Concepts of "Society”
The Twelve Brothers (baro bai)
The commensal community of the Twelve Brothers (baro bai) was formed in the legendary past, when the Gadaba came from the Godavari, as the following Gan- gre myth (katani) recounts.
When the Gadaba came from the Godabir [Godavari], they assembled and cooked tsoru [after a sacrifice]. When it was ready, it was distributed, but there wasn’t enough, and only twelve brothers ate it.[1] [2] [3] So they became the Twelve Brothers, and these twelve still share tsoru even today. They include Alangpada, Totapada, Guneipada, Deulpada, Gudapa- da, Soilpada, Poibada, Auripada, Bondpada, and Potenda [only ten are named]. There wasn’t enough tsoru for the Oleibir [in Oleibir], Osol [in Orna and Ponosguda], Guga [in Ka- lapada], Kupa [in Ponjol]. They mingled with one another. Among the killo (Tigers) as well, there was only enough tsoru for twelve; among the golori (Monkeys) and kora (Suns) there was enough, because there are so few of them.
When the Gadaba speak of the Twelve Brothers, they are referring to a community of villages defined by tsoru commensality, as the myth suggests. Beyond this level of the Twelve Brothers, no tsoru commensality takes place, and the Twelve Brothers compose the maximal ritual community within the broader social configuration of Desia society.222 The Guga and Oleibir mentioned also belong to the Cobra descent category and are agnates (bai) of the Gangre, but they do not share tsoru.223 Likewise, the Pambia are the panjabai of the Sisa in Gudapada, but they are not part of the Twelve Brothers.
The Twelve Brothers are an omnipresent category of reference, especially in invocations to the gods, but they only rarely take concrete form as an empirical group, and Gadaba usually have difficulty naming all twelve villages spontaneously. During my research stay, there was only one occasion on which the Twelve Brothers became empirically relevant and were sent raw portions of meat in their villages. To do this, it had to be agreed who belonged on the list; the villages were counted out by common effort and the meat portions prepared. The reason was a violent death, combined with a ritual error - that is, a transgression of the proper order (mam) - that had enraged the spirit of the deceased (duma), resulting in his brother’s death. The situation appeared so serious that the Sisa’s senior tsorubai were called on to feed tsoru to the spirit in the name of the Twelve Brothers and to include all the Brothers by sending the meat. The restoration of order - in less serious cases, the junior tsorubai are sufficient - was thus an effort of the totality of the tsoru commensals. Death and marriage are the two major events at which the Twelve Brothers are supposed to appear to eat tsoru, demonstrating the significance of these rituals for the society as a whole. This ideal is generally not put into practice at the mortuary rituals (bur), but representatives of the Twelve Brothers are supposed to be present at the wedding rituals. The Twelve Brothers - or at least some of their representatives - should also be called for the reintegration of individuals excluded from the community due to transgressions (such as the marriage of a member of the house to a spouse from a lower-status group).
The Twelve Brothers are an exclusive community, and only someone who is ritually married - that is, has been fed tsoru by them - is permitted to share tsoru in their circle. Someone who participates in this tsoru illegitimately commits a serious offense, one that is also associated with jati (exclusion from the community) and requires a compensation payment (the gift of a head of cattle). Tsoru commensality is closely associated with a group’s status or identity, and it is said that the group of the Murjia (from Murja, an Ollar village) changed their bonso by inadvertently eating their affines’ tsoru.221'
Parkin (1992, 74f, 90ff) discusses similar “village federations” among various “Munda” tribes. He describes them as “clan councils,” the members of which come from villages dominated by the same descent category; like the village themselves, these “federations” thus have “an agnatically conceived focus” [4]
(95). At various times, in his account, regional rulers appropriated these institutions for administrative and fiscal purposes and modified them in the process, to differing degrees depending on the specific historical situation. Nevertheless, Parkin argues, they are indigenous tribal institutions that were already in existence before any external intervention. In his view, this is demonstrated by the chief function of these federations, the regulation of marriage alliances, an area presumably of little interest to local rulers like petty kings or national governments.
Perhaps the main preoccupation of tribal justice is to ensure that a properly constituted kinship universe is maintained through correct marriages, and this is ultimately of more importance than even inheritance disputes or public-order offences. This is especially so as regards marriage outside the tribe and breaches of exogamous rules, the most serious of all offences to most tribals, and where they exist it is the village federations that are ultimately concerned with them. (95)
What has been said so far about the Gadaba’s concept of the Twelve Brothers supports this view of these “federations” as “final regulators of tribal custom” (95). The Twelve Brothers are fundamentally seen in relation to the social order (niam), which they represent and protect, with regard to marriage alliances but also, as already noted, in the event of other serious ritual lapses, as in the mentioned example involving mortuary rituals. At least today, the villages included among the Gadaba’s Twelve Brothers do not form an economic or political unit, and they perhaps have never done so. Nothing is known about their relationship to the kings in Nandapur and Jeypore. The Twelve Brothers today are an ideal ritual and commensal unit; however, this last aspect - the most significant for the Gadaba - goes unmentioned by Parkin.
The bara-jangar group among the Bondo, described by Elwin (1950, 6 f), has some similarities to the Gadaba’s Twelve Brothers. It consists of twelve villages that understand themselves as the Bondo’s original settlements and are each supposed to go back to one of “twelve” (baro) brothers. This group forms a ritual unit and is represented by twelve naik, who practice tsoru commensality as part of the veneration of pat kanda (Elwin 1950, 24n1). The chief village of this group - and the Bondo’s mythical place of origin - is Mundlipada, and its naik is the chief of the twelve villages.[5] According to Elwin, Mundlipada and its naik maintain a special relationship to the king of Jeypore, and the other eleven villages pay tribute to the head village. Other Bondo villages (the “Gadaba Bondo”) do not belong to this group, are not subordinate to the naik of Mundlipada, and do not participate in the pat kanda cult. Elwin’s description does not make explicit whether the twelve villages belong to the same or different bonso, but it is unlikely that affinally-linked villages are included, especially in view of the material collected by Parkin.
- [1] In another version, some of the brothers were absent and received nothing for that reason.
- [2] The “tribe” of the Gutob Gadaba is from this perspective a comparatively irrelevant unit. AllGutob Gadaba do share a language, but this is not a major source of identity, since Gutob andRemo are very closely related. Although the tribe can in principle be regarded as an endogamousunit, marriage alliances regularly take place at least with the Ollar Gadaba, and the GutobGadaba also cannot claim any exclusive rights to their gotr, since the Ollar and Parenga (andsome Dombo) likewise perform this ritual. Conversely, not all Gutob Gadaba perform it. HencePfeffer (2002a, 214) is correct when he writes, “the talk of [tribe as] a religious or an endogamousentity must be seen as meaningless formalism.”
- [3] They are sometimes referred to as “crooked” (arki) brothers, in contrast to the “straight”(tia) brothers who received tsoru.
- [4] The Murjia are supposed to have been Cobras “in the past,” but a drunken member of thegroup ate the tsoru of the Tigers at a wedding, causing the entire group to take on this bonso.They are still considered Tigers today, but they and the Cobras do not marry one another, sincethey were once brothers. The randan of Gudapada married a Murjia woman, and my informantsviewed his loss of sight in one eye as a consequence of this incest.
- [5] Unlike in the Bondo case, there is no head village among the Gadaba Twelve Brothers.
