Bonda’s Relationship with God and Supernatural
The Bondas are god-fearing people. Fear, but not gratitude or love for gods lies at the root of their religion. They sacrifice themselves to preserve their traditions and customs but for ordinary occasions they depend on priests and “shamans to deal with the malice of sorcerers” and the territorial ambitions of the supernatural world (see Elwin 1950:132).
The Bondas have their own concept of god as those of mainstream religions, for as Humra Quraishi and Kushwant Singh state, every religion has its symbol for its god and the power which people attribute to Him (Quraishi & Singh 2014:35). Bondas find god in every aspect of nature, in various forms and shapes.
The gods and goddesses whom the Bondas worship do not need stone images carved by man: they manifest themselves to him in different forms, as they please-a rock, a tree, a lake, a tiger, a ghost... The gods create human beings, but human beings do not create gods.
(Ray 2001:199)
They believe in different gods as well as ghosts and demons, as people of most religions. The story behind the Bonda worship of various gods is intriguing. In fact, according to their belief, gods were created after the remos, and the remos knew cultivation and hunting even before the gods. Once Mahapru was worried on thinking that the Bonda in their prosperity would become proud and disrespectful. Hence, He sent the gods to destroy the remos’ wealth and bring them under the control and fear of gods. On His instruction, the gods went and stayed with the remos and demanded feasts of meat and drink. They also stipulated that all the Bondas in the village are to be fed if they were to accept the Bonda’s offerings to them. So “the entire village had to feast when a god was fed” (Ray 2001:151). In order to manage them, the disari (soothsayer and medicine man) named each of them and assigned each a different place to reside - Dumbar in the mango and jackfruit trees; Urseli, the tiger-god in the jungle; Rutka in the village stream; Singraj in the waterfall; and Sindbore in the stone platform at the centre of the village.
Further, the Bondas began worshipping Gurang, Poi, and Dagoi as the Bonda household deities (Ray 2001:149-151).As delineated by Ray, Mahapru is the king of the Mountains. Soma Muduli, the disari, knows the power of the supreme God. If He is pleased, the Bonda village prospers, and when He descends, the village witnesses calamities - the tiger turns man eater, and people become disease-stricken. Thus, in the novel, we see birus (ritual sacrifice offered to a deity) being performed across the Bonda country during an epidemic of brain fever to appease Goi Gigey (god of death). Mantras are chanted, cattle are slaughtered, and the “dead cremated” (Ray 2001:201-202). Bagha Bindu, who became the naik after Soma Muduli, also offers a biru when his second wife Chhotli falls sick due to this illness. Buda Muduli’s wife Sukri Toki who has a bad dream also feels that a biru has to be performed to ward off the evil. The author describes in detail the gunam rituals carried out to exorcise Soma Muduli of Lachchma Toki’s spirit and put the duma (the spirit of an ancestor) of Lachchma Toki to rest. Somra and Mangla play the roles of sairemba, the ancestors of the dead one. Gunam involves the sacrifice of a pig, feeding meat and rice to the sairembas, everyone “gorging on meat” and drowning “themselves in drink,” and dancing nightlong by the young and the old, to the accompaniment of “tomkas, flutes and dungudungas” (Ray 2001:259). Finally, a memorial is constructed with four pieces of flat stones in front of the private sindbore (stone platform) of Soma Muduli, and one more is placed in the collection of stones in the common sindbore (Ray 2001:260). The author vividly brings out the Bonda belief in spirits which also reflects the blending of Hindu and indigenous elements.
They believe both in jiu (soul) and duma (ghost, the shadow of the jiu). According to them, a selani’s jiu seldom returns, unless otherwise she has an unhappy death; but a man’s always returns to keep a watch over the merits and demerits of its relatives (Ray 2001:210211).
There are different birus to appease different gods. Ray says, “the Bonda’s life is intertwined with birus and sacrifice. He performs birus to live and lives to perform birus” (Ray 2001:148). Theirs is a religion “of magic and of sacrificial rites. The deity is thought to be propitiated by certain formal acts when duly performed” (Everett 1900:487). The ancient Bonda feared god as well as the demons. The Bondas strongly believe that they have to appease the ghosts of the dead, or else the demons will cast a spell on their crops and cattle, and strike the people with disease. To appease the angry gods, there are priests who conduct specific rituals. Elwin is of the opinion that the priest is not really a gifted person since he has no special powers to guard, but “he is a religious hack on whom a great burden of responsibility and many an arduous duty is laid” (Elwin 1950:247). In the novel, when Soma Muduli, the disari and the much turned-to man, feels helpless when the Bondas’ simple traditional life meets with massive changes and they are exploited, Somra the youth gets furious and frustrated and kills him with an arrow.
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