The Moriyas behind the megaliths

Srikumar M Menon delves into the fascinating tales behind ancient structures in Koppal, and similar legends in other places

The setting could not be more dramatic – low rocky hills beneath bright blue skies, strewn with granite boulders of all sizes and shapes, baking under a harsh sun. Some of the boulders seem impossibly perched on others, and one gets the uneasy feeling that they might topple at the slightest provocation. On a saddle between rocky promontories on one of the hills stand several strange-looking structures. They look like houses of cards. Four of these ‘cards’ – thin slabs of granite, upon closer inspection, are stood on end to make a box-like structure, and covered with another circular slab. These structures stand prominently – singly and in groups, across the stark rockscape. Several of them sport a circular ‘porthole’ on one of the vertical slabs.

This is Moriyara Gudda, or the Hill of the Moriyas, near a village called Hire Benakal, located off the highway connecting Gangavati with Koppal. I first visited Moriyara Gudda in 2007, in the company of two youngsters from the village. It was the quiet and reticent Jambanna who first told me about the Moriyas — a now-extinct race of dwarves who allegedly built these enclosures of stone long ago. At less than three feet tall, the Moriyas were, however, believed to possess the superhuman strength to split boulders into slabs with their bare hands and heft them into place to make these ‘Moriyara manes’ (houses of the Moriyas). At some point in the uncharted past, a rain of fire supposedly wiped them out.

Archaeologists swear by a different narrative, though. The stone huts of the Moriyas are megaliths — sepulchral or commemorative structures from the Iron Age. I tried telling Jambanna that, but he insisted that his grandfather had seen the Moriyas. One could not argue with that!

During a conversation with Samira Agnihotri, a wildlife biologist, I came to know that an identical narrative about megalith-building Moriyas existed at her study site, in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills, too. Excited by the recurrence of the legend in different regions, we decided to study the distribution of these dwarf legends across megalithic south India.

Cultural memory?

The first ever mention of dwarves associated with megaliths was in 1847, in a report by Captain H Congreve of the Madras Army, from the Nilgiris. We found many more mentions of the legend in early literature on megaliths, from various places in southern India. We also visited megalithic sites with names seemingly derived from ‘Moriya’, but where the legend was not recorded previously. At these sites, we invariably found that there were legends about little people called Moriyas building them as houses. The sheer geographical spread of this legend was astounding, and we could no longer afford to dismiss it as a mere figment of imagination of a local populace.

At sites like Moribetta and Morikallu in Kodagu; Sanna Moriyara Thatte near Mallapur; and Moral Parai near Krishnagiri, in Tamil Nadu, the authorship of the megalithic monuments is attributed to ancient dwarves. This mythical race was known by different names in different regions – in Kannada-speaking regions, the word ‘Moriya’ is used, while it is ‘Panduraru’ or ‘Valiyaru’ or their derivatives in Tamil-speaking regions, and ‘Pandyan Chondyan’ in Marayoor in Kerala. Interestingly, not just dolmens, but even other types of megaliths were attributed to the mighty little people. For instance, in Moribetta and Morikallu, dolmens are pointed out as the houses of the little people, while in Somwarpet, it is a dolmenoid cist (a type of megalithic dolmen that is partially sunken, smaller and with a lower porthole). In Kerebailu, near BR Hills, the Moriyara mane assumes the form of a boulder circle.

It is indeed mystifying why these sepulchres and memorials of our ancestors from the Iron Age are associated with a mythical race of little people across almost all of south India.

As early as 1851, Captain (Thomas John) Newbold had noted the fanciful nature of this belief, since the bones interred in these tombs are of normal-sized people. He rightly conjectured that the small size (30-40cm) of the porthole openings might have been the inspiration for the legend of the dwarfish megalith-builders. Clearly, such stories were made up by later settlers in the landscapes where these ancient monuments were already prominent. The discovery of grave goods like miniature urns and utensils in some megalithic graves only served to bolster the legend.

But why this obsession with a mysterious race of little people across the subcontinent? Could it be some cultural memory from the dim past when anatomically modern humans coexisted with other hominin races of diminutive stature? The recently discovered hominin race Homo floresiensis, nicknamed ‘Hobbit’, is said to have coexisted with modern humans till 50,000 years ago, on the Indonesian island of Flores. On Flores, too, there is a legend about dwarfish wild humans, locally known as ‘Ebu Gogo’.

The dwarf legends associated with megaliths have detailed and nuanced plotlines too complex to be narrated here. The dwarves kept hares like humans keep cows, and erected megaliths with assistance from hares and porcupines. The sequence of events wherein they found shelter within megaliths, initially from a rain of stones, and later from a rain of fire, unleashed upon them by gods they angered, are suggestive of extreme events like sustained hail, and volcanic eruptions. The mythology of the mighty Moriyas who built megaliths can rival that of the Middle Earth of Tolkien’s imagination. It is important to record these legends before they are lost, as generations pass.

(The author is with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.)