FRESH EVIDENCE 
A. THE PUTKA OF THE SANTAL 
At an early stage of our mycological inquiries the late Georg 
Morgenstierne, the distinguished Norwegian scholar specializ- 
ing in the babel of tongues spoken in Nuristan, drew my atten- 
tion to an oddity of the language spoken by the Santal, a tribe 
numbering some millions living in scattered villages of Orissa 
and Bihar in India. Their language is neither Indo-European 
nor Dravidian: in India it heads a third much smaller family 
called Munda. A trait of these languages is that they possess no 
genders: Munda speakers know not our masculine, feminine, 
neuter categories. For them all creatures and objects are either 
animate, possessing a soul, or inanimate, devoid of soul. The 
division between the two seems to us somewhat arbitrary, 
enshrining conceptions that prevailed long long ago. Thus the 
sun, moon, stars were and are conceived of as animate. On the 
other hand the whole of the vegetable kingdom is inanimate — 
with one exception, a single species of mushroom* called 
‘putka’. What was this mushroom and why was it animate? 
In 1965 I visited the Santal Parganas (as they are called) in 
Bihar, in and around Dumka. I questioned as many of the older 
people as I could. Mrs. A.E. Stronstad, the wife of the Norwe- 
gian missionary, most graciously was serving as my interpre- 
ter. | found the Santal an endearing people, gentle, eager to 
help, obviously candid. None of them that I spoke with knew 
either English or Hindi. The Santal are, unlike the Hindus, 
mycophiles. My best informant was an elderly woman, Ludgi 
Marndi. She told me there was one mushroom that caused 
inebriation. Was it the putka? No, definitely not. What was the 
putka? We were in January and none were around at that time 
of year. Why was it animate? No one knew: apparently the 
reason had been lost in the depths of the past. A few informants 
pointed out hesitatingly that putka abounded in the sacred 
grove of sarjom trees growing near every village. (Santal sar- 
jom = Hindi sal = Shorea robusta) Was this perhaps the 
**Mushroom in French is champignon, but unlike ‘mushroom’ in English, champig- 
non embraces the whole fungal world even to the microscopic species. As this paper 
was to be translated into French, ‘mushroom’ in it embraces ascomycetes as well as 
basidiomycetes. 
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