ABSTRACT
During the years preceding marriage and, in fact, throughout a Santal’s lifetime, the bongas continually impinge on Santal affairs. The bongas are not invariably strange invisible forces obsessed with Santal life but are sometimes met with in the guise of boys and girls. The desire of bongas to intrude on Santal life, their fascination with mortals, their willingness to exchange their own kind of life for that of Santals, their need to fraternise - these project a kind of alter-Santal which over the centuries the tribe has felt it necessary to invent. Bonga lovers were in many ways what Santals hoped for and expected - a boy or girl who by their enterprising adventures fused the normal with the supernormal, the natural with the supernatural. The bonga lover was a loving bonga and through these accounts of supposed experiences Santals revealed their ultimate confidence in life itself.
