Jungle Mahals, the Permanent Settlement of 1790 led landlords and the Company to recruit Santals for forest clearing, and after Damin-i-koh was demarcated in 1832 thousands migrated into the Rajmahal Hills as peasants, falling into debt to moneylenders.