Khonds Erotic

The Khonds live in the forested hill country of Kandhamal and the Eastern Ghats spilling across Odisha into bits of Andhra Pradesh, a landscape of sal trees, narrow valleys, and red lateritic soil that has kept them somewhat apart from the plains for most of their recorded history. They speak Kui, a Dravidian tongue that sits oddly far north of its linguistic cousins; a related variety, Kuvi, is spoken by a southern branch, and the split between Kui-speaking Khonds and Kuvi-speaking Khonds is one of the basic internal divisions of the people. Outsiders historically distinguished further between the Kutia Khonds of the deeper hills, who farmed by shifting cultivation, and the Desia Khonds of the lower country, who took up plough agriculture and absorbed more Odia influence. Self-identification is by clan and village before it is by any pan-Khond label.

Their religious life is usually catalogued as Hinduism, and the upper layer is — Hindu festivals, Hindu deities slotted into the pantheon, intermarriage of categories with Odia neighbors — but the underlying frame is an indigenous earth religion organized around a creator goddess and her consort, with village priests, sacred groves, and sacrifice as the central act of worship. The Khonds entered colonial archives largely because of one practice: the meriah, a human sacrifice offered to the earth goddess to secure the fertility of the soil and the turmeric crop in particular. The British suppressed it through a series of military campaigns in the 1830s and 1840s and substituted buffalo. The episode hardened a stereotype that has clung to the group in outside writing ever since, often at the cost of attention to anything else they do.

What they do, mostly, is farm — turmeric, millet, rice, pulses — and gather from the forest, and conduct an elaborate marriage system involving bride-price, clan exogamy, and a long tradition of dormitory youth-houses where unmarried young people of the village socialised and paired off. Land is the running theme of recent Khond history: the encroachment of plains settlers, the loss of forest rights, the bauxite-mining disputes in the Niyamgiri hills, and the 2008 communal violence in Kandhamal between Khond Hindus and the substantial Khond Christian minority, which displaced tens of thousands and which the community is still working through.