Santal Religion

Santal religion is the traditional faith of the Santal people, one of the largest Adivasi, or indigenous, communities of eastern India and Bangladesh, centered on Marang Buru, the great mountain spirit, and on bongas, spirits of village, forest and ancestor addressed through village priests, naeke, and healing specialists, ojha. This article does not reproduce Santal ritual invocation; the linguist P.O. Bodding transcribed versions of it in the early twentieth century as part of a wider record of Santal oral literature, but that transcription belongs to the historical record of scholarship rather than to a text open for general reuse, and the invocations remain the province of the named specialists who speak them.

What is public is the religion's demographic and geographic reach: Santal communities span Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar in India as well as parts of Bangladesh and Nepal, and Santal religious identity is often carried today under the wider Sarna faith label a number of Adivasi peoples use to describe their traditional religion as a category distinct from Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. That identity question, whether Adivasi traditional religion is its own recognized category, has become a public and political conversation in the regions Santal communities call home, and Santal religion remains an actively practiced faith within it.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sarnaism's worship has a fixed physical form: the sacred grove, called Sarna in general and Jaherthan specifically among Santals, a stand of sal and mahua trees left standing at the edge of a village precisely because it is understood to be where the village deities dwell. Marang Buru, Singbonga or Gram Deota by different regional names, along with Dharti Ayo, the earth goddess, are worshipped there rather than in any constructed temple, and a pahan, a village ritual specialist rather than a member of any priestly caste, conducts the twice yearly ceremonies at the grove, which include animal sacrifice as part of the offering.

This is a living, numerically substantial faith rather than a residual folk practice: India's 2011 census recorded nearly five million Sarnaism adherents, concentrated in Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, and Santals make up just under a third of that total alongside several other Adivasi communities who hold the same grove based worship under their own names for it.

What Sarnaism does not yet have is its own line on India's census form. Adherents are folded into the Hindu category by default unless they specify otherwise, a classification many reject as inaccurate to what they practice. Jharkhand's state legislative assembly passed a unanimous resolution in 2020 asking the central government to create a distinct Sarna religion code ahead of the next national census, a campaign that treats accurate counting itself as part of the faith's claim to be recognized as its own religion rather than a variant of another one; the central government had not granted it as of this entry.