Kond

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Kond

ETHNONYMS: Kandh, Khand, Khond, Kondl, Kui

Orientation

The Konds are a Dravidian people traditionally inhabiting the hill country of the Eastern Ghats of India. In Phulbani District, central Orissa State, they occupy an area lying Between 19° and 20° N and 83° and 84° E. Their population in 1971 was 911,239. The name "Kond" (plural Kondulu) means "mountaineer," from the Telugu word meaning "hill."

However, they refer to themselves in their Kui language as "Kui people." There are several different tribes of various origins who speak the Kui language; for clarity's sake the term "Kond" is used here to refer to members of that specific tribe.

Kui (and its closely related dialect, Kuvi) is a Dravidian language with strong resemblance to Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada in grammar. Although Kui does not have its own script, it has borrowed the Oriya script.

History and Cultural Relations

It is believed the Konds originally came from the richer coastal plains of eastern India before being driven away during the Aryan advance. Three separate groups of Konds emerged from history: the subjugated Bettiah Konds, who inhabit the plains below the Ghats; the Benniah Konds, who inhabit the foothills and lower slopes of the Ghats; and the Maliah Konds or Hill Konds, constituting the majority of the Kond population, who are situated on the central tableland of the Ghats. The Hill Konds have never been under foreign domination, and for centuries they raided Oriya villages in the plains. Until the early nineteenth century they practiced human sacrifice as a religious rite in order to avoid natural calamities. Their neighbors the Pans have always been indispensable to the Konds in their capacity as traders, moneylenders, musicians, and intermediaries in all transactions between Hindus and Konds. Certain aspects of funerals that are taboo to the Konds themselves are handled by the Pans.

Settlements

Kond homes are traditionally rectangular with hardened dirt floors, strong outer wall-planks of wood, and thatched grass roofs with wood supports. Doorposts are used to keep cattle from the sleeping quarters of the occupants, who are housed in the same dwelling; chickens and goats share another room, and a pigsty is also traditionally found in a separate part of the house. The houses of a village are generally scattered near the fields.

Economy

Rice is the staple of the Kond, and both dry and wet cultivation are practiced in the foothills; maize and lentils are also important crops. Turmeric and mustard seed for oil, as well as grain and legume surpluses, represent the cash crops. Cattle are domesticated both for their milk and as draft animals; occasionally they are slaughtered for their meat. Pigs are kept both for their meat and as sacrificial animals. Chickens and goats are kept as well for all their economic benefits; jungle products such as teak hardwood (the most valuable tree in the forest) are cut, collected, and sold to the Pan wholesalers. Cooking is very plain, featuring nothing like the rich curries found elsewhere in India. Except for linseed oil, which is used to grease pots for cooking vegetables, oil is not used in cooking; instead, everybody uses it on skin and hair. Wild boars, deer, and hares are occasionally hunted and their meat is dried in the hot sun and stored in earthen pots. Distilled spirit made of the mahua blooms is a popular alcoholic beverage.

The Kond's neighbors the Pan act as middlemen in all trade between the Hill Kond and the Hindus from the plains. Exchange relations between villagers are still more prevalent than money except near market towns. Reed sleeping mats and soft grass sweeping brooms are popular crafts the men engage in, during the off-season from work in the paddies; these are in demand on the plains.

The men of a household are responsible for the hill-plot preparation, such as deforesting the land and moving large rocks, and for the leveling of the wet paddy fields. Plowing is strictly a man's business; in fact, it is taboo for a woman to touch a plowshare, the male symbol that penetrates the female earth. Threshing the paddy is a man's job and is temporarily stopped if the wife is menstruating. Women generally do all the cooking, the planting and weeding in the paddies, and the raising of the young. Young and old generally patrol the fields to protect them from birds and deer that feed on the rice seedlings.

Kinship, Marriage, and Family

The Kond family is patrilineal in structure. Childhood is traditionally a time of preparation for marriage and civic responsibility. When a girl turns seven her ears are pierced many times and kept open with bamboo insertions, which upon marriage are filled with a dozen or more rings given to her by her husband. At ten years of age a girl's upper face is traditionally tattooed. Girls who don't submit are considered undesirable for marriage; and it was once widely believed that a girl without tattoos would turn into a tiger. According to the men, there was a raja of Gumsur who had such an eye for Kond women that the practice of tattooing was adopted to make them less desirable to him and to end his raids into their villages; however, today the custom is dying out. Cousin marriage on either side is considered totally impossible. The clan is completely exogamous. Although the caste system is absent in Kond society, in some villages there is a religious idea of defilement that extends into cooking, eating, and marriage customs. Priests and shrine keepers must keep themselves pure by avoiding others of lower religious status under certain circumstances, and this attitude in some Villages extends into several lower degrees of social stratification as well.

Sociopolitical Organization

The traditional administration of the Konds is centered on the clan. Each clan is headed by a male who is representative of the common ancestor; succession passes on to whoever is most competent. Beyond the individual clan leaders, each Village is led by a Kond headman, a lay ritual official, possibly also a priest, and a council of village family leaders including the priest and a lay ritual official.

Religion

The Kond religion has two different forms of ritual within the same tribe, based on two different interpretations of Bura (the supreme being) and his consort Tari (the earth goddess) . The followers of Bura insist that Bura in his struggle with Tari (who rebelled against Bura) was victorious; Tari's followers maintain that Tari was never conquered. According to the Bura sect, Bura created three classes of lesser gods to regulate the powers of nature for man. According to the Tari sect, the beliefs are the same; however, Tari is supreme and must be appeased with her natural food, human sacrifice, which has been replaced by animal sacrifices. Since the nineteenth century Christian missionaries have converted many Konds.