The Santals are one of the largest homogenous indigenous peoples group in India, numbering more than six million scattered over in the states of Assam, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and outside India in Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.
The Santals have no primordial books on their religion written by themselves. Their religion is based on oral traditions, which of course, has now been documented by sociologists and anthropologists. The Santals are non-idol worshipping theist people. They have no temples, nor images to worship and no fixed place to worship in; no holy mountains and no sacred drivers for pilgrimages and yet they hold an unassailable religious faith which can be traced through the tradition of the creation narrative, through their festivals, their cleansing ceremonies performed during their birth, wedding, and death, and through their belief in the continuation of life after death.
This work may not have widespread universal appeal, but it will certainly help a group of people, whose faith declaration of creator-creation relationship, as expressed through their ancestral creation narrative, is compared and discussed with that of the Biblical one. It will be a move towards ‘localization’, and ‘contextualization’ of theology.
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