To “the indigenous people”—in our case the Santals, who over the past 100 years have organized themselves on many fronts—cultural identity’ inspired by the richness of Santali language has become a platform for self-representation. Despite the dialectal variation of the language spoken in different states. Santali speakers share a strong ideology viewing their language as a marker of unity among the dispersed Santali communities. The indigenous theory of speech defines a vast range of registers of discourse, which revolve around the idea that the tribal deities lost their original language when fighting each other. Humans try to recreate this divine speech. I compare two genres of ritual songs, the Dasae seren which are performed by the ojha’s disciples, and the Baha seren which celebrate women, fertility and the deities of the sacred grove. These two genres show how the Santals appreciate a form of twisted speech called bentha katha, a metaphorical discourse in which similarities are invoked to index other metaphors, creating multiple semantic displacements. In both genres the trope of feminity as flower is central and reveals insights in the reality of the world. Finally, the songs allow the participants to experience, through possession, an ontological continuity between plants animals and humans. Wherein lies the authority of ritual language? Answering this question requires examination of the relations of the formal characteristics of the songs and of the assumptions which accompany them.