Jalia is the most prominent of the malevolent powers recorded in the earliest detailed ethnography of the Sora (Savara) of the Ganjam and Vizagapatam hill tracts. F. Fawcett, whose account Edward Thurston reproduces, calls Jalia 'the most widely known' of the deities the Savaras name sonnum or sunnam: a very malevolent being, thought male in some places and female in others, which travels from one village to another causing illness and death. Households kept fetishes and set aside objects for Jalia's use and amusement, including two new cloths in a bamboo box, feather brushes for dancing, oil for the body, a looking-glass, a bell and a lamp; the deity is fond of tobacco, and near one village an upright stone before a small Jalia temple received the cheroot ends of passers-by. When mangoes ripen, and before they may be eaten cooked, goats are sacrificed to Jalia with the usual drinking and dancing, and offerings of pigs or fowls, rice and liquor follow at the mahua, hill-grain and red-gram festivals. In some villages fetishes of Jalia stood beside those of Kittung and other gods.