Vol. 5 No. 8 (2008): Collective Memory and Reconstruction of Ho History - By Asoka Kumar Sen

Reconstruction of the history of the Ho, or of Adivasis in general, of erstwhile Singhbhum in Jharkhand has drawn heavily on colonial records and neglected oral sources, a neglect attributable to a ‘race-divisive historiography’ so far. The net result was the putative understanding that the Ho represented a pre-historic society. To situate the Ho in history, this essay invokes folklore and recorded collective memory, primarily to understand oral society’s strategy of codifying its past and to recapture the defining moment in indigenous collective life when they surrendered their itinerant life to found and people villages and socially formulate the norms of a collective life.