West Medinipur-Tribal Communities-1

View of Santali Traditional Dance

One of the main characteristics of the West Medinipur district is that this district has a major portion of tribal inhabitants. This tribal communities are divided between various names;

Santali-This tribal class is most popular in Bengal and also in India.This tribal group is generally lives at the north and western part of this district which is mostly hilly area.This tribal group was first find-out by Walter Hamilton in 1820.There is different opinion about the name of this tribal;some opinion which is very near to believe is that this name had come from smanta or may be saont; because this place was known as samanatbhum. It was also the opinion that this tribal class belongs to this region.

View of Santali Festival Dance

Historically, it can be said that Santali group was mostly found in Jhargram and nearest parts of the Medinipur district. Forest is closely attached to their daily life; they collect Sal-tree- leaf from for nearest forest for making plates which are mostly used for different ceremonies of our Bengali people, they do agricultural works surrounding the plain area of the forest and now most of them come to town area and do digging of earth work for the foundation of buildings, well, etc., for their such digging works, they use to call in local name Mita.

Santali Women-Welcome Mood

After discovered them, the American Baptist Foreign Mission had especially taken care to improve their lifestyle and tried to bring them in mainstream of development of the society. But the main mission of that mission was to convert them to their religion; in spite of this, the mission had tried to give them proper education. On the inspiration to this Christian mission, namely, Rev. J Philips, Rev. G Kennan and also Rev. L.C. Kitchen had struggled much to know the origin of this tribal group and as per his strong effort, the entire world came to know about Santali language,Olchiki.This is the mother language of Santal.

Rev Philip had first time published Santali songs and poems in Bengali language in the year nearly 1845. He first took initiative to start school for them at Jaleswar. Rev Philips had done huge research on Santali Language and wrote most famous two books; Santali Bhasa Siksha in 1850 and another book Santali Language in the year 1852 where he included grammar and more than 5000 words of the Santali language. This is great work undoubtedly and he deserved thanks from this group of the tribe.

This tribal group had strong participation in India's freedom movement. Some eminent personalities of this tribe had directly involved in India's freedom movement and they were fully inspired the non-cooperation movement towards Mahatma Gandhi and controlled common Santali people for not paying taxes and revenues to the colonial British rulers. In the long run they got direct involvement in confrontation with colonial British rulers.
Santali has their own songs and dance form for their different occasions and festivals which give them separate identity in the world.