Exploring the Origins: Tribal Creation Myths from Central and East India

Long before written scriptures, before temples and texts, the tribal communities of Central and East India were already answering humanity’s deepest question – how did the world begin? Their answers were not abstract theological propositions. They were vivid, living narratives, passed down through generations in song, ritual, and oral tradition. These creation accounts – known as cosmogonies – tell us not just about the origins of the world, but about how these communities understood morality, nature, and the human place in the cosmos. Today, they remain among the most philosophically rich yet underexplored bodies of thought in Indian intellectual history.

Who are the tribes of Central and East India? 🔗

The tribal communities of Central and East India – primarily the Santals, Mundas, Oraons (Kurukh), and Gonds – are among the oldest inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Scholars identify major adivasi groups like the Mundas, Santals, Oraons, and Hos as early settlers of the Jharkhand region, whose ancestors are believed to predate the arrival of Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples. Spread across Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, these groups speak languages from the Austroasiatic and Dravidian families – linguistic families entirely distinct from the dominant Indo-Aryan tradition.

Their religious worldview is animistic at its core, deeply intertwined with nature, seasonal cycles, and ancestral spirits. Tribal religion in this region is best described as a blend of animistic beliefs, magic, and localized spiritual practices, where deities are not Sanskritic but intimately tied to forests, rivers, and community life. It is within this worldview that their creation stories take root and flourish.

The primordial waters: a shared starting point 🔗

Across nearly all the creation myths of this region, the world does not begin with fire or void – it begins with water. An endless, formless ocean covers everything. There is no land, no sky-boundary, no life. This image of a primordial ocean as the matrix of existence is not incidental; it reflects a deep ecological awareness common to communities whose lives were governed by monsoons, rivers, and floodplains.

The Santal creation tradition holds that in the beginning, there existed nothing but a vast sheet of water and the sky, with the sun lost in darkness and no creation possible. It is only when air emerged that the earth gradually dried, land appeared, and life became possible. This sequence – water, air, earth, vegetation, and finally humans – mirrors what we might today call an ecological succession, and it encodes a sophisticated understanding of how living systems build upon one another.

Singbonga and the Munda genesis 🔗

Singbonga is revered as the supreme deity of the Ho, Munda, Bhumij, and Santhal tribes – a sun god whose name literally combines Sing (sun) and Bonga (god or deity) in Munda languages. He is the creator, sustainer, and moral governor of the universe, associated with light, fertility, and life.

In the Munda origin account, Singbonga floated above a silent, primordial abyss with the intent of creation. He entrusted three creatures – Horo the tortoise, Karakom the crab, and Lendad the earthworm – with a mission to dive into the depths and bring back clay from which the earth could be made. The tortoise and crab attempted the task but failed. It was the humble, overlooked earthworm that persevered and returned with the clay that would seed terrestrial life. From this clay, Singbonga shaped the earth, filled it with forests and rivers, and finally breathed life into the first human beings – a man and a woman.

This detail is philosophically significant. The hero of creation is not a mighty god or a powerful beast, but a small, burrowing worm. The myth signals that in this cosmology, size and social status are no measure of cosmic importance. It is effort, persistence, and service – not power – that drives the world into being.

The Santhal saga: divine birds and the first ancestors 🔗

The Santhal creation myth shares the watery beginning but arrives at humanity by a strikingly different route. The Santhals speak of Thakur Jiu, who placed the first couple, Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi, on a hilltop when the world was still water and sky. A goose brought up mud, land formed, and the couple’s many children populated the earth.

In another layer of the Santhal tradition, Thakur Jiu first created aquatic creatures, then attempted to fashion humans from clay – but they were destroyed before life could be given to them. He then created a pair of divine birds, the Has-Hasil (a goose and a gander). Once land was formed through the combined efforts of the earthworm and the tortoise, the female bird laid two eggs from which the first Santhal man and woman hatched, becoming the ancestors of all who came after.

What makes these myths remarkable is not just their antiquity but their continuing presence in daily life – animals, birds, and spirits are not marginal but central to the human story. In the Santhal cosmogony, creation is not a single divine act from above but an unfolding collaboration between god, animal, and earth – a deeply relational view of existence.

Haram and the Gond cosmos 🔗

The Gond people of Central India – one of the largest tribal groups in the subcontinent, spread across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha – bring a rich and distinct cosmogonic tradition of their own.

In Gond mythology, Haram emerges as the cosmic architect. The world begins submerged in water, and Haram employs animals – including the turtle, the crab, and the earthworm – to draw land up from the depths. The supreme creative force in Gond myth, sometimes called Bara Deva or Persa Pen, is omnipotent and omniscient, responsible for the creation of the world and governing the universe.

The Gonds say that Bhagavan sent an earthworm to bring up mud from beneath the waters. Then came Lingo, the first bard, who sang the world into culture. This is a remarkable philosophical move: the physical world is created through matter (mud), but civilization – culture, meaning, and community – is created through song. Creation is not complete until it is performed, until it is given voice. Music and ritual are not embellishments; they are the final act of cosmic completion.

The Gonds are organically connected with nature, and their entire pantheon represents the aspects of nature – their songs, dance forms, myths, legends, customs, and rituals all reflect this close bond. The creation myth, in this sense, is not a story told once and set aside. It is re-enacted and reaffirmed in every dance, every festival, every sacred grove.

The role of animals in tribal creation 🔗

One of the most consistent features across these diverse creation accounts is the central role of animals as cosmic agents. The crab, the turtle, the earthworm, and the goose are not background characters. They are the ones who make creation materially possible. This stands in notable contrast to many Brahmanical creation narratives, where the divine acts alone or through cosmic beings.

In tribal myths, the world is created for the sake of relationships – with nature, with animals, with each other – whereas in Brahmanical myths, the world is often created for the sake of sacrifice. This difference runs deep. Tribal cosmogonies are fundamentally ecological: they encode the idea that humans are not the purpose of creation but participants within it, embedded in a web of mutual dependence with the natural world.

The earthworm is a particularly compelling symbol. In Gond cosmology, the earthworm is called the King of the Underworld – a burrowing figure who kneads and churns the clay, emerging with perfectly formed mud, like a potter shaping the material of life. This is not mere mythology; it reflects an intimate ecological knowledge of soil formation and the role of decomposers in sustaining the land these communities depended on for survival.

Destruction, renewal, and the cyclical universe 🔗

These creation myths do not imagine the world as a finished, static product. Central to the cosmogonic worldview of these tribes is the idea of a cyclical universe – one that undergoes repeated phases of creation, destruction, and renewal. Destruction is not treated as catastrophe or punishment in any final sense. It is a necessary reset, a return to the formless state from which new creation can emerge.

In Gond tradition, the world is periodically destroyed and recreated. When human behavior corrupts the moral order, natural forces – floods, storms, upheavals – restore the balance. Similarly, in the Santhal tradition, Singbonga’s interventions are understood not as divine wrath but as acts of cosmic maintenance. The floods and destructions that feature in these myths serve the same function as the earthworm’s burrowing: they break down what is old and exhausted so that something new can grow.

This cyclical view has an important moral dimension. The world is not morally neutral – it responds to human actions. Communities that abandon their obligations to each other and to nature bring imbalance upon themselves. Creation myths thus function as moral charters, encoding the ethics of the community within a cosmological framework. The story of how the world was made is inseparable from the story of how people ought to live.

Oral tradition as philosophical medium 🔗

It is worth pausing to note how these ideas have survived. The creation story most representative of Santal cosmogony was first recorded when a tribal elder named Hor Kolean narrated it to missionary Diku Skrefsrud in 1887, later translated by O.P. Bodding. This single act of transcription preserved a cosmological system of enormous depth and complexity. Yet for centuries before this, these ideas lived entirely in sung poetry, festival rituals, and communal storytelling – not in texts.

As recently as 2017, the Sahitya Akademi – India’s National Academy of Letters – had creation myths from six tribal groups, including Munda, Santali, and Kurukh (Oraon), narrated in their original languages at its Annual Festival of Letters. The fact that these narratives are still being actively performed and recognized underscores that they are not museum relics but living philosophical traditions.

What makes these cosmogonies philosophically distinctive 🔗

When placed alongside other Indian philosophical traditions, the tribal creation myths of Central and East India stand apart in several important ways. They do not posit a transcendent, all-powerful god who creates from nothing by sheer will alone. Instead, creation is collaborative, incremental, and material. It requires the participation of animals, the transformation of water into earth, and ultimately the performance of song and ritual to be complete.

There is no sharp division between the sacred and the natural. The earthworm is sacred. The tortoise is sacred. The cosmic bird is sacred. And because these creatures are sacred in the creation story, they remain worthy of reverence in daily life. The cosmogony thus directly underwrites an ecological ethics – a way of relating to the natural world as kin, not as resource.

Furthermore, the presence of failure in these myths – the tortoise that tries and cannot, the clay figures that are destroyed before they live – introduces a philosophy of resilience and learning. Creation does not happen in one perfect stroke. It is a process that involves setback, perseverance, and adaptation. In the Santhal tradition, this resilience is embodied by the birds and the worm; in the Gond tradition, by the earthworm and, ultimately, by the bard who must sing the world into full existence.

These are not primitive precursors to more sophisticated philosophies. They are independent philosophical traditions with their own internal logic, their own questions, and their own remarkably coherent answers about what the world is, how it came to be, and what it asks of us.

What do you think? If creation, in tribal philosophy, is understood as a collaborative act involving animals, earth, and song rather than a single divine command – how might this fundamentally change the way we think about humanity’s relationship with nature? And what does it tell us that these cosmological traditions survived for millennia not in texts but in music, dance, and ritual performance?

References

1. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/320/oa_edited_volume/chapter/2576255
2. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/oraons
3. https://www.etribaltribune.com/index.php/volume-7/mv7i1/cosmography-in-the-oral-tradition-of-the-santhals-an-anthropological-perspective
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singbonga
5. https://indroyc.com/2016/04/09/cosmogonic-myths-of-kolarians/
6. https://devdutt.com/creation-in-many-tongues/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondi_people
8. https://www.folklore.earth/culture/gond/
9. https://ignca.gov.in/divisionss/janapada-sampada/tribal-art-culture/adivasi-art-culture/the-gond-or-koiture-cultural-roots/
10. https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/15/creation-bhajju-shyam-gita-wolf-tara-books/
11. https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=21807