Santal Medicine¹

Abstract

THE Santals are one of numerous aboriginal tribes inhabiting those hilly tracts of western Bengal that extend southwards from the Ganges into Chutia Nagpur. They are—or were—distinguished for their bravery, independence, and love of sport. It was of the Santals that an English magistrate, coming among them with an official experience limited to the low-lying eastern districts of Bengal, complained that they confused him by their obstinate adhesion to the simple truth, or, as his Bengali clerk is said to have expressed it, by their ignorance of the value of a lie. More than other untutored races do Santals live in dread and constant appeasement of malignant spirits, or bongas. So much do these bongas exclude the supreme but impassive good spirit from men's minds that the earliest European missionaries, seeking among the people for some native concept of the supernatural upon which to ingraft the theology and message of Christianity, are said to have based their first unhappy attempts upon a misconception of the nature of a bonga.