Bhima Buddha (an old man named Bhima), revered as a folk deity among the Ganda (Scheduled Caste) community in Kurul village, Balangir, Odisha, occupies a unique place in both oral traditions and social memory. While the Ganda community sees him as a historical hero rooted in Tantric Buddhist traditions and the pioneer of the domestication of rice cultivation, tribal Kondh worshippers in Bhim Dunguri—a hill named after Bhima (fifteen kilometres away from Kurul)—recognize him as a devotee of the Shakti tradition. Interestingly, Shakti in this context refers to women ascetics from Odisha’s Tantric traditions. The legend of Bhima Buddha corresponds to scientific research around the domestication of the aus ecotype of rice in the Jeypore tract and the references to Bhima’s possible relationship with Ganda and allied communities in Jataka tales.
However, when a former MP, Narasingha Mishra, inaugurated a tourism project on the hill, he projected Bhima as the epic figure from the Mahabharata, reinforcing the dominant Hindu narrative. This contestation of meanings surrounding Bhima Buddha reflects a broader question: how do folk myths, legends, and tales evolve in the public sphere, and how are they subjected to the test of logic and historical scrutiny to be understood as true speech or history in an anti-caste community?
Since the time of the Sophists, myth and history have been seen as separate—truth being associated with the latter, both discursively and academically. Yet, for communities historically denied access to textual historiography, oral traditions of myths, legends and folktales have served as vital mediums for passing down historical memory (a past of essence).
The history of ex-untouchable communities is often narrated through the lens of loss— a) the upper-caste dominance in historiography has largely left out the history of the caste-oppressed communities, and b) the dominant historiography has not produced methods to reconstruct history out of myths, legends and folks that communities carry past through. Loss has also become a definition of certain communities. However, communities do not survive solely through loss; their continued existence is marked by victories, joys, and cultural expressions preserved through myths, legends, and folktales. The challenge is not to replace myth with history but to critically examine a) the discursive history of myths, b) how communities apply logic to reconstruct myths as ‘probable pasts’, and c) the historical references that emerge from such reconstructions.
This paper outlines the rationale for the necessity of historicizing such narratives and proposes a methodological framework for doing so.
Dr. Ambedkar (1948) attempted to construct a macro-history of India’s ex-untouchable communities, linking their Buddhist past to their rejection of Brahminical practices, which led to their social marginalization. While some historians have sought to uncover micro-histories of specific ex-untouchable castes through archival research, these efforts are often constrained by temporal and spatial limitations of the data. Ambedkar’s advice to to exhume the history of ancient India by using “imagination and intuition to bridge the gaps left in the chain of facts” inspires my approach. Additionally, critiques of dominant historiography by Carr (1961) and White (1985) inform my conceptualization of history as ideological, literary, thetarical and discursive rather than a mere collection of objective facts. Further, I draw upon the Italian thinker Vico (1961), who saw myth as the object of studying the history of the social world for its reflection of social realities and human conditions across different historical contexts.
By tracing how myths and legends discursively evolve, adapt, and are reclaimed over time, I examine the shifting meanings and processes of Bhima Buddha—from an agrarian hero in Buddhist traditions to an ascetic linked with Tantric practices and, eventually, a figure assimilated into the Mahabharata by Hindu upper-caste narratives.
A similar transformation is evident in the legend of Saat Bahin (Seven Sisters), ascetic women saints in western Odisha. While sometimes associated with Durga, they are also linked to the Bhai Jiuntia festival (where sisters pray for the life of their brothers). Buddhist folk traditions reclaim these women as Tantric saints who resisted the murder of their brothers, much like Mahisasura’s murder. This reinterpretation aligns with Jotirao Phule’s (1873) theatrical reimagination of India’s Buddhist past associating it with anti-Aryan myths.
This paper builds upon Russell’s (1910) synthesis of logic and mysticism for mysticism’s capability to understand the unity and interconnectedness of things, commitment to universal ideas, expression of lived experience, and inspire with logic’s capability of scepticism, analysis, the art of thinking clearly, avoidance of fallacy and empirical verification. But in this work, I also criticise the relegation of myth to intuition and emotion, devoid of logic, as my fieldwork also informs that even the sacredness of myth goes through the test of logic.
My ethnographic research among the Ganda/Gana community in Kurul and Malgodampada, Balangir, Odisha, explores the semiotic structures embedded in cultural symbols such as rituals, languages, and social practices. However, I also engage with Talal Asad’s (1993) critique of Clifford Geertz’s symbolic anthropology, highlighting the need to contextualize culture within historical, material, and political frameworks. Understanding how myths become true statement within communities requires examining the power structures that shape their articulation. This would lead me to situate the myths in the history of the community, what begot different associations with different cultural references, also also how it was articulated as ‘probable past’.
Drawing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1955) application of Saussure’s langue and parole to myths, I analyze their dual nature: myths function both as ahistorical (reversible time) and time-specific narratives. This reversibility allows myths to be reclaimed for an anti-caste cultural praxis, offering an alternative historiography to dominant narratives.
By situating Bhima Buddha, Saat Bahin, and Bastarain Mata (and her possession), among others, within a broader discourse on myth, history, and anti-caste epistemology, this paper engages in the reconstruction of a Buddhist past, argues for a methodological approach that acknowledges the logic within myths while recognizing their role in shaping historical consciousness among marginalized communities.
This paper explores the historicization of myths, legends, and folktales within the Ganda community of Kurul and Malgodampada, Balangir, Odisha. Challenging the dominant historiographical exclusion of caste-oppressed communities, it examines how myths are not merely remnants of the past but serve as mediums for reconstructing history. Drawing from Ambedkar’s call for imagination in exhuming history, Vico’s insights on myth as social history, Russell’s synthesis of logic and mysticism, Carr and White’s criticism of dominant forms of historiography, this study interrogates how myths undergo logical scrutiny within communities to be articulated as ‘probable pasts.’ Through ethnographic data and semiotic analysis, it engages in Asad’s view on power’s role in defining ‘true speech.’ By tracing the discourses and practices around Bhima Buddha, Saat Bahin, and Bastarain Mata, among others, across Buddhist Tantric and Hindu narratives, the paper highlights myth’s role in anti-caste cultural praxis, reclaiming lost histories beyond narratives of mere ‘loss.’