The Nomadic Birhors of Hazaribagh

The Birhors, a little-known Jungle tribe of Chota-nagpur have been the subject of interest of all who have taken an interest in the area now called Jharkhand. The deeper aspects of this little tribal group revealed themselves to me only after I got to know them well and to respect them not only as equals but masters in many fields. Apart from being experts in bush law and ethnobotany, their song and folklore was of very great interest to me. When I became interested in rockart and realized that it could be the work of their ancestors I was excited. Here was a stoneage people, still living solely by hunting and gathering in the Twentieth Century! They posed a challenge to the very nature of evolution in a region that has been facing continuous industrial development for over half a century in the valley and watershed of the Damodar river. I have been collecting information on the tribe and taking photographs of them for over the past four decades and now I have had an opportunity to bring these together in a book which shows challenges posed by the sedentarization of a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe.