An Anthropo- Linguistic Study on Clan Formation of Toto of Totopara in West Bengal

Abstract

The paper focuses on the linguistic anthropological characteristics of the Clan system of Toto. Apart from the description of the clans the paper discusses a few morphological properties of the lexical items related to clans. Toto is one of the smallest indigenous people of Alipurduar district in the state of West Bengal, India. The community members interact in their own language which is called Toto but do not have any written literature or a script. In terms of the population, Toto is one of the smallest language communities in our country. A linguistic anthropological survey was conducted among all the households of the Totopara village of Alipurduar district of west Bengal with the help of structured and open-ended questionnaire schedules. The Totos are divided into thirteen clans like /boŋ-go-bei/, /boudʰubei/, /budʰubei/, /ɖɑnkɔbei/, /moŋto-bei/ etc. These clans are patrilineal and totemic. The tribe is endogamous in nature but strictly follows clan exogamy. The member of each clan respects their clan totem that is inevitably non-human in nature. From the data, it is evident that the clan names belong to fauna semantic domain. However, use of a single entity as two different clan names can be observed as the following: • ɖant̯rɔ-be Elephant • dʰiringt͡ʃɔnkɔ-be Elephant • nurint͡ʃɑnko-be Elephant The clan names end with the suffix -be or –bei to indicate genericness. a. lɑnkɑid͡ʒi-be ‘Snake’ b. moŋto-bei ‘White goat’ Generally, the clan names in Toto have descended through the male line i.e. from father to son. The community believes that its relation with these totemic objects is mysterious. Unmarried daughters may retain their father’s clan till their marriage. Married women are found to imbibe the clan names of their husbands belonging to different clans. Some of the clans are reported to split up into different number of sub-clans.

Keywords: clan, morphology, linguistics, anthropo-linguistics, totem, Toto.

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/109-03

Publication date: January 31^st 2026