Lanjia Saora

Abstract

Countless gods and spirits hold sway over their mundane existence.They are worshipped with fear and anxiety. Their male and female Shamans get into trance to communicate with unseen and know what they want because it may be dangerous and even fatal to displease them. Their demands - be it flesh and blood of buffalo, goat or fowl and liquor or anything else - are to be met at any cost through appropriate rituals. To keep the supernatural in good humour, they make their famous and beautiful wall paintings or icons known as idital inside the house. Not only the art of icons but also the art of taming the mountains with trees and terraces for survival have made the tribesmen famous. They are the Lanjia Saora Highlanders, a fascinating primitive tribe of Odisha. They inhabit of a picturous mountainous territory stretched across Rayagada and Gajapati districts of southern Odisha. They are shifting cultivators and at the same time expert terrace cultivators. They exhibit a high degree of indigenous skill, ingenuity and technological outfit for preparing the terraces with inbuilt water management system. Their success comes from their hard work and team spirit.To help each other at the time of need they have ansir their traditional system of labour cooperative. SCSTRTI has endeavored a photographic documentation of this colourful tribe. This is the first booklet in a Series on 13Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs).This book as a glimpse of lifestyle of the Lanjia Saora tribe will not only will be useful to the academics, researchers, tourists, but will also be extremely helpful for the administrators, planners and development practitioners in effective planning for tribal development.