Musahar Marriage

This is an Indian wedding with a difference. No fine clothes. no shehnai. no richly dressed women dancing. No boisterous joy. Just a sense of resignation. Two different weddings taking place the same day. In one house, a boy gets ready to go to another village for a bride. in another, a girl completes the pre-nuptial rituals. Both weddings were to take place at a temple in another village which would be presided over by a musahar priestess [not a pandit or a Brahmin].


The musahar community are among the poorest of the labouring classes in Bihar, India and are almost at the bottom of the caste heirarchy.

Musahar comes from two words Musa or ‘rat’ and ahar which means ‘food’. Musahar are people who eat rats as food. They are people who harvest the fields for the landowners and also subsist by gleaning grain off rat-holes. They smoke out the rats and collect the grain that field rats hoard.

It’s the wedding season at present. Lagan, it’s called. The Musahar community also follows the season.

At a village near Khagaul, we witnessed some pre-nuptial rituals as we passed by.

One was the hawa-neuta, a sort of ceremony using sprouted grain and singing by women, asking for the blessings of nature.








This was followed by a strange ritual. The girl [the bride to be] and another old lady huddled on the ground. One woman soaked mango leaves in water and beat another woman with it, chasing her so that both of them jumped over the bride-to-be.

In another house a boy was being readied for his marriage as well, here we caught the turmeric ceremony.







Unlike the upper caste rituals, this was a perfunctionary affair.


The boy sat down. His mother rubbed some turmeric on him, and so did some other women from the house.


The ceremony was over in about five minutes.

Then he was led out of the house with a sickle coated with a blob of mud, symbolic of how he was to supposed to earn his living.





They went towards an open space and the jumping ritual was repeated.