Return of the Stolen God: The Sora Cult of Mattar Banom (an Ethnolinguistic Analysis)

Abstract

The article describes the religion of Mattar Banom, the cult of the autochthonous script of the Sora language, created in the 1930s in the state of Odisha, India, at the same time as script itself. The newly invented script (Sorang-Sompeng) is considered to be the incarnation of the god Jagannath who, according to Hindu beliefs, was originally the god of the Savara tribe (supposed ancestors of the Sora) but then was taken away from them by the Oriya Brahmins. Each character of the script is dedicated to a certain deity of the traditional Sora pantheon. The article deals with the social prerequisites, conditions and goals of creating the cult, as well as the history of its development. I attempt to examine and reconstruct cult modification strategies through the ethnolinguistic analysis of the inscription on the iconographic image of the god- alphabet, religious texts, and cult terminologies. I argue that the cult was originally based on the tantric ideas common in Odisha, while the ideas of Jagannath and letters associated with deities appeared later in the course of the cult’s development.