Most philosophical and religious traditions around the world grapple with a single central question about the human soul: what is it, and what happens to it after death? But for many tribal communities of India – particularly the Santals, Oraons, and Mundas of the Chota Nagpur Plateau – the question is more nuanced than that. Their answer is not one soul, but two. Each soul has a distinct identity, a distinct purpose, and a distinct destiny. This dual-soul belief, expressed through the concepts of the ‘ji’ and the ‘roa’, forms one of the most philosophically rich expressions of indigenous spiritual thought.
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The concept of two souls in tribal philosophy
The belief that a human being carries more than one soul is not unique to Indian tribal communities. Soul dualism – the idea that a person possesses both a “body soul” linked to physical life and a “free soul” capable of leaving the body – appears across a remarkably wide range of indigenous cultures. From the Chinese tradition of hun and po to the dual souls of ancient Egypt’s ka and ba, historians and anthropologists have long documented how ancient peoples independently arrived at similar dualistic understandings of the soul. In shamanistic traditions especially, this soul dualism is foundational – the free soul is what a shaman’s spirit journeys with, while the body soul keeps the living person anchored to the physical world.
Within this global context, the tribal philosophy of central and eastern India offers its own deeply considered version of this duality. According to these communities, every living being – humans, animals, and plants alike – carries within it two distinct spiritual principles: the ji and the roa. Together, they account for both the universal fact of life and the deeply individual experience of being a particular person with a particular fate.
The ‘ji’: the universal life principle
The ji – also rendered as jee or jiya in some dialects – is best understood as the vital force of existence itself. It is not a personal soul in the usual sense. Rather, it is the animating energy that makes something alive at all. This is why, in tribal understanding, the ji is present not only in humans but in animals, plants, and the broader natural world. It is a universal principle of life that transcends individual identity.
The ji is considered immortal. When the body dies, the ji does not disappear – it journeys onward to the afterlife. This belief connects directly to tribal eschatological views about what lies beyond death. For communities like the Santals, the Oraons, and the Mundas, the transition of the ji after death is not an ending but a continuation of existence in a different realm. The ji carries forward the thread of life itself, free from the constraints of the body it once inhabited.
This idea – that all living things share a common life principle – also underpins the deep tribal reverence for nature. If the ji flows through humans and through the forest equally, then cutting down a tree or killing an animal without purpose is not a neutral act. It is a disruption of a shared life force. This gives the tribal concept of the ji both a metaphysical and an ethical dimension, one that supports the broader tribal philosophy of living in harmony with the natural world.
The ‘roa’: the personal soul of identity and fate
Where the ji is universal, the roa is entirely personal. The roa embodies what makes each individual distinctly themselves – their temperament, their character, their emotional life, and crucially, their fate. It is the roa that accounts for why two people raised in the same village, under the same circumstances, can turn out so different from one another. One may be bold, another cautious; one may thrive, another struggle. Tribal philosophy locates this difference in the roa.
The roa’s relationship with fate is particularly significant. In tribal belief, the events and experiences that shape a person’s life are not entirely random. The roa is believed to govern much of this unfolding – carrying within it the seeds of what is to come. This gives tribal communities a framework for understanding suffering and fortune that is neither entirely fatalistic nor entirely under a person’s control. The roa is a given, but how one lives in relation to it matters deeply.
The roa and the world of dreams
One of the most fascinating aspects of the roa is its mobility. Unlike the ji, which is bound to life itself, the roa is capable of temporarily leaving the body – most notably during sleep. According to tribal belief, when a person dreams, it is their roa that is active, moving through experiences beyond the physical body. These journeys can take the roa to the spirit world, into contact with ancestor spirits, or even forward in time, offering a glimpse of what is yet to come.
This belief gives tribal dream interpretation a significance that goes well beyond psychology. Dreams are not just the mind processing the day’s events – they are reports from the roa about what it encountered during the night. A vivid dream of a deceased ancestor may mean that the roa made contact with that spirit. A dream that seems to echo something that later happens in waking life is understood as the roa having seen the near future during its nocturnal wandering.
This is consistent with a broader pattern found in indigenous spiritual traditions worldwide. Across Austronesian, Tibetan, African, and Native North American traditions, the “free soul” – the soul that can leave the body – is described as journeying during sleep, trance, or states of altered awareness. The tribal roa belongs to this same cross-cultural category. Shamanic traditions globally hold that entering these spiritual dimensions brings guidance and healing – and in tribal communities, the shaman’s role is intimately connected to navigating exactly these soul journeys on behalf of others.
How the ji and roa relate to each other
The ji and the roa are not simply two parallel souls that happen to coexist. They are understood as interdependent, and their relationship with each other has real consequences for a person’s health, fortune, and spiritual wellbeing. When the ji and the roa are in alignment – when the life force and the personal soul are in balance – a person experiences health, vitality, and a sense of moving with the grain of their fate. When they fall out of balance, illness, misfortune, or spiritual unrest can follow.
This is why tribal rituals, offerings, and ceremonies are not merely symbolic gestures. They serve a functional purpose: maintaining or restoring the harmony between the two souls. The tribal religious specialist – whether a village priest or a healer – intervenes precisely at moments when this balance is disrupted. Among the Santals, religious specialists serve crucial functions in placating spirits and managing the boundary between the living and the spirit world. Illness may be read as a sign that the roa has wandered and not returned properly, or that some external spiritual force has disturbed the ji. The remedy is spiritual as much as physical.
This holistic approach to health is one of the most distinctive features of tribal philosophy. It does not separate the physical from the spiritual. A person is not just a body that can fall sick or recover. A person is a complex spiritual entity whose wellbeing depends on the proper relationship between their universal life force and their individual soul.
The fate of the two souls after death
Death, in tribal philosophy, does not mark the extinction of either soul – but it marks a parting of the ways. The ji, as an immortal life principle, journeys to the afterlife. Different tribal communities have different names and visions for this realm. For the Oraons, it is merxa – often described as a fertile, abundant continuation of earthly life. For the Mundas, the afterlife is understood as a state of spiritual consciousness and communion with ancestors. In all cases, how the individual lived – whether they honored their community, their elders, and the natural world – shapes what kind of afterlife the soul enters.
The roa, by contrast, continues to move between realms after death. It is not simply deposited in an afterlife and left there. It wanders, interacting with other spirits, including the spirits of ancestors, nature, and the divine. This is why the dead remain a living presence in tribal spiritual life. When a family member performs rituals for a deceased ancestor, they are not performing empty ceremony – they are maintaining a relationship with a roa that is still active in the spirit world and still capable of influencing the lives of those it left behind.
This belief places ancestor veneration at the heart of tribal religious practice. The roa of a well-honored ancestor becomes a protective, guiding presence. The roa of someone whose death was marked by conflict or neglect may become unsettled and disruptive. The community’s relationship with its dead is therefore a living, ongoing negotiation – not a one-time farewell.
The broader philosophical significance of the ji-roa duality
What makes the ji-roa concept philosophically compelling is what it says about human nature and identity. In Western philosophy, the dominant tradition of soul-body dualism treats the soul as a single entity – the part of a person that is not the body. The soul either survives death or it doesn’t; it is either immortal or it isn’t. Tribal philosophy, by contrast, sees the spiritual dimension of a person as inherently plural. There is the part of you that connects you to all living things, and there is the part that makes you irreducibly you. Both matter. Neither is reducible to the other.
This also means that tribal philosophy resists any simple hierarchy between the universal and the particular. The ji – the universal life force – is not more real or more valuable than the roa, the individual soul. They are different in nature and function, but both are necessary. Anthropological scholarship on animism has increasingly recognized that indigenous beliefs about souls are not naive or pre-philosophical – they are sophisticated ontological positions that reflect careful observation of life, death, dreams, and the behavior of consciousness at the edges of ordinary experience.
The ji-roa framework, in particular, achieves something that many philosophical traditions struggle to articulate: it honors both what human beings share with the rest of the living world and what makes each person singular. It is at once a philosophy of interconnection and a philosophy of individuality – and it holds both without contradiction.
What do you think? If the self is made of two distinct souls – one universal and one personal – does that change how we think about what survives death, or what part of us is truly “ours”? And in a world where dreams are treated as messages from a wandering soul, what does tribal philosophy suggest about the limits of waking consciousness?
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_dualism
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/soul-religion-and-philosophy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santal_people
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism
- https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/santals
- https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/SoulBodyDualismandScience
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
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