Sora

The Sora, also recorded as Savara or Saura, are a South Munda people of the Eastern Ghats in southern Odisha and the adjoining Andhra coast, centred on the hills around Parlakhemundi. They farm irrigated rice terraces and slash-and-burn podu fields.

The Vedic Brahmanas list Savaras alongside the Pulindas, and Pliny in 77 CE and Ptolemy around 130 CE placed the Suari or Sabarae in Kalinga. A Bihari tradition remembers Savara tribesmen deposing the Hinduized Chero rulers around 500 CE.

In the hills their society is built on exogamous extended families called birinda and villages led by a hereditary Gomango headman with a Buyya priest; female shamans, kuran, descend in trance to the underworld to speak for the kittung spirits. They were called Lanjia Sora for the hanging loincloth mistaken for a tail, and their language remained unwritten through this period.