Simpul Behera: The Meriah and Kedu Rituals of the Kandha Tribe. Blood Sacrifice for Fertile Land in Odisha, India
Abstract
The present article aims to describe the Meriah ritual of the colonial times and the contemporary Kedu festival. First, it deals with the Meriah ritual, a human sacrifice which is believed to have taken place until the colonial government began to suppress it, i.e., in 1836 BCE. Since the British permitted the Kandha to use a substitute, i.e., a buffalo for the human being, the ritual continued for a long time even after independence, but now a trend has set in to give up the animal sacrifice, too. The article describes the Kedu festival based on repeated observation by the researcher. In the course of examining various interpretations of these rituals, it is argued that these rituals/festivals are basically related to agriculture and the productivity of soil that sustains life. The festival brings together deified nature, land and Kandha, and provides a unique cultural identity to the Kandha tribe. Ethnohistorical approaches have been applied to collect and analyse the data from the field.
[India, Kandha blood, sacrifice, tribe, ritual, land]
