Santal religion is the traditional faith of the Santal people, one of the largest Adivasi, or indigenous, communities of eastern India and Bangladesh, centered on Marang Buru, the great mountain spirit, and on bongas, spirits of village, forest and ancestor addressed through village priests, naeke, and healing specialists, ojha. This article does not reproduce Santal ritual invocation; the linguist P.O. Bodding transcribed versions of it in the early twentieth century as part of a wider record of Santal oral literature, but that transcription belongs to the historical record of scholarship rather than to a text open for general reuse, and the invocations remain the province of the named specialists who speak them.
What is public is the religion's demographic and geographic reach: Santal communities span Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar in India as well as parts of Bangladesh and Nepal, and Santal religious identity is often carried today under the wider Sarna faith label a number of Adivasi peoples use to describe their traditional religion as a category distinct from Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. That identity question, whether Adivasi traditional religion is its own recognized category, has become a public and political conversation in the regions Santal communities call home, and Santal religion remains an actively practiced faith within it.