37- Magic and Witchcraft on the Chota Nagpur Plateau 



By Sarat Chandra Roy, M.A., B.L. 



[Presented at the First Indian Science Congress, January 17, 1014.] 



Although among the Chota Nagpur aborigines, I have not 

 yet come across Sbiiy term equivalent to the rnana of the 

 Melanesians or the orenda of the Iroquoian tribes, the idea 

 of a mysterious impersonal force connoted by such terms is 

 fully recognized by the Mundas and the Oraons. It is this 

 mysterious energy or mana that, for the Oraon and the 

 Munda, gives the leaves of the mango-tree or the twig of the 

 pictl. (buchania latifolia) its fertilizing influence, which gives the 

 bheloa (semicarpus anacardium) twig its power of averting the 

 ' evil eye,' which gives the small perforated rati-jara stone its 

 power of curing fever by its contact, which gives the vegetable 

 love-charm or hate-charm, sometimes used by the Oraon youth, 

 its magic potency, which gives the Dhora snake its supposed 

 magnetic power of harming people who may happen merely 

 to look at it, and which gives the Chandi stone, sometimes 

 carried as a fetish by an Oraon hunting-party, its power of 



bringing luck in the chase. 



The means adopted by the Chota Nagpur aboriginal, as by 

 other peoples of the lower culture, for securing alliance with 

 the help jul impersonal powers, has been Sympathetic Magic— 

 through contact, direct or indirect, and through imitative 

 suggestion. The means adopted by him to avoid the harmful 

 impersonal powers has been either to keep at a distance from 

 them, or to divert their attention to other objects, or to con- 

 trol or repel them through the help of some beneficent power 



or through the superior force of man's own mana. These are 

 the modus operandi of Magic. And thus Religion and Magic 

 are the two methods adopted by the man of the lower culture 

 in his dealings with the supernormal and the mysterious. As 

 to whether the one preceded the other or was evolved out of 

 the other, or whether both were independently evolved, autho- 

 rities are divided in opinion. Among the aborigines of Chota 

 Nagpur, however, we find the two methods often combined in 



practice. 



I shall now proceed to give a few illustrations of the 



different kinds of magic proper as practised by the Mundas 

 and the Oraons of Chota Nagpur. 



