The Kudumi (Kudmi, Kurmi Mahato) are a large agrarian community of the Chotanagpur plateau, spread over present-day Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and parts of Assam and Bihar. Who they are and where they come from has been argued for more than a century. Colonial ethnographers called them a “tribal peasantry”, the 1913 gazette listed them among tribes, the 1931 census dropped them, and the 1950 Scheduled Tribe list left them out. Since then they have been counted as Other Backward Classes, while many of their organisations ask for Scheduled Tribe status. This article reads the available scholarship on four questions: what the name means, what theories explain their origin, how their social life is organised, and how their identity moved between “tribe” and “caste”. It finds that no single theory is proved. Totemic clans, Kurmali language, nature worship and shared festivals point towards a Chotanagpur-rooted community, while Hindu practices, landholding and Kshatriya claims point the other way. Both pictures can be true together.
Keywords: Kudumi, Kudmi Mahato, Kurmi, Chotanagpur, Kurmali, tribe and caste, Scheduled Tribe status, identity.
1. Introduction
Ask a Kudumi elder where his people come from and you will often hear a story of forests, rivers and old villages founded by their forefathers. Ask a historian, and you will hear about colonial census books, gazette notifications and court cases. Both answers are part of the same story. The Kudumi are among the biggest communities of the Chotanagpur plateau, and in many districts of Purulia, Bankura, West Midnapore, Singhbhum, Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar they are the main cultivating people. Even so, their place in the Indian social order is still undecided. Are they a tribe, a caste, or something that does not fit neatly in either box? This question has direct effect on their daily life, because reservation, land protection and political representation depend on the answer [1][2].
This article tries to look at the question calmly. It does not claim that the Kudumi must be called a tribe, nor that they must be called a caste. It tries to show what the evidence says, who says it, and how strong each claim is. Many of the sources are written by community members or by activists, and some are written by outsiders who were not friendly to the community. A careful reader should keep both in mind. The word “Kudumi” is used here for the community of Chotanagpur, as on this website, and the spellings Kudmi, Kudmi Mahato and Kurmi Mahto are used when a source uses them.
2. Sources and Method
This is a desk review. It uses four kinds of material: colonial ethnography (mainly Risley’s 1891 Tribes and Castes of Bengal and Grierson’s linguistic survey), a recent peer-reviewed paper on identity and Scheduled Tribe status [2], a community-authored study [4], and reference and news sources for the dates of notifications and recent agitations [1][7][11]. Language evidence is taken from Paudyal and Peterson’s linguistic study of Kurmali as summarised in reference works [8]. A genetic claim from a government research institute is mentioned only as reported, since the original report was not seen.
The request for this article also asked for Shodhganga, the national repository of Indian doctoral theses. A search of the repository was made with the terms Kudmi, Kurmi, Kurmali, Mahato, Chotanagpur, Manbhum and Jharkhand. Honest reporting needs one clear statement here: the catalogue records that could be opened did not yield a thesis devoted to the Kudumi. The records that came up were on other subjects, such as the Rajbanshi [6], the origins of the Bengali people [5], aboriginality in English literature [3], the hunter-gatherers of the Chotanagpur plateau [9], and the society and culture of Purulia as seen in periodicals [10]. Most of these records carry no abstract, so nothing in them can be quoted about the Kudumi. Two further records, on the history of the Jharkhand movement and on a Jharkhand village, could not be opened because the repository blocked automated access. The full texts of the Calcutta and Burdwan theses may well discuss the Kudumi, and a reader with access should check them. Until then, Shodhganga is used here only as a pointer to where primary reading should continue, not as evidence for any claim.
The method has limits that the reader should know. Many sources repeat each other, so the same claim may look better supported than it is. Several are written by advocates on one side of the Scheduled Tribe debate. Where the claim comes from only one such source, the text says so.
3. Names and Homeland
The name of the community itself is a first puzzle. In the Gangetic plain, “Kurmi” is the name of a large farming caste, and the word is often linked with krishi, meaning cultivation [4]. Some writers go further and trace it to kurma, the tortoise incarnation of Vishnu, and to the solar line of Rama; the same paper that reports this presents it as a claim by some authors and not as established fact [4]. In Chotanagpur, the people use the names Kudmi, Kudumi, Kurmi and Mahato, and the title Mahato is also a village-headman title. One community writer suggests that Kudmi comes from the Kudum river and hill [4], but this is a local explanation and has not been tested by language scholars. The honest position is that the origin of the name is unknown.
The homeland is clearer than the name. For many centuries the Kudumi have lived on the Chotanagpur plateau and its edges, in the old districts of Manbhum, Singhbhum, Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Midnapore, Bankura and Mayurbhanj. Their traditions speak of founding villages by clearing forest, and the Mahato title is often tied to being among the first settlers of a village [4][11]. Risley, writing in 1891, noted that the Chotanagpur Kurmis looked like the neighbouring Dravidian tribes [11]. Modern writers separate them from the Kurmis of Bihar. Prasad and Mitra stress that the Kurmi Mahto of Chotanagpur are different from the Kurmis of Bihar and the plains, because of their totemic clans, animistic practice and marriage rituals, which they compare with those of the Munda and Mahli [2]. This is why this website keeps a separate identity for the Kudumi of Chotanagpur and does not merge them with the Kurmi caste of the Gangetic plain.
The view from Odisha adds one more detail about names. This website is produced from Odisha, where the Kudumi are a settled farming community of the northern districts, and the family title differs by region. In Kendujhar (Keonjhar) and Sundargarh the community uses the title Mahanta, while in Mayurbhanj the same community uses Mohanta. The two forms are the Odia-area counterparts of the Mahato title used in Jharkhand and West Bengal, and the sources reviewed here, which mostly speak of Mahato or Mahto, do not discuss them. This gap matters for research. A reader who searches records, census tables or theses only under “Mahato” may miss the Odisha Kudumi completely, and an Odisha reader may not see himself in a literature written around Ranchi, Purulia and Midnapore. The article therefore does not claim that Mahanta and Mohanta have the same origin as Mahato, or that they were once one word; that is a plausible reading but it is not shown in any source seen here, and it needs local records and oral history to check. What can be said is that the Odisha Kudumi sit at the southern edge of the same plateau region, share the Kurmali-speaking belt of Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar [8], and are counted among the Kurmi groups whose status is debated in Odisha as well [1][11].
4. Theories of Origin
Four main explanations are found in the literature. The first is the Dravidian or indigenous-peasant theory. It rests on Risley’s observation of totemism and physical resemblance to nearby Dravidian-speaking and Munda-speaking tribes, and community writers such as P. P. Mahato repeat it, calling the Kudumi people of Dravidian racial stock [4][11]. Its weakness is that the old racial vocabulary is no longer accepted in science, and “looks like” is not proof of descent. Totemic clans are better evidence, because they are a social fact and not a guess about bodies. Reports speak of about eighty-one clan groups, with names like Keshariya, Hindowar, Bagh Banwar, Nagwar and Katiar, many of them taken from animals or plants [11].
The second is the migration theory. It says the Chotanagpur Kurmis came from central India, where their relatives would be the Kunbi of Maharashtra, and that the Tribal Research Institute once called them a sub-caste of the Kunbi [11]. This idea fits the shared word-root with Kurmi and Kunbi cultivator groups across India, but it does not explain the totemic clans, and its date and route are not documented. The third is the Kshatriya or Aryan theory, which connects the community with the solar dynasty and the tortoise myth. It is mostly found in caste-association writing from the early twentieth century, and it grew out of the wish to rise in the Hindu order, not out of archival evidence [12]. It is better understood as part of the story of identity than as a history of origin.
The fourth is a linguistic theory, and it is the most interesting new one. Paudyal and Peterson found that Kurmali has some words and grammatical features that are present neither in Indo-Aryan, nor in Dravidian, nor in Munda languages. They suggest that the ancestors of the Kudumi once spoke a separate language of their own, and later moved to an Indo-Aryan speech while keeping a substrate of the older one [8]. A government genomics report is also quoted, which places the Kudmi genetically with Indo-European-speaking populations of Bengal and Odisha but with some closeness to Austroasiatic groups [11]. Both findings suggest a mixed and old population. They are early results, however, and the genetic claim should be checked against the original report before it is relied upon. Taken together, the evidence favours a long-settled Chotanagpur community with several layers of contact, and not a single clean line of descent from one ancestor.
5. Social Structure, Religion and Language
The daily social order of the Kudumi is where the tribe-or-caste question becomes concrete. Marriage is within the community but outside the clan, which is the pattern of totemic exogamy. Mahato society has been described as having two layers: the buniadi families who founded the village and held larger land and ritual rights, and the ordinary Mahatos [4]. Disputes were settled by village councils and customary law, and this customary character is exactly what the British noted when they listed the community in 1913, as the next section shows [7]. Some writers mention eleven major endogamous divisions, though caste genealogists count many more, and the number differs from source to source [4]. The Kudumi also have regional names and separate Kurmi groups in other states, such as the Manwa Kurmi of Madhya Pradesh, and these should not be mixed up with the Chotanagpur people.
In religion the picture is mixed. Most Kudumi follow Hindu festivals and worship Hindu gods, but they also keep older practices: worship of trees, hills and water, and nature-linked festivals such as Tusu. Some reports name Budha Baba and Garam as deities, and a part of the community today asks to be recognised as followers of the Sarna dharam [11]. The harvest festival of Tusu, which is treated separately on this website, is a good example, since it combines a farming goddess, women’s songs and a month-long ritual without a priest or an idol. Prasad and Mitra argue that such practices continue even after Sanskritisation [2]. A fair reading is that the Kudumi religion has two layers, and that each side of the debate stresses the layer that supports its case.
Language is a third marker, though it is the one most under pressure. Kurmali (also called Kudmali) is classed as an Indo-Aryan language. Grierson placed it as an eastern form of Magahi, while many later linguists see it as a Bengali-influenced dialect of the Manbhum region, and it has no standard form [8]. The 2011 census recorded about 556,000 speakers, but the figure is unreliable, because many Kudumi answered with Bengali, Odia, Hindi or Nagpuri, and census returns were grouped under those larger languages [8]. Roughly forty per cent of speakers live in West Bengal and about forty-four per cent in Jharkhand, and language shift towards the regional language is fast in West Bengal and Odisha [8]. Kurmali is also spoken by other communities, and tribal groups like the Santal and Oraon use it as a second language [8]. So language marks the Kudumi region and history strongly, but it cannot by itself fix who counts as Kudumi.
6. Identity: From Tribe to Caste and the Demand to Return
The colonial record shows how unstable the label was. The 1872 census recorded the community as “Jari Kurmi” and not as a tribe, and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 lists Kurmi (Mahto) among backward classes, which opponents of the Scheduled Tribe demand quote today [7]. Yet on 3 May 1913 a Government of India notification listed the Kurmi with the Munda, Oraon and Santal as tribes whose customary succession did not fit the Indian Succession Act, and a similar notification came in December 1931 [7]. Other accounts say the 1931 census then dropped them from the tribe list [7][11]. After independence the community was not included in the first Scheduled Tribe list of 1950, and by about 1951 it was counted among Other Backward Classes in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha [2][11]. Supporters of the demand argue that Chotanagpur Kurmis were confused with the Kurmis of Bihar and the plains, and so were left out by mistake. Opponents answer that the community is better off in land, education and public life than the listed tribes [2][7].
The community’s own response has moved in two directions at once. In the early twentieth century, some Chotanagpur Kudumi took part in the same Kshatriya-claiming movements as the Kurmis of north India, which had produced the Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha by 1910 [12]. This is called Sanskritisation. In the later twentieth century, a counter-current began, and P. P. Mahato named it “Nirbakisation”, the argument that the community was pushed into the Hindu fold although it had its own religion [7]. The Jharkhand movement gave this a political home. Damodaran shows how an image of an older, forest landscape and sacred-grove festivals became a shared language of Chotanagpur identity for protest movements from the nineteenth century to the Jharkhand parties of the twentieth [13]. Prasad and Mitra note that the Kurmi Mahto joined the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha during the statehood struggle, while the established tribes feared losing their share of political power if Kurmis were added [2].
The official answer so far has been to wait. Jharkhand sent a recommendation to the Centre in 2004 or 2005 and West Bengal in 2007, and reports say the Tribal Research Institute of Jharkhand did not support it [1][11]. A 2020 report by the Institute found the community ineligible, citing better social and educational standing and fewer “primitive” traits [2]. Jharkhand also moved to raise total reservation, with a proposed Extremely Backward Class slot for the community, which Prasad and Mitra say does not solve the question of political representation [2]. Rail and road blockades in 2022 and 2023 showed how strongly the community feels about the matter [1][11]. The sources differ on small points, such as the year of the first state recommendation, and the reader should treat these dates as reported and not as settled.
7. Discussion and Conclusion
The evidence reviewed here does not support a one-line answer. The strongest findings are those that stand on observed facts: the community has lived on the Chotanagpur plateau for a very long time, it keeps totemic clans and nature-linked rituals, it speaks or recently spoke a language with an unexplained substrate, and it shares festivals such as Tusu with its tribal neighbours [2][8][11]. The weakest are those that stand on racial vocabulary, on caste-association myth, or on advocacy writing from either side. The identity of the Kudumi is therefore best described as a layered one. An older Chotanagpur base, a long history of contact with Austroasiatic and Dravidian-speaking neighbours, a later settled peasant and landholding life, and a century of Hindu status claims all sit together. The words “tribe” and “caste” were colonial boxes, and the Kudumi never fitted either one cleanly.
This also explains why the legal question stays hard. A community can be historically rooted in the plateau and also relatively well placed today, and the Scheduled Tribe criteria of the 1950s were not built to weigh both. Prasad and Mitra make a similar point when they say a single uniform policy cannot suit tribal communities with very different histories [2]. For this website, the useful lesson is that culture should be recorded in the community’s own voice, with clear sourcing, and without taking sides in the political dispute.
This study has clear limits. It could not read any Shodhganga thesis on the Kudumi, because none was found among the records that could be opened, and two records were blocked. It relies on summaries of Risley, Grierson and Paudyal and Peterson, and not on the originals. Several sources are advocacy pieces or brief papers with internal errors. Future work should read the full Shodhganga theses on Chotanagpur and Manbhum, the original 1913 and 1931 gazettes, the Tribal Research Institute reports, and the genomics report, and should add oral histories from the community.
A special limit concerns Odisha. None of the sources found treats the Mahanta of Kendujhar and Sundargarh or the Mohanta of Mayurbhanj on their own terms. Future work should collect family histories, village records, temple and festival customs, and the census and settlement records of these districts, so that the Odisha Kudumi are described from their own evidence and not only through the Mahato-centred literature of Jharkhand and West Bengal.
References
Web sources were opened on 22 October 2026. Items marked (summary) were read through a summary and not in the original.
- Vishad Kumar. Kurmis of Jharkhand, Bengal and Odisha demand ST status. Forward Press, October 2022. (news; both sides reported)
- Sachchidanand Prasad and Abhijit Mitra. Intersection of claim for Scheduled Tribe status and identity politics among the Kurmi Mahto of Chotanagpur region in India. Contemporary Voice of Dalit, SAGE, December 2023. (abstract page)
- Ashish Gangopadhyay. Resituating aboriginality. PhD thesis, University of Burdwan. Shodhganga record; no abstract; not about the Kudumi.
- Nagendra Nath Mahto. Social, cultural and historical status of the Kurmi/Kudmi community in the state of Jharkhand. JETIR 12(5), 2025. (brief paper; has internal inconsistencies)
- Annapurna Chattopadhyay. Bengali people and culture: a study in origins. PhD thesis, University of Calcutta, 1991. Shodhganga record; no abstract; Kudumi coverage unverified.
- Madhab Chandra Adhikary. Ethno cultural identity crisis of the Rajbanshis of North Eastern part of India and Nepal and Bangladesh during the period of 1891 to 1979. PhD thesis, University of North Bengal. Shodhganga record; no abstract; not about the Kudumi.
- Kolkata Kurmis: history, demand and the tribal pushback. The Indian Tribal, 2 April 2024. (news; cites the 1913 and 1931 gazettes and P. P. Mahato’s work)
- Kurmali language. Wikipedia, citing Paudyal and Peterson (2020), Grierson (1903) and the 2011 Census. (summary)
- Dipankar Chaudhuri. Hunter gatherers of past and present: a study on interrelationship from the Chotanagpur Plateau area. PhD thesis, University of Calcutta, 1992. Shodhganga record; no abstract; Kudumi coverage unverified.
- Dayamay Mandal. Purulia jelar samayik patre purullar samaj sahitya o sanskritir ruprekha (1899-2002). PhD thesis, University of Burdwan, 2007. Shodhganga record; no abstract; Kudumi coverage unverified.
- Kudmi Mahato. Wikipedia, citing Risley (1891), Singh (2006), P. P. Mahato, and NIBMG (2022-23). (summary; some claims tagged as needing citation)
- Kurmi. Wikipedia, citing Pinch (1996) and Jaffrelot (2003). (summary; covers the northern Kurmi)
- Vinita Damodaran. Environment, ethnicity and history in Chotanagpur, India, 1850-1970. Environment and History 3(3), 1997, pp. 273-298. (abstract page)
