Bhuiyan
Tharu · deity · Tharu traditional religion; continuing · deity
Bhuiyan, also recorded as Bhumsen, is the Tharu earth- or land-deity, the 'lord of the soil' who presides over the village territory, its fields and its harvest. He is worshipped at the bhuinhar, an open village shrine marked by several carved wooden posts set upright in the ground, where chickens, pigs and goats are offered by the community under the guruwa priest. The name belongs to a wider class of bhumiya / bhuiyan land-godlings of the Gangetic plain, but among the Tharu he is a fixed and central tutelary of the settlement; the variant Bhumsen reflects the local assimilation of the strongman-hero Bhimsen (Bhima), whom the Dangaura Tharu glorify in their Barka Naach epic and honour as a protector at the Atwari festival.
Domains
- earth and soil
- village territory
Powers
- to guard the village and its cultivated land
Epithets
- Bhumsen
Sources
- Drone P. Rajaure, 'Tharus of Dang: Tharu Religion', Kailash IX(1): 61-96 (1982).
- Rajesh Gautam & Asoke K. Thapa-Magar, Tribal Ethnography of Nepal (Delhi: Book Faith India, 1994).
- Christian McDonaugh, The Tharu of Dang: A Study of Social Organisation, Myth and Ritual in West Nepal (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1984).