Of ornaments and tribal life

Ch. Santakar
KORAPUT: Since time immemorial, making of ornaments and adornment constitute an integral part of art and aesthetics of tribal life. The treasure of styles, designs, material and techniques that tribal traditional craft of jewellery and ornaments bear, has been inherited through ages. Even the Bonda women who are portrayed and believed to be naked by many outsiders cover their body with their traditional ornaments and costumes, Damabarudhar Sisa, a Bonda youth from Malkangiri district says. While the women collected different beads and strings from the forest for generations they got dressed up according to their capacity to cover their body to the maximum.

Collective work
Bonda women wear ‘Renga’, a small piece of cloth prepared from the wild strings being collected from the forests. While this protects the portions of the body below the waist, the finely knit necklaces of coloured beads by the Bonda women are regarded as expressions of their artistic and aesthetic quality by their society. The process of making the necklaces with the beads also needs a collective work and this in turn promotes cooperation among the tribal women to support each other in other fields of their life, Paresh Rath, a tribal researcher from Jeypore says.
Further, while the Durua male have wavy hair with a ponytail get dressed with a turban on their head, bow on their shoulder, a knife and a set of arrows in hand during the special occasions, women too love to be dressed with a number of ornaments. They wear saree covering the knee with a styled knot on the left shoulder. They dress their hair with castor oil, make a clear partition of the hair on the scalp and put a number of hair clips, hand-made wooden comb and forest flowers.
Beauty conscious Dongria Kondhs have their distinctive hairstyle. Dongria Kondh women and men make their hairstyle more beautiful by using different hair clips and silver pins. Girls decorate their heads with as many as fifty types of hair clips and their buns are set with more than ten types of hairpins. The tradition of a boy making scarf for his beloved girl and the girls making special wooden combs for their loving boys establish their immediate relationship, Mr. Rath adds. Material and natural objects derived from the forests and metals available in the markets are also used by the tribals for making their ornaments. Fruits, roots, leaves, seeds, stones of different colour, teeth, bones and nails of different animals are also used in the making of ornaments. The sophistication of ornaments and jewelleries is seen with the tribals when they use different metals like iron, copper, aluminum, silver, brass, gold in their making. Moreover, getting decorated with jewelleries !
is also a societal necessity in which the tribal youth’s fancy, fashion and imagination are felt.


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