Santal

Santal religion is unusually well documented among South Asian Adivasi traditions because one missionary linguist made recording it his life's work. Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian missionary who worked among the Santal of eastern India from the 1890s into the 1930s, compiled Santal dictionaries, collected Santal folk tales and produced detailed studies of Santal medicine and religious practice, work that remains a primary reference for Marang Buru, the great mountain god, Jaher Era, goddess of the sacred grove, and the wider bongas addressed at the jaher shrine and in the household.

Bodding wrote as a missionary seeking to translate Christian scripture into Santali, a purpose that shaped which vocabulary and concepts he chose to record and how he framed them, and later scholars have used his material carefully for that reason rather than treating it as a neutral transcription. Since Bodding's era, the Santal religion he documented, generally known as Sarna, has moved from an ethnographic subject into an active political claim: Santal organisations, together with other Adivasi communities across Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar, have campaigned for Sarna to be recorded as its own religion on the Indian census, separate from Hinduism, a contest over classification rather than over the underlying practice, which continues in villages regardless of which census box eventually applies to it.