How Bastar tribals mourn dead: ‘Roon-saun’ echoes as top Maoist commander Madvi Hidma’s body returns to Puvarti - watch

RAIPUR: As word of his death spread, Puvarti village slipped into a familiar, ancient rhythm of mourning that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with loss.

Videos of Hidm'as mother and family members emerged mourning, holding their heads, and announcing through a sound called roon–saun — a piercing, rolling wail that carries from house to house faster than any phone call.


As Maoist Hidma and his wife Rajje’s bodies are brought to the village, the whole village broke out into the same wail called ‘roon-saun.’

Women, usually the first to respond, gathered around the family. Their wails rise in long, trembling notes before breaking into sobs. Each call seemed to address the dead directly, narrating memories, regrets, unfinished conversations.

Elders are believed to be talking to the departed soul — guiding it, persuading it to cross over peacefully and not linger around the living. It is in this cultural frame that Puvarti is preparing for the return of Hidma’s body — not as a commander, but as a son of the soil, a relative said.

“Hidma, come home… we will live on our land and earn a living”Barely eight days before the encounter that ended his life, Hidma’s mother had made what now sounds like a final appeal.

"Son, come back home, wherever you are, I am calling you,” she had said in a video appeal after Chhattisgarh home minister Vijay Sharma met her in Puvarti last week.

For a woman who has spent decades listening to gunfire echo through the forests, the wish was simple: some peace in old age.

That wish was never fulfilled. Instead, the news that reached her was not of a son returning alive, but of a body that must be claimed from another state.

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