Sabar Tribals and Tishu (Tusu) Festival, Purulia, West Bengal

The Sabar tribals (also Shabar and Saora) are one of the Munda ethnic group tribe who live mainly in Odisha and West Bengal, India. They were classified as one of the ‘criminal tribes’ under the colonial rule and still suffer from social stigma and ostracism. We visited the Sabar tribals in Gagda village in Purulia district, West Bengal. The visit was colourful as the entire region was celebrating the Tishu Festival, the last day of the Makar Sankranti harvest festival in the month of Paush. The Tishu festival is mainly celebrated by women and girls, dressed in very colourful clothes (for some reason mainly bright pink), dancing and singing with colourful images of Goddess Tusu and finally immersing the image in the river.

On the way to the village we witnessed hundreds of people joining the Paush season market fair on the bank of the river Kangsabati at Napara. As part of the celebrations of Tishu we saw people streaming through the fields from neighbouring villages to join the festivities at the fair. It was a colourful affair!

A NGO has been working with this tribal community teaching children basic literacy and numeracy in the very appropriately named Hope Project. At this Sabah tribal village, the children were taught through games and play activities. The children were creating alphabets with clay and mud. Out of curiosity we ‘tested’ the children by asking them to read random alphabets. All the children aged 5 to 7 were able to read all the alphabets. Apparently this form of teaching a community of first generation children was successful.

We went down to the river Kangsabati. There was some water in the river and a few fields of mustard were flowering. The Sabar tribe owned no land but worked for or leased land from the Mahto community, which was higher in the hierarchy. In some states Mahtos are categorised as a tribe, but more generally as an Other Backward Community (OBC). We walked through the village which showed some progress. It had few brick houses made from an old Gitanjali housing scheme of the state government of 2012. There was drinking water provided by the government through pipes and hand pumps.

Next, we went to another village where a tribal person had adopted a number of children and was running literacy and numeracy classes for them. With a large number of orphan children he found it difficult to manage. He was a singer and sang folk songs travelling from village to village to collect funds for his children. He also received some support from the local NGOs.