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Deities
Bathou
Bathou — Bodo supreme religion
Bathou — Bodo supreme religion
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
Bathou is the traditional religion of the Bodo people of Assam and the neighbouring hill tracts of Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and West Bengal. It is a nature-and-ancestor religion without idols, without temples and without a scripture: its institutions are household, its symbols natural, and its calendar tied to the agricultural year. The name is generally taken to mean the "way of the five", and the five principles are personified as five deities — Baralong, Bwr, Sidai, Hajo and Chatrai — though the spellings, the genealogies and even the number vary between Bodo and Garo tellings of the tradition.
The central and most distinctive feature of a Bodo household's religion is the Siju cactus (Euphorbia antiquorum / E. neriifolia), which is planted in the middle of the courtyard and treated as the visible presence of the supreme power. It is not worshipped as an idol but kept, watered and ritually attended like a person, and it is planted at a wedding, at the birth of a child and at a death, and removed with ceremony when the household's cycle ends. Around it stand the dāṅ (a sijūju-branch altar) and the khargaon (the prayer house, the ancestor shrine of the clan line, kept in the phaḍam of the family) — the two institutions that most need documenting and the two this entry cannot describe from sources.
Bathou is also a social instrument. The khargaon is a lineage shrine; the clan (honao) and its benglai (the head of the lineage who is the keeper of the shrine) are the units of Bathou life, and the annual rites of the khargaon are the point at which a family of the line is most visible to itself. The relation between Bathou and Christianity among the Bodō is not one of simple replacement: conversion since the nineteenth century has been massive and the two systems of practice coexist in the same household in many villages. Any account that describes Bathou as a "pure pre-Christian tribe religion" is describing an ideal type, not the field.
