इतिहास
The plateau's history has to be written differently from the plains', because for most of it authority here was not dynastic. The unit that governed was the village, held under khuntkatti tenure by the descendants of the family that first cleared the forest, and above it the Munda-Manki headmanship among the Ho and the parha council of villages among the Munda and Oraon. Rajas existed - the Nagvanshis of Khukhra, the Cheros of Palamu, the Rajas of Porahat and Panchakot - but they collected tribute from a country they did not administer village by village, and outside empires reached the plateau only as intermittent tribute demands. The medieval period therefore begins not with a conquest but with the first documented chieftaincy, in about the fifteenth century. The modern period begins sharply in 1765-71, when the Company acquired the revenue right and, for the first time, an outside power tried to run the plateau by installing landlords and contractors over the village. Everything that follows - Kol, Hul, Ulgulan, Tana Bhagat, and the tenancy laws they produced - is a response to that single change.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनprehistory - c. 1200 CE
What the plateau has instead of an ancient political record is an ancient settlement record. Megalithic burial grounds - Chokahatu in Ranchi district is among the largest in India - mark a stone-raising practice that Munda families have continued into living memory rather than abandoned. Iron was smelted here on a scale that left slag across whole districts, and Munda oral tradition attributes the older workings to the Asur, a Munda-speaking community that still bears the name. The three language families of the plateau - Austroasiatic Munda, Dravidian Kurukh, Indo-Aryan Sadri - arrived in that rough order and did not displace one another. The plains empires named the forest country and taxed its margins but did not garrison it, and no imperial inscription places a capital on the plateau. Rock shelters at Isco in Hazaribagh carry engraved designs that later wall painting resembles; their antiquity is proposed rather than securely dated.
मध्यकालीनc. 15th century - 1765
From about the fifteenth century the plateau's chieftaincies are documented rather than merely remembered. The Nagvanshis of Khukhra moved their seat from Sutiambe and Chutia to Navratangarh at Doisa and, around 1719, to Palkot; the Cheros held Palamu from its two forts in the west; the Ho of the Kolhan and the Munda of the south-east recognised no raja at all. Mughal interest was in tribute and in the diamonds washed from the Sankh, not in administration: Shahbaz Khan's campaign of 1585 and Ibrahim Khan's of 1615, which ended with Durjan Shah's defeat and imprisonment, were revenue expeditions rather than occupations, and the plateau's internal arrangements survived them unchanged. This is the period's central fact - it is why the tenure system the Company met in 1765 was intact and older than any state in the region.
आधुनिक1765 - 1947
The Company took the revenue right in 1765 and by 1771 the Nagvanshi raja was its vassal, and the change that followed was not a change of ruler but a change of what a village was. Revenue farming installed outside contractors, thikadars and moneylenders above the khuntkatti village; forced labour, transfer of cleared land and debt bondage followed; and the plateau answered with the longest continuous sequence of agrarian risings anywhere in India. The Chuar disturbances in the eastern marches ran from the 1760s to Ganga Narayan's rising of 1832-33; the Kol uprising of 1831-32 produced the South-West Frontier Agency and Wilkinson's Rules, which for the first time recognised village custom in law; the Hul of 1855 produced the Santhal Parganas and its tenancy act; the Sardari agitation ran through the courts for four decades; and Birsa Munda's Ulgulan of 1899-1900 produced the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which wrote khuntkatti into statute. Only after 1914, with the Tana Bhagats, did any of this connect to the national movement. Running underneath the whole century is labour migration - recruitment for the Assam and Dooars tea gardens from the 1860s - which is why Sadri is spoken in the tea belt today.
शासक और सेनापति
The Munda-Manki and parha headmanship Village and cluster office प्रशासक continuous
Authority on the plateau was distributed, not dynastic. The munda headed the village and the manki a cluster of villages among the Ho; the parha council did the same among the Munda and Oraon; land was held by the lineages descended from the village's first clearers under khuntkatti tenure. These offices, not any throne, decided land, dispute and ritual, and every rising of the nineteenth century was fought to defend them. They are the reason the plateau has its own tenancy law.
राजधानी: The khuntkatti village
Phani Mukut Rai संस्थापक 1st century CE by tradition
Named in Nagvanshi tradition as the founder of the Khukhra chieftaincy, in an origin account involving a serpent deity. This is tradition, not record: the documented history of the line begins about the fifteenth century.
राजवंश: Nagvanshi. राजधानी: Sutiambe
Durjan Shah Raja शासक early 17th century
Refused Mughal tribute and was defeated in 1615 by forces under Ibrahim Khan, after which the chieftaincy was annexed and he was held prisoner for some years before being restored. Navratangarh, the five-storey palace complex at Doisa, dates from the Nagvanshi seat of this period.
राजवंश: Nagvanshi. राजधानी: Navratangarh (Doisa)
Raghunath Shah Raja शासक 1663-1690
Built the temples at Chutia and the Jagannath hill temple outside Ranchi, whose annual rath procession is still the largest in the region. His reign is the point at which Vaishnava temple building becomes part of the Nagvanshi court's public presence.
राजवंश: Nagvanshi. राजधानी: Doisa
Medini Ray Raja शासक c. 1658-1674
The strongest of the Chero rulers of Palamu, who held the western plateau from the two forts above the Auranga and extended his authority towards the Sone. Palamu tradition remembers his reign as the benchmark for good governance in the west of the region.
राजवंश: Chero. राजधानी: Palamu
Thomas Wilkinson Agent to the Governor-General प्रशासक 1830s
Suppressed the Kol uprising and then framed the settlement that followed it. Wilkinson's Rules of 1837 removed the plateau from the ordinary regulation courts and gave legal standing to village headmen and customary tenure - the first admission in colonial law that this country could not be governed like the plains, and the ancestor of both the Santhal Parganas and Chotanagpur tenancy acts.
राजधानी: South-West Frontier Agency
Thakur Vishwanath Shahdeo Thakur of Barkagarh विद्रोही 1817-1858
Landholder of Barkagarh who took the leadership of the 1857 rising in the Ranchi country after the Ramgarh Battalion mutinied at Doranda, raising a force with neighbouring zamindars. Defeated at Sherghati in September 1857.
राजधानी: Satranji, near Ranchi
Pandey Ganpat Rai Diwan of Barkagarh सेनापति died 1858
Administrator of the Barkagarh estate who joined the 1857 rising alongside Vishwanath Shahdeo and helped organise its forces in the Ranchi country.
राजधानी: Ranchi