इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Chota Nagpur Plateau · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
छोटी-छोटी बातें
- A script invented in 1925 that people actually useRaghunath Murmu built Ol Chiki as thirty letters whose shapes are drawn from objects the letters are named for, so that the alphabet can be taught to a non-literate adult through the things around them. Most invented scripts die with their inventor. This one is now taught in schools in three states, sets newspapers, and carried Santali into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003.
- The second invented scriptLako Bodra did the same thing for Ho a generation later with Warang Chiti. Two purpose-built writing systems for two Munda languages spoken a hundred kilometres apart is not a coincidence — it is what happens when a language has speakers in three states, each of which would otherwise write it in a different borrowed script.
- Painting by subtractionSohrai is added and Khovar is taken away. For Khovar a wall is coated in dark manganese earth, then a layer of white kaolin is laid over it, and while it is still damp the white is combed off with a broken comb — the pattern is what the comb removes. The two techniques are practised by the same women in the same village, at two different points in the year.
- A grove that dates the villageA sarna is not a planted grove. It is the piece of original forest a village deliberately did not clear when it cleared everything else, left standing for the deities. That makes it a physical record of what grew there before the settlement — and the trees in it are frequently older than any structure in the village.
- Water pots as a monsoon forecastAt Sarhul the pahan fills earthen pots with water at night and inspects the level at dawn. How much has gone is read as the coming season's rainfall. It is a genuine measurement of overnight evaporation, which tracks humidity, which is not a bad proxy for what is coming.
- Two brewers, one rice, two beersHandia is fermented with a ranu tablet — a pressed cake of twenty or more roots, barks and leaves gathered locally, dried, and stored. The rice is the same everywhere; the ranu is the household's, learnt from a mother-in-law and not written down. Every difference between one handia and another comes out of that cake.
- Mushrooms that outprice muttonRugra and putka are puffballs that fruit in sal root zones in the days after the first heavy monsoon thunderstorm. They cannot be cultivated and the flush lasts about a week. In that week they routinely sell in Ranchi's markets for more per kilo than goat meat, and they are gone before anyone organises a supply chain.
- A mask that cannot change expressionThe Seraikela Chhau mask is deliberately given a neutral, half-lidded face. Because it cannot move, the dancer must produce grief, rage or longing entirely through the tilt of the head and the line of the body — which is why the form's training is built around the neck and the spine rather than around the face.
- The corridor that made Assam's tea gardensFrom the 1860s, recruiters worked this plateau for labour for the tea gardens of Assam and the Dooars, and hundreds of thousands of Santal, Munda, Oraon and Kharia people went. Their descendants are Assam's largest single population bloc after the Assamese and Bengali speakers, they speak Sadri as a first language, and they dance jhumair — a plateau still audible eight hundred kilometres away.
- Twenty of twenty-fourTwenty of the twenty-four Jain Tirthankaras are held to have attained liberation on Parasnath hill. The pilgrim circuit over the ridge and its shrines runs about 27 km, is walked barefoot, and is usually started around three in the morning to finish before the heat.
- Seventy-two temples in one villageMaluti in Dumka has around seventy-two surviving terracotta temples out of an estimated hundred and eight, all in a village of a few hundred people. The brick plaques carry the same Ramayana and hunting scenes as the Bishnupur temples across the Bengal border — the same craft tradition, the same laterite country, split by a state line drawn much later.
- An insect that pays the rentLac is a resin secreted by an insect farmed on kusum and palas trees, scraped off the twigs twice a year. Jharkhand produces most of India's supply, the national research institute for it sits at Namkum near Ranchi, and the same substance ends up as bangles, sealing wax, shellac polish and record-industry history.
- The oldest rock, the newest townThe Singhbhum ridges are banded iron formation among the oldest exposed continental crust on earth, and the town built to smelt it, Jamshedpur, was laid out from scratch in 1907 with its arterial roads planted before its houses went up. Three billion years and a hundred and twenty, in the same valley.
Chota Nagpur Plateau की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (13)