Which of the following is the local name of ‘Jhumming’?
2023
Which of the following is the local name of ‘Jhumming’?
Answer: D. More than one of Bewar, Dahiya and Podu — Concept: Shifting cultivation is a subsistence farming system in which a patch of forest or hill scrub is cleared, the felled vegetation is burnt, the…
- A.
Bewar
- B.
Dahiya
- C.
Podu
- D.
More than one of Bewar, Dahiya and Podu
- E.
None of Bewar, Dahiya and Podu
Attempted by 43 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept: Shifting cultivation is a subsistence farming system in which a patch of forest or hill scrub is cleared, the felled vegetation is burnt, the ash-enriched plot is cropped for two or three seasons, and the plot is then abandoned to a long fallow while the cultivators move to a fresh patch. Because the practice grew up independently inside many tribal communities long before any standard vocabulary existed, it carries a different regional name in almost every belt where it is practised. A question asking for "the local name" of this system is therefore asking which of the listed words belong to that family of regional names, and the family has many members rather than one.
Application: Each of the three named words is a regional term for exactly this clear-burn-crop-fallow system, drawn from a different tribal belt of India:
Term | Region / community | What the word names |
|---|---|---|
Bewar | Baiga tribe, Mandla and Dindori tracts of Madhya Pradesh | A forest patch cleared, burnt and cropped for a few seasons, then left fallow |
Dahiya | Baiga tribe, Satpura-Maikal hill belt of Madhya Pradesh | A hill-slope plot cleared of scrub, burnt and sown, then left fallow |
Podu | Koya, Konda Reddi and other Eastern Ghats communities of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha | A hill patch cleared, burnt and cropped, then left fallow |
Cross-check: The same standard list of Indian regional names for this system runs well beyond these three, which confirms that no single word owns the label:
Madhya Pradesh: Bewar and Dahiya
Andhra Pradesh: Podu and Penda
Odisha: Pama Dabi, Koman and Bringa
Western Ghats: Kumari; south-eastern Rajasthan: Valre or Waltre; the Himalayan belt: Khil; Jharkhand: Kuruwa; the north-eastern region: Jhumming
Because Bewar, Dahiya and Podu are all members of that family, no single one of them can be picked without wrongly implying that the other two are not local names of the system, and a reading that denies all three would contradict every entry in the table.
Result: More than one of the listed words is a local name of shifting cultivation — Bewar, Dahiya and Podu all are — so the alternative stating that more than one of the listed terms qualifies is the one to pick.