JUANGS (Patuas, literally "leaf-wearers"), a jungle tribe of Orissa,
India. They are found in only two of the tributary states, Dhenkanal and
Keonjhar, most of them in the latter. They are estimated to amount in
all to about 10,000. Their language belongs to the Munda family. They
have no traditions which connect them with any other race, and they
repudiate all connexion with the Hos or the Santals, declaring
themselves the aborigines. They say the headquarters of the tribe is the
Gonasika. In manners they are among the most primitive people of the
world, representing the Stone age in our own day. They do not till the
land, but live on the game they kill or on snakes and vermin. Their huts
measure about 6 ft. by 8 ft., with very low doorways. The interior is
divided into two compartments. In the first of these the father and all
the females of a family huddle together; the second is used as a
store-room. The boys have a separate hut at the entrance to the village,
which serves as a guest-house and general assembly place where the
musical instruments of the village are kept. Physically they are small
and weak-looking, of a reddish-brown colour, with flat faces, broad
noses with wide nostrils, large mouths and thick lips, the hair coarse
and frizzly. The women until recently wore nothing but girdles of
leaves, the men, a diminutive bandage of cloth. The Juangs declare that
the river goddess, emerging for the first time from the Gonasika rock,
surprised a party of naked Juangs dancing, and ordered them to wear
leaves, with the threat that they should die if they ever gave up the
custom. The Juangs' weapons are the bow and arrow and a primitive sling
made entirely of cord. Their religion is a vague belief in forest
spirits. They offer fowls to the sun when in trouble and to the earth
for a bountiful harvest. Polygamy is rare. They burn their dead and
throw the ashes into any running stream. The most sacred oaths a Juang
can take are those on an ant-hill or a tiger-skin.
See E. W. Dalton, _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_ (1872).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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