# Chota Nagpur Plateau (Jharkhand)

> Three language families in one village, a script invented in 1925 that stuck, and sacred groves that are the original forest left standing as evidence.

The Chota Nagpur plateau is the Santal, Munda, Ho and Oraon country, and the only part of India where an Austroasiatic, a Dravidian and an Indo-Aryan language are routinely spoken by neighbours in the same settlement. Its religion has a physical form — the sarna, a grove of the original sal forest left uncleared at the edge of each village, in which the village deities are seated and no tree is cut. Its wall painting is done by women twice a year, at harvest and at marriage, in the earths of the district, and holds a geographical indication registered in 2020. Its script, Ol Chiki, was devised in 1925 by one man for one language and is now taught in three states. Its rebellions — the Santal Hul of 1855, Birsa Munda's Ulgulan of 1899–1900 — are the reason the region has its own tenancy law and its own historical vocabulary. And its labour migration, from the 1860s onward, is why the tea gardens of Assam and the Dooars speak Sadri.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/chota-nagpur
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Central Highlands & Forest Belt
- Tier 2 cultural region: Chota Nagpur Plateau
- Indigenous scope: A stepped granite and gneiss plateau between roughly 300 and 1,100 m, drained outward in every direction — the Damodar east through its coal trough, the Subarnarekha south-east past the iron hills, the Koel and Sankh west into the Mahanadi system, and the Mayurakshi and Ajay off the north-eastern scarp. Sal is the defining tree and the plateau's edge is where sal thins. Its languages sit in three unrelated families in the same villages — Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kharia of the Austroasiatic Munda group; Kurukh, Dravidian, spoken by the Oraon; and the Indo-Aryan link speeches, Sadri or Nagpuri above all, with Khortha, Kurmali and Panch Pargania around the rim. The region ends where Sadri stops working as the market language — north into Magahi, east into Bangla, south into Odia, west into Chhattisgarhi.
- Overlapping administrative units: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Bihar
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Ranchi Plateau (Upper plateau, 600–700 m, with the Pat highlands above it); Santhal Pargana (Rajmahal trap hills and the Damin-i-Koh foothill belt); Singhbhum Iron Belt (Ancient banded iron formation ridges and sal forest); Hazaribagh Uplands (Upper and lower plateau steps with the Damodar trough below)
- Languages: Santali, Mundari, Ho, Kurukh, Kharia, Sadri (Nagpuri), Khortha, Kurmali, Hindi

## Terrain and eco-zones

Tropical, but noticeably cooler than the Gangetic plain below because of altitude — Ranchi at 650 m averages several degrees below Patna in every month, and Netarhat at about 1,100 m needs a blanket in January. Rainfall runs 1,200–1,500 mm, almost all of it June to September, and it runs off fast on hard rock, which is why the plateau has waterfalls rather than aquifers and a real water problem by April.

**Landforms:** The Pat highlands — flat-topped laterite-capped remnants at 900–1,100 m, of which Netarhat is the best known, The Ranchi upper plateau, a broad step at about 600–700 m, The lower plateau of Hazaribagh and Palamau, at 300–450 m, The Damodar trough — a rift-like valley cutting the plateau east–west, Singhbhum's banded iron formation ridges, among the oldest exposed rock surfaces on earth, The Rajmahal traps in the north-east, basalt flows breaking down to the Ganga plain

**Rivers and waters:** Damodar — the trough river, running east through the coal belt to Bengal, Subarnarekha — Ranchi to the Bay, making Hundru on the way, Koel (North and South) and Sankh — the western drainage into the Brahmani, Kharkai — joins the Subarnarekha at Jamshedpur, Mayurakshi and Ajay — off the north-eastern scarp into the Bengal laterite country, Barakar — the Damodar's largest tributary

- **Winter** (November–February, 5–25 °C): Sohrai falls at the start of it and the wall painting is done then. Cold enough on the Pat highlands for frost. The clearest months, and the marriage season runs through them.
- **Spring** (March–April, 15–35 °C): Sal and palash flower. Sarhul and Baha are held on the sal blossom, mahua is collected before dawn, and Khovar painting is done ahead of weddings.
- **Hot dry** (May–mid June, 22–42 °C): Hard on a plateau with no groundwater to speak of. Streams stop, the falls reduce to trickles, and forest collection is the main household activity.
- **Monsoon** (Mid June–September, 22–32 °C): Paddy transplanted, rugra and putka mushrooms fruit after the first storms, the falls run, and Karam is observed in Bhado.
- **Post-monsoon** (October, 18–30 °C): Harvest, the Dassain and Durga observances of the plateau towns, and the start of the Sohrai season.

**Best time to visit:** October to March. Late October and November for Sohrai painting and the harvest festivals; March or early April for Sarhul and Baha and the sal blossom; July to September if the point is the waterfalls, which are dry by May and worth nothing then.

## History

## Foodways

Rice, and then everything the sal forest supplies around it. The plateau's soil is thin and acidic and its water runs off, so a single paddy crop plus millet on the uplands is what the land gives — and the gap between harvests is filled by gathering. The kitchen is boiled, lightly oiled and short on spice; the strong flavours come from fermentation, from wild greens with real bitterness in them, and from mustard oil used raw. Handia, the rice beer, is not an indulgence at the edge of this foodway but part of its centre — it is offered to the ancestors, drunk at work parties, given to guests, and brewed in almost every village household by women, using a starter cake whose recipe is inherited.

**Primary cooking medium:** Mustard oil, the default cooking and finishing fat, Mahua oil and sal seed oil, home-pressed in the forest villages, Ramtil (niger seed) oil, particularly in the Singhbhum and Odisha-facing villages, Very little ghee, and almost no dairy fat in everyday cooking

**Dominant sour agents:** Tamarind, the everyday sour, Amchur and raw mango in summer, Fermented rice water, both as drink and as a souring liquid, Fermented bamboo shoot in the southern and eastern villages, Wild sour fruit — kusum, jamun, karonda — used fresh and in chutney, Red weaver ants in the forest fringes, where the chutney is eaten as it is in Bastar and Mayurbhanj

**Spice register:** Restrained. Mustard seed, dry red chilli, garlic, turmeric and a little panch phoron on the Bengal-facing edge — and, on the Bihar-facing north, the roasted-gram and ajwain register of the plains creeping in. There is no onion-tomato masala base in the village kitchen. Against Magadh immediately north, this is a far less wheat-and-sattu cuisine and a far more fermented one; against Rarh to the east, it uses much less fish and much more forest green.

**Staple grains and carbs:** Rice, in a large number of local landraces, and its parboiled and fermented forms, Marua (ragi, finger millet), the upland grain, Gondli (little millet) and other coarse millets, Maize on the upland plots, Urad, kulthi and other pulses on residual moisture

**Preservation:** Handia and its ranu starter cake, dried and stored for months, Mahua flowers dried on the floor and kept for years, Wild greens and gourd rings sun-dried for the lean months, Bamboo shoot salted and fermented, Dried and smoked river fish and crab, Rugra dried after the flush, though it never keeps as well as the fresh

### Ranu starter and handia brewing
Boiled rice is spread to cool, mixed with a crumbled ranu tablet — a pressed and dried cake of twenty or more roots, barks and leaves gathered locally — and left in a covered earthen pot for two to four days. The ranu recipe is the household's, learnt from a mother or mother-in-law, and it is the reason two neighbours' handia taste different from identical rice.
Also found in: Rarh, Dooars & Terai, Brahmaputra Valley, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands

### Rice-batter griddling
Soaked rice is ground wet to a thin batter and poured on a hot tawa to make chilka roti — no fermentation, no lentil, and a crisp lace edge. The same batter thickened and fried in deep oil with chana dal makes dhuska. Both are breakfast, both are rice standing in for wheat.
Also found in: Magadh, Anga & Seemanchal

### Wild-green cookery
Koinar (bauhinia leaf), sanai flower, munga, gandhari, chakor and a dozen others are boiled, squeezed and tempered in mustard oil with garlic and chilli. The bitterness is deliberate and is not cooked out — a saag that has lost its bitterness is considered spoilt.
Also found in: Rarh, Magadh, Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands

### Ember and leaf roasting
Fish, crab, mushrooms or minced meat wrapped in sal leaf and buried in hearth ash. It is the standard method for anything gathered in small quantity, because it needs no oil and no pot.
Also found in: Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands, Bastar

### Marua flour and mudde
Finger millet ground fine and either stirred into a stiff ball with boiling water or made into a thin roti. Marua is the upland insurance crop — it stores, it withstands a bad rain year, and it is what a village eats when the paddy has failed.
Also found in: Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands, Bagelkhand

### Rugra harvesting
Puffball mushrooms are dug from sal root zones in the days after the first heavy thunderstorm, cleaned by rubbing rather than washing, and cooked plain with garlic. They cannot be cultivated, the flush lasts days, and the price in a Ranchi market during the flush regularly exceeds mutton.
Also found in: Rarh, Bastar

## Dishes

One kitchen with three registers. The Adivasi village kitchen — rice, handia, wild greens, forest mushroom, fermented shoot, occasional meat tied to a sacrifice. The Sadan and Kurmi cultivator kitchen of the plateau villages, which adds pulses, dahi and the rice-batter breakfast repertoire. And the town kitchen of Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad, which is a migration record in itself — Bengali, Bihari, Odia and Marwari cooking layered over the plateau's own by a century of industry.

### Dhuska
Ground rice and chana dal batter deep-fried into a thick, soft-centred disc, eaten with a thin black-gram or potato curry and a coarse mint-and-chilli chutney. The plateau's most recognisable breakfast and the one item every roadside stall from Ranchi to Dumka makes.
Where to try: Any morning stall in Ranchi, Hazaribagh or Bokaro.

### Chilka roti
A thin, lace-edged pancake of wet-ground rice batter cooked on a tawa without fermentation, eaten with chutney or with a spoonful of ghee. Distinct from a dosa in having no lentil and no souring.

### Rugra and putka
Wild puffball mushrooms from sal root zones, cooked plainly with garlic, onion and a little mustard oil. They appear for a few days after the first monsoon storms, cannot be farmed, and are the most expensive thing in the market when they do.

### Marua roti and marua mudde
Finger-millet flour as a dark, dense roti or as a stiff hand-rolled ball eaten with a thin curry. The upland staple, and the crop that survives a failed monsoon.

### Koinar and wild saag
Bauhinia leaves, sanai flower, gandhari, chakor and a long list of others, boiled and tempered in mustard oil. Bitterness is the point. Different greens are in season in different weeks, so the same dish is a different plant every fortnight.

### Bamboo shoot curry and pickle
Monsoon shoot cooked fresh, or salted and fermented into a sour pickle used to season a whole pot. Common in the Singhbhum and Odisha-facing villages, thinner on the northern plateau.

### Handia
Rice beer fermented with a ranu herbal starter in an earthen pot, strained through cloth and drunk cloudy. Offered to the ancestors before anyone drinks, served to guests, and supplied to every work party. Brewed by women, and sold by women at village markets.

### Pittha
Steamed rice-flour dumplings, filled sweet with jaggery and coconut or savoury with dal or crushed pulses. Made in bulk at Sohrai, Karam and weddings — a festival food that has become a daily one.

### Arsa roti
Rice flour worked with jaggery syrup, rested, and fried into a chewy disc. It keeps for days, which is why it travels to fairs and is what a household sends with a departing guest.

### Malpua and thekua
Fried batter discs in syrup, and a stamped wheat-and-jaggery biscuit. Both come from the plains to the north with the Chhath and Karam calendars and are strongest on the plateau's northern rim.

### Chhilka meat and country chicken
Meat here is occasional and tied to a sacrifice, a festival or a guest. It is cut small, boiled with turmeric, garlic and dry chilli in mustard oil, and served thin rather than thick. Kadaknath, the black-meat fowl, is kept in this belt, but its geographical indication belongs to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh.

### River fish and crab, ember-roasted
Small fish and monsoon crabs from the plateau streams, wrapped in sal leaf with salt and pounded chilli and cooked in the hearth ash. The catch is small and the method is built for a small catch.

### Bhuja and sattu at the northern rim
Roasted grain mixtures and roasted gram flour. These belong properly to Magadh and the Bhojpur plains and thin out as you climb the plateau. Litti, the baked sattu-stuffed wheat ball, is a Magadh dish and is not a plateau one, whatever the restaurant menus in Ranchi now say.

### Mahua laddu and mahua roti
Dried mahua flowers steamed or roasted and bound with millet flour or sal kernel. Sweet without sugar, and the standard March and April food of a forest household.

### Deoghar peda
A dense, slightly grainy khoya sweet made in quantity around the Baidyanath temple and carried away by pilgrims. It belongs to the pilgrimage economy rather than to the plateau's own kitchen.
Where to try: The lanes around the Baidyanath temple at Deoghar.

### Jamshedpur and Dhanbad street plate
Bengali-style chop and cutlet, Bihari litti-chokha, Odia dalma and Marwari kachori sold within a hundred metres of one another. The industrial towns did not develop a cuisine so much as accumulate one.

**Staples:** Rice, boiled and as fermented rice water, Marua and gondli millet, Wild greens, in a rotating seasonal list, Tamarind, Handia

**Sweets:** Arsa roti, Sweet pittha, Mahua laddu, Tilkut and thekua on the northern rim, Deoghar peda

**Street food:** Dhuska with ghugni, Chilka roti, Pittha, steamed to order, Rugra, in the fortnight it exists, Chana and puffed rice mixtures at every bus stand

**Drinks:** Handia — rice beer with a ranu starter, Mahua liquor, Fermented rice water, Tamarind and mahua sharbat in summer

## Dress and textiles

Dress on the plateau is unstitched, cotton, and read at a glance by border colour. The Santal panchi-parhan — a plain white or cream cloth with a coloured border, worn as a lower wrap and an upper wrap — is the most codified version, and the same two-piece logic runs through Munda, Ho and Oraon dress. The region's textile weight sits in tasar silk, reared on forest trees rather than farmed, and in the silver and brass ornament that is a household's stored wealth. Sohrai and Khovar are the region's great surface-design tradition, but they are applied to walls, not to cloth.

### Panchi and parhan
Two lengths of cotton — one wrapped at the waist, one across the upper body — plain, usually white or cream, with a red, green or blue border. At Baha and Sohrai the border widens and sal or palash flowers go into the hair knot.
Worn by: Santal women
Worn for: Everyday and festival

### Panchi and bhagwan
A short dhoti worked between the legs for field and forest work, with a second cloth over the shoulder or wound as a head-cloth for carrying.
Worn by: Santal and Munda men
Worn for: Everyday

### Karia and kachhni
Coarse cotton wraps with broad dyed borders, worn tight for the akhra dance ground where the line moves shoulder to shoulder and loose cloth is a hazard.
Worn by: Oraon and Munda women
Worn for: Everyday and dance

### Tasar silk sari
Undyed or lightly dyed tasar in its natural honey colour, woven at Kuchai and around Bhagaiya, worn where a household is marking an occasion.
Worn by: Women, at weddings
Worn for: Marriage and festival

### Chhau costume of Seraikela
A fitted upper garment, a wrapped lower drape and the painted mask — the costume is built around the mask rather than the other way round, and the drape is cut to read from a distance in torchlight.
Worn by: Dancers
Worn for: Chaitra Parva

### Kuchai tasar
Silk reeled from Antheraea mylitta cocoons reared on arjun and asan in the plateau forest. Jharkhand is the largest tasar-producing state in India, and Kuchai is its best-known rearing and reeling cluster. No geographical indication of its own.

### Sohrai and Khovar wall painting (GI tag)
Not cloth, but the region's registered surface-design tradition — see the crafts entry below. Registered as a geographical indication in 2020, the first from the region.

### Lac bangle and ornament work
Lac resin, secreted by an insect farmed on kusum and palas trees, worked into bangles and inlay. Jharkhand produces the bulk of India's lac and the national research institute for it sits at Namkum in Ranchi.

**Jewellery:** Hansuli — a rigid silver collar, the standard bridal piece, Silver bala and kada at the wrist and ankle, Bead necklaces layered many strands deep, Lac bangles, Brass hair pins and combs, Flowers worn in the hair knot at Baha and Sarhul, and treated as ornament rather than decoration

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Chhau of Seraikela — martial
A masked dance built out of a martial movement vocabulary, in which the face is fixed and every meaning is carried by the angle of the head, the line of the spine and the arms. The masks are made by Sutradhar families in Seraikela from clay moulds and layered paper. Chhau in its Seraikela, Purulia and Mayurbhanj forms was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010 — Seraikela and Purulia masked, Mayurbhanj without masks.

### Paika — martial
A shield-and-sword dance in a fast circle to the mandar and nagara, with leaps and mock combat. The name is the old word for a foot-soldier, and the form retains the drill.

### Jhumair — folk
The plateau's general-purpose dance — a linked line moving with a swinging step to the mandar, sung in Sadri, Khortha or Kurmali. Mardana jhumair is danced by men, janani jhumair by women. It travelled with migrant labour and is now danced in the Assam tea gardens and the Dooars as well.

### Jadur and Sarhul dance — ritual
Danced on the sal blossom, from the sarna grove to the akhra, with the pahan leading and the line growing as it passes each house.

### Lagre, Dong and Baha — tribal
Named Santal dance-song genres, each with its own drum pattern on the tamak' and tumdak' pair. Dong is a wedding form; Baha belongs to the spring flower festival; Lagre is danced at almost anything.

### Karam dance — ritual
Danced around a karam branch planted in the courtyard, all night, with the jhumair step and Karam songs answered line for line between two groups.

### Domkach — folk
A night-long women's dance with parody, cross-dressed roles and teasing songs, sung in Nagpuri or Khortha. Shared with Magadh and Bhojpur to the north.

### Tamak' and tumdak'
The Santal drum pair — a large kettle drum struck with sticks and a two-headed hand drum — which between them set the pattern that names a Santal dance. A dancer identifies the form from the drum before the singing starts.

### Mandar and nagara
The plateau's other percussion pair, carrying jhumair, paika and Karam across the Sadri-speaking villages. The mandar is slung and played with both hands; the nagara is a bowl drum beaten with sticks.

### Banam and tirio
The Santal bowed lute, often carved as a standing human figure with the strings running through it, and the side-blown bamboo flute. The banam is played solo and is as much a sculpture as an instrument.

### Nagpuri song
The Sadri-language popular repertoire — jhumair, domkach and pachra forms recorded commercially since the cassette era, and now the plateau's largest music industry by volume.

### Jadopatia scroll performance
A Jadopatia painter arrives at a house with a rolled scroll, unrolls it frame by frame and sings the narrative — including the chakshudan scroll painted after a death, in which the eye of the departed is completed only when the family has paid. Painter, singer and ritual officiant in one visit.

### Chhau at Chaitra Parva
The Seraikela festival is staged over several nights in April as a sequence of solo and duet items, each a single mood or figure, and until the mid twentieth century was performed largely by men of the ruling and artisan households of the town.

### Nachni and rasik
A professional dancer-singer and her male partner-composer performing jhumur at fairs and private gatherings across the Purulia and Dhalbhum belt. A long-standing performance institution with a hard social history, now sustained by a small number of ageing performers.

### Sohrai and Khovar painting (GI registered)
Done by women of Kurmi, Santal, Munda, Oraon, Ganju, Teli and Prajapati households on the outer and inner walls of their own houses — Sohrai at the cattle festival after the harvest, Khovar on the marriage chamber before a wedding. The motifs are cattle, forest, wheel and plant, and they repeat forms found in the prehistoric rock shelters of the same district, which is the connection Bulu Imam spent decades documenting. Registered as a geographical indication in 2020.
Material: Local earths — white kaolin, red and yellow ochre, black manganese, on a mud plaster
Technique: Sohrai is painted on with a chewed sal or cloth swab in coloured earths, after the harvest. Khovar is subtractive — a coat of white kaolin is laid over a dark manganese ground and, while it is still damp, the white is combed away with a broken comb so the pattern appears as the dark layer beneath. One is added, the other is removed.

### Paitkar scroll painting (GI-worthy)
Practised by Chitrakar families in a handful of villages, with Amadubi the surviving centre. Subjects run from the Ramayana and Krishna cycles to Santal creation narratives and the journey of the soul after death. Closely related to the Jadopatia tradition of Santal Pargana. Very few working painters remain.
Material: Handmade paper and cloth, natural pigment
Technique: Painted in horizontal frames on a long scroll, unrolled and sung frame by frame.

### Seraikela Chhau masks (GI-worthy)
Made by hereditary Sutradhar households in Seraikela town for the Chaitra Parva dance and, increasingly, for sale. The mask is a functioning instrument — its weight and balance determine what the dancer can do.
Material: Clay mould, layered paper, cloth, mineral paint
Technique: A clay master form is built, layers of paper and cloth pasted over it and dried, the shell lifted off, smoothed and painted. The face is finished with a deliberately neutral expression so that head angle and lighting can supply the emotion.

### Lac work (GI-worthy)
Jharkhand produces most of India's lac. It is an insect resin harvested twice a year from host trees, and the same material supplies bangles, sealing wax, shellac and traditional inlay. The national institute for lac and natural resins is at Namkum, near Ranchi.
Material: Lac resin from Kerria lacca, farmed on kusum and palas trees
Technique: Resin melted, coloured, rolled and worked into bangles, beads and inlay.

### Bamboo and sabai grass work
Grain bins, mats, fish traps, winnowing fans and rope. Sabai grass rope from the Singhbhum and Odisha border villages is a cash crop as much as a craft material.
Material: Bamboo, sabai grass, siali fibre
Technique: Splitting, coiling and plaiting.

### Bell metal and Dhokra casting
Practised by Malhar and Tanti caster households, mostly for ritual lamps, measuring bowls and figures. It is the same technique as Bastar's registered Dhokra, without the registration and with a smoother finish.
Material: Brass and bronze scrap, beeswax, clay
Technique: Lost-wax casting, with the mould broken to release each piece.

### Tasar reeling and weaving (GI-worthy)
A forest-based sericulture — cocoons are reared on standing trees rather than in sheds. The finished cloth often leaves the region undyed and is dyed and finished elsewhere, which is where the margin goes.
Material: Antheraea mylitta cocoons reared on arjun and asan
Technique: Forest rearing, hand or machine reeling, pit-loom weaving.

### Stone and wood carving
Grave and memorial stones, house posts, and the carved wooden figure-necks of Santal banam fiddles. The memorial stones set at Santal burial grounds are the region's least-photographed sculpture tradition.
Material: Local stone, sal and gamhar timber
Technique: Direct carving, with no joinery in the ritual pieces.

## Folk songs

### Sarhul and Jadur songs (Kurukh, Mundari, Sadri)
The sal blossom, the marriage of earth and sun, and the petition for rain. Sung in procession between the sarna grove and the village dancing ground.
Sung at: Sarhul, in Chaitra

### Baha songs (Santali)
The first sal and mahua flowers of the year, which may not be used or worn until the naeke has offered them. Sung with the tamak' and tumdak' pair setting the pattern.
Sung at: Baha, in Phalgun

### Sohrai songs (Santali, Khortha, Kurmali)
Cattle — their washing, oiling, garlanding and driving over a threshold. The songs are addressed to the animals as much as about them, and are sung by the same women who paint the walls that week.
Sung at: Sohrai, after the harvest

### Karam songs (Sadri, Khortha, Kurmali, Santali)
The Karam brother-and-sister narrative, sung all night around a planted karam branch by two answering groups of unmarried women.
Sung at: Karam, in Bhado

### Tusu gaan (Kurmali, Khortha, Bangla)
Tusu, addressed as a daughter of the household who is looked after for a month and then set adrift on the river with her decorated chaudal. Composed fresh each year, and the verses regularly comment on the year just passed.
Sung at: The month of Poush, ending at Makar Sankranti
Shared across the plateau's eastern rim with Purulia and Bankura, and the single most productive living song-composition tradition in the region.

### Jhumair (Sadri, Khortha, Kurmali)
Work, courtship, absence and return, in short verses set to the mandar. Mardana and janani jhumair are distinguished by who dances rather than by subject.
Sung at: Any gathering at the akhra

### Domkach (Nagpuri, Khortha)
Parody and licensed obscenity, performed by the women of the household for each other with roles taken across gender. Shared with Magadh and Bhojpur.
Sung at: Weddings, after the baraat has left

### Jadopatia chakshudan song (Santali)
The journey of the departed, sung by the scroll painter as he unrolls the painting, with the eye of the figure left unfinished until the family pays. A ritual, a performance and a transaction at once.
Sung at: After a death

## Dialect and oral traditions

Three language families in one settlement pattern, which is rare anywhere. Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kharia belong to the Munda branch of Austroasiatic — related to Khasi and to languages of mainland Southeast Asia, not to anything else nearby. Kurukh, the Oraon language, is Dravidian, with its nearest relative Malto in the Rajmahal hills a hundred and fifty kilometres away and nothing in between. Sadri, Khortha, Kurmali and Panch Pargania are Indo-Aryan. Sadri is the link language that lets all of them trade, and it is also the language that migration carried out of the region — the tea-garden communities of Assam and the Dooars speak it as a first language today. Santali is the region's great counter-example to language loss — it is in the Eighth Schedule, it has a purpose-built script, and it is taught in schools in three states.

### Santali — Austroasiatic, Munda
The most widely spoken Munda language anywhere. Written in Ol Chiki, and also in Devanagari, Bangla, Odia and Latin script depending on where its speakers live. Added to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003.

### Mundari — Austroasiatic, Munda
The Munda language of the Ranchi plateau and Khunti. Its verb morphology, which can pack an entire clause into one word, is a standard reference case in descriptive linguistics.

### Ho — Austroasiatic, Munda
Spoken across Kolhan and into Odisha's Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar. Written in Warang Chiti, a script devised for it by Lako Bodra in the mid twentieth century.

### Kurukh — Dravidian, North
The Oraon language, and one of only two Dravidian languages spoken this far north — the other, Malto, is spoken in the Rajmahal hills at the plateau's north-eastern edge. Their separation is the strongest single piece of evidence for a Dravidian presence in eastern India before Indo-Aryan.

### Kharia — Austroasiatic, Munda
Spoken in Simdega and Gumla, and one of the region's smaller and more endangered languages.

### Sadri (Nagpuri) — Indo-Aryan, Bihari group
The plateau's lingua franca — a market and inter-community language that has become a mother tongue for many Sadan households, and the shared language of the tea-garden communities of Assam and the Dooars.

### Khortha, Kurmali and Panch Pargania — Indo-Aryan, Bihari group
The rim speeches — Khortha across the Hazaribagh and Dhanbad uplands, Kurmali on the Bengal-facing east, Panch Pargania south-east of Ranchi. All three carry heavy Munda substrate vocabulary.

#### Indigenous terminology

- **Sarna**: The sacred grove — a stand of the original sal forest left uncleared beside a village, in which the village deities are seated and no tree may be cut. Also the name used for the religion practised in it.
- **Jaher and jaher era** (ᱡᱟᱦᱮᱨ): The Santali term for the grove, and Jaher Era, the goddess who lives in it, worshipped alongside Marang Buru, the great mountain.
- **Bonga**: Santali and Mundari for a spirit or deity — of a grove, a hill, a stream, a house or an ancestor. Ritual life is transactional with bongas rather than devotional towards them.
- **Naeke and pahan**: The village priest — naeke among the Santal, pahan among the Munda and Oraon. He conducts the grove sacrifice, fixes the festival dates and, at Sarhul, reads the water pots for the coming monsoon.
- **Manjhi haram**: The Santal village headman, working with a council of named officers — paranik, jog manjhi, godet — each with a defined role at weddings, disputes and hunts.
- **Munda and manki**: The Ho and Munda system of village headman (munda) and cluster headman (manki), formally recognised in Kolhan since the nineteenth century and still functioning.
- **Parha**: The Oraon confederation of villages — a standing inter-village council with its own head, its own flag and its own jurisdiction over disputes between member villages.
- **Khuntkatti**: The tenure in which the descendants of a village's original forest-clearing lineage hold its land collectively. Its defence was the central demand of Birsa Munda's movement, and it is written into the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908.
- **Ulgulan** (ᱩᱞᱜᱩᱞᱟᱱ): Mundari for "the great tumult" — the name of Birsa Munda's rising of 1899–1900, and now a general word in the region's political vocabulary.
- **Hul**: Santali for insurrection, used specifically of the rising of 1855. Hul Diwas is observed on 30 June.
- **Handia and ranu**: Rice beer, and the pressed herbal starter cake that ferments it. A ranu recipe is inherited, and the difference between two households' handia is the difference between two ranu recipes.
- **Akhra**: The village dancing ground — a levelled open space, usually under a tree, that is also where meetings are held and disputes heard. Every village has one and it is maintained collectively.
- **Dhumkuria and gitiora**: The Oraon and Munda youth dormitories, in which the unmarried young of a village slept, worked and learnt song, dance and adult roles under their own officers. The northern counterpart of Bastar's ghotul, and, like it, now almost gone.
- **Rugra and putka**: Wild puffball mushrooms of sal root zones, appearing days after the first monsoon storm and impossible to cultivate.
- **Jharkhand**: "The forest tract" — jhar, thicket, plus khand, a region. The name appears in inscriptions and land records for centuries before it became the name of a state in 2000.

#### Sayings

- "Johar" — literally: A greeting — The standard greeting across Santal, Munda, Ho and Oraon country, used in place of namaste, and shared with the Gondi-speaking belt to the south-west. It is now also a deliberate marker of Adivasi identity.
- "Abua disum, abua raij" — literally: Our country, our rule — The Mundari slogan of Birsa Munda's movement of 1899–1900, still the most quoted phrase in the region's historical vocabulary.
- "Sarna dhorom" — literally: The Sarna religion — The self-description used by those who worship in the sacred grove, and the term at the centre of a long-standing demand for a separate religion code in the census, which currently offers no such option.

## Places

### Ranchi, Ranchi
The plateau's capital at about 650 m, cool enough that it served as the summer seat of the Bihar administration. The Tribal Research Institute museum at Morabadi, the Sarna sthal at Siramtoli that fills at Sarhul, and the ring of falls within a two-hour drive are the reasons to stop rather than pass through.
Best time: October–March

### Netarhat, Latehar
A sal-covered Pat highland at about 1,100 m, the highest inhabited point on the plateau, with sunrise and sunset viewpoints and a residential school founded in 1954 that is a regional institution in its own right.
Best time: October–March

### Betla National Park and Palamau Tiger Reserve, Latehar and Palamu
Sal and bamboo forest on the western plateau, part of the first group of tiger reserves declared in 1973. Two Chero-era forts stand inside the forest, which is unusual — most Indian parks have no ruins in them at all.
Best time: November–March

### Hundru Falls, Ranchi
The Subarnarekha drops about 98 m over a granite step some 45 km from Ranchi — the plateau's most visited fall, reached down a long flight of steps, and worth nothing at all between March and June.
Best time: August–November

### Dassam and Jonha Falls, Ranchi
Dassam on the Kanchi, a broad curtain of about 40 m; Jonha, also called Gautamdhara, a hanging-valley fall reached by a few hundred steps with a small Buddhist shrine at the top. Both are half-day trips from Ranchi.
Best time: August–November

### Lodh Falls, Latehar
The Burha river falls about 143 m off the Pat highland edge — the highest fall on the plateau and the least visited of them, because the approach is a forest road.
Best time: September–December

### Parasnath Hill (Shikharji), Giridih
At about 1,350 m the highest point in the region, and among the most important Jain pilgrimage sites anywhere — twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras are held to have attained liberation here. Pilgrims walk a circuit of roughly 27 km over the ridge and its shrine clusters, most of them barefoot and most of them starting before dawn. The hill also carries the sacred sites of the Santal community who live on its slopes.
Best time: October–March
Getting there: Parasnath railway station on the Delhi–Howrah main line, then road to Madhuban.

### Baidyanath Dham, Deoghar, Deoghar
One of the twelve jyotirlinga shrines, and the destination of the Shravani Mela, when pilgrims carry Ganga water on shoulder-poles about 105 km on foot from Sultanganj through July and August. Administratively this is Santhal Pargana; culturally it belongs to the Anga and Magadh pilgrimage world that feeds it, and it sits on the plateau's edge rather than in its Santal core.
Best time: October–March, unless the Shravani Mela is the point

### Hazaribagh and the Sohrai villages, Hazaribagh
The painted-house belt. Villages in and around Barkagaon and Bhelwara carry Sohrai and Khovar work on their outer walls, repainted each year, and the Sanskriti museum in Hazaribagh town holds the documentation and a standing collection.
Best time: November–January, when the Sohrai painting is fresh

### Isco rock shelters, Hazaribagh
Painted rock shelters in the Barkagaon valley whose motifs — concentric forms, horned animals, plant and wheel figures — recur in the Sohrai and Khovar painting done on house walls a few kilometres away. The continuity is the site's real interest.

### Maluti temples, Dumka
Around seventy-two surviving terracotta temples of an estimated hundred and eight, packed into one small village near the Bengal border, built by the Baj Basanta family between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Their brick plaques carry Ramayana scenes, hunting scenes and everyday village life, in the same idiom as the Bishnupur and Birbhum temples across the border.

### Seraikela, Seraikela-Kharsawan
A small former court town on the Kharkai, and the home of the masked Chhau that carries its name. The mask workshops, the palace and the Chaitra Parva ground are all within a few streets.
Best time: April, for Chaitra Parva

### Amadubi, East Singhbhum
The surviving Paitkar scroll-painting village, where a handful of Chitrakar households still paint and sing the scrolls. Now run partly as a rural tourism village.

### Saranda forest and the Kolhan ridges, West Singhbhum
One of the largest continuous sal forests in Asia, on banded iron formation ridges that are among the oldest exposed rock on the planet. Ho villages under the Munda-Manki system sit throughout it.
Best time: November–February

### Jamshedpur, East Singhbhum
Founded in 1907 at the meeting of the Subarnarekha and the Kharkai and named for Jamsetji Tata in 1919 — India's first planned industrial town, laid out with tree-lined arterials before the houses were built. The reason it is here is the iron ore and the water, both within a short radius.

### Bhognadih and Ulihatu, Sahibganj and Khunti
The village where Sido and Kanhu Murmu called the Santal Hul on 30 June 1855, and the village where Birsa Munda was born in 1875. Both are memorial sites now, and both are ordinary working villages the rest of the year.

## Festivals

- **Sarhul** (Chaitra Shukla Tritiya (March–April)): The plateau's principal festival, observed by Oraon, Munda and Sadan households. Sal blossom is offered in the sarna grove by the pahan, who also fills earthen pots with water at night and reads the fall in level next morning as a forecast for the monsoon. Nothing of the new season may be eaten or worn before the offering. Processions run from the grove to the akhra with jadur dancing.
- **Baha** (Phalgun (February–March)): The Santal flower festival, at which the naeke offers the first sal and mahua blossom at the jaher. Until he has, no one may pick, wear or use them. Danced with the tamak' and tumdak' pair.
- **Sohrai and Bandna** (Kartik Amavasya, at the harvest (October–November)): The cattle festival — animals washed, oiled, horns painted, garlanded and driven over a threshold, with songs addressed to them. It is also the week the Sohrai wall painting is done. Kurmi households call it Bandna; the ritual is the same.
- **Karam** (Bhadrapad Ekadashi (August–September)): A branch of the karam tree is cut, brought in procession and planted in the courtyard, and unmarried women dance and sing round it through the night while the Karam story is told. Observed across communities and across the plateau's languages.
- **Tusu Parab and Makar** (The month of Poush, closing at Makar Sankranti in January): A month-long household observance in which Tusu, treated as a daughter, is kept and sung to nightly, then carried out on a decorated chaudal frame and immersed. New Tusu verses are composed every year, and the fairs on the closing day are the largest winter gatherings on the eastern rim.
- **Hul Diwas** (30 June): The anniversary of the Santal Hul of 1855, observed at Bhognadih and across Santhal Pargana with processions, song and public readings.
- **Chaitra Parva** (April, around Chaitra Sankranti): The Seraikela Chhau festival — several nights of masked dance, preceded by weeks of ritual observance by the performers. Purulia and Mayurbhanj hold their own Chaitra festivals in the same fortnight.
- **Mage Parab** (Magh (January)): The principal Ho festival of Kolhan, marking the close of the agricultural year, with a village fast, a sacrifice at the sacred grove, and several days of feasting and dancing after it.
- **Shravani Mela** (Shravan (July–August)): The Deoghar pilgrimage, in which lakhs of walkers carry Ganga water from Sultanganj on shoulder-poles to the Baidyanath shrine. It belongs to the plateau's northern fringe and draws overwhelmingly from the plains.
- **Jani Shikar** (At long intervals, traditionally once in twelve years): The Oraon women's hunt, in which women dress in men's clothing and go out with the hunting party, held in memory of the defence of Rohtasgarh. It is observed rarely and its dates are set by the parha councils.
- **Dasae** (Ashwin (September–October)): A Santal observance in which men travel village to village in groups, singing and dancing and receiving grain, running alongside the Dashain and Durga observances of the plateau towns.

## People

- **Sido Murmu and Kanhu Murmu** (Active 1855) — Rebellion: Brothers from Bhognadih who called the Santal Hul on 30 June 1855, mobilising tens of thousands of Santals across the Damin-i-Koh. Their brothers Chand and Bhairav and their sisters Phulo and Jhano are named in the same accounts. The rising was suppressed by 1856, and the Santhal Parganas were constituted as a separate administrative district in its aftermath.
- **Birsa Munda** (1875–1900) — Religious reformer and rebellion: Born at Ulihatu in the Ranchi plateau. Preached a reformed practice among the Munda, was recognised by followers as Dharti Aba, and led the Ulgulan of 1899–1900 in defence of khuntkatti land tenure. He died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900 at twenty-five. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which still governs land transfer on the plateau, followed from the movement.
- **Raghunath Murmu** (1905–1982) — Script and language: Devised Ol Chiki, a thirty-letter alphabet for Santali, in 1925, and spent his life writing primers, grammars, plays and poetry in it and teaching it village by village. It is one of very few purpose-built scripts anywhere that its intended community actually adopted; Santali entered the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003.
- **Lako Bodra** (1919–1986) — Script and language: Devised Warang Chiti for the Ho language and campaigned for its use, a generation after Raghunath Murmu did the same for Santali. Ho is now taught in Warang Chiti in parts of Kolhan and Odisha.
- **Jaipal Singh Munda** (1903–1970) — Sport and public life: From Khunti; captained India's hockey team to the Olympic gold medal at Amsterdam in 1928, and later sat in the Constituent Assembly, where he argued the Adivasi case during the drafting of the Constitution.
- **Ram Dayal Munda** (1939–2011) — Linguistics and music: Mundari linguist, ethnomusicologist and Vice-Chancellor of Ranchi University; worked on Munda language documentation in India and the United States, and did as much as anyone to bring Nagpuri and Mundari song onto a public stage as music rather than as folklore.
- **Bulu Imam** (Born 1942) — Documentation and conservation: Recorded the Sohrai and Khovar painting of the Hazaribagh villages from 1991 onward, connected its motifs to the painted rock shelters of the same valley, and set up the Sanskriti museum at Hazaribagh. The geographical indication registered in 2020 rests on that documentation.
- **Mukund Nayak** — Music: A Nagpuri singer and jhumair exponent from the Ranchi plateau who carried Sadri song from the akhra to the recording studio and the concert stage, and trained a generation of performers.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **Jharcraft emporium**, Ranchi: Tasar silk, lac work, bamboo, Sohrai painting on paper and cloth The state handicraft and handloom outlet, and the easiest place to see the range and set a price benchmark before buying in a village.
- **Sanskriti Museum and Art Gallery**, Hazaribagh: Sohrai and Khovar painting, and the documentation behind it Bulu Imam's collection and archive. Also the practical way to arrange a visit to painted villages in the Barkagaon valley in the weeks after Sohrai.
- **Seraikela mask workshops**, Seraikela: Chhau masks, made by hereditary Sutradhar households Buy the working weight rather than the light tourist version if you want the object the dance actually uses.
- **Amadubi Paitkar village**, Amadubi, East Singhbhum: Painted scrolls, sold by the painters A handful of households; call ahead through the village tourism committee rather than arriving unannounced.
- **Tribal Research Institute Museum**, Morabadi, Ranchi: Standing collections of Munda, Santal, Ho and Oraon material culture Not a shop, but the best single orientation to what you will then see in villages.
- **Kuchai tasar cluster**, Kuchai, Seraikela-Kharsawan: Reeled tasar yarn and undyed woven cloth Rearing runs on forest trees; the reeling and weaving happen in the village.
- **Deoghar temple lanes**, Deoghar, since The shops predate the railway: Peda, and the pilgrimage supply trade

## How to reach

**By air:** Birsa Munda Airport, Ranchi (IXR); Deoghar Airport (DGH); Sonari Airport, Jamshedpur (IXW)

**By rail:** Ranchi (RNC); Tatanagar (TATA); Dhanbad (DHN); Parasnath (PNME); Jasidih (JSME); Bokaro Steel City (BKSC)

**By road:** The Grand Trunk Road (NH 19) runs along the plateau's northern rim through Barhi and Dhanbad, Ranchi–Jamshedpur, the plateau's busiest internal corridor, Ranchi–Hazaribagh, climbing the plateau step through the Chatra and Ramgarh country, Ranchi–Netarhat and on to Palamau, the western forest route, Ranchi–Dumka and on into Santhal Pargana

**By water:** Ganga ferry crossings at Sahibganj, at the plateau's north-eastern foot

**Getting around:** Buses and shared vehicles radiate from Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Dhanbad and Dumka. Distances are short and slow — the plateau is stepped, and every road that changes level does so through a ghat section. For the falls and the painted villages, a hired car for the day is the only practical arrangement.

## The small things

### A script invented in 1925 that people actually use
Raghunath 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 script
Lako 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 subtraction
Sohrai 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 village
A 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 forecast
At 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 beers
Handia 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 mutton
Rugra 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 expression
The 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 gardens
From 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-four
Twenty 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 village
Maluti 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 rent
Lac 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 town
The 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.

## Cross-border corridors

### Tea Garden Labour Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Bangladesh

People, and with them Sadri, jhumair dance, the mandar drum, handia brewing, Karam and Sohrai observance and the sarna. Recruitment from this plateau for the Assam and Dooars tea gardens ran from the 1860s and moved Santal, Munda, Oraon, Kharia and Sadan families in very large numbers. Their descendants form Assam's tea-garden communities and much of the Dooars labour population.

Divergence: In Assam the several languages of origin collapsed into Sadri as a single community tongue and the community is administratively "Tea Tribes" rather than Scheduled Tribes, which is a different legal position from the one their relatives on the plateau hold. Karam and Sohrai are observed there on garden schedules rather than on village ones, and jhumair has picked up Assamese melodic habits.

### Ol Chiki and Santali Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Nepal, Bangladesh

Santali, its Ol Chiki script, the jaher grove, the tamak' and tumdak' drum pair, and the Baha and Sohrai calendar — across the whole eastern Santal belt and into the Nepal Terai and northern Bangladesh.

Divergence: West Bengal and Odisha teach Santali in Ol Chiki alongside Bangla and Odia scripts; Bangladesh's and Nepal's Santals mostly write it in Bangla or Devanagari. Ol Chiki literacy therefore maps administrative borders more than it maps speech.

### Chhau Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha

Chhau — one dance system in three schools, all performed around Chaitra Sankranti, all drawn from a martial movement vocabulary, and all inscribed together on the UNESCO Representative List in 2010.

Divergence: Seraikela uses a small refined mask and a lyrical solo repertoire; Purulia uses a large, high-relief mask and plays Ramayana and Mahabharata episodes with acrobatics; Mayurbhanj dances without a mask at all, which shifts the expressive work back to the face.

### Tusu and Karam Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Assam

The Tusu observance of Poush and the Karam observance of Bhado, with their song forms — both composed fresh each year, both sung antiphonally by women, and both running across the Kurmali and Khortha-speaking eastern rim into Purulia, Bankura and Mayurbhanj.

Divergence: In Purulia and Bankura Tusu has become a large public fair with competitive chaudal-making; on the Jharkhand plateau it stays more domestic. Karam travelled with labour migration and is now observed in the Assam tea gardens as well.

### Sacred Grove Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya

The practice of leaving a stand of original forest uncleared beside a settlement and seating the community's deities in it, with a named priest, a fixed calendar and a prohibition on cutting.

Divergence: Here it is the sarna or jaher and the priest is the pahan or naeke; in Meghalaya's Khasi hills the same institution is the law kyntang with its own lineage of custodians; in Odisha's Munda and Ho villages it carries the Santal and Ho names. The prohibition is identical everywhere; the theology is not.

### Harvest and Marriage Wall-Painting Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha

Wall painting done by women at two fixed points in the year — harvest and marriage — in local earths, on the walls of their own houses, with motifs shared with much older rock art in the same districts.

Divergence: Hazaribagh's Khovar is combed away rather than painted on and stays on the wall; Mithila's kohbar, for the same marriage chamber, is painted on and has largely migrated to paper and a commercial market. Hazaribagh's tradition holds the geographical indication; Mithila's holds the gallery trade.

### Jain Pilgrimage Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, Bihar

The circuit of Shikharji on Parasnath hill with Pawapuri, Rajgir and the Magadh sites — walked and travelled as a single pilgrimage, and served by the same trust network and the same dharamshala system.

Divergence: The Magadh sites sit on the plain and are approached as temple towns; Shikharji is a 27 km barefoot ridge walk, and the difference between the two halves of the circuit is entirely a difference of terrain.

### Sal Belt Foodway Corridor
Spans: Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh

Mahua, sal seed, chironji, tendu, bamboo shoot, wild puffball mushrooms and red weaver ants — the same gathering calendar that runs west through Bastar and south into the Odisha uplands, with rice beer at the centre of the ritual economy everywhere along it.

Divergence: The plateau ferments rice into handia with a compound herbal ranu starter; Bastar brews landa and, uniquely, drinks fresh salfi palm sap. Odisha's Mayurbhanj holds the geographical indication for red weaver-ant chutney; nobody on this plateau has one for it.

## Sources

- [Jharkhand Tourism — official portal](https://tourism.jharkhand.gov.in/)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Census of India 2011 — language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)
- [UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Chhau dance, inscribed 2010](https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/chhau-dance-00337)
- [Anthropological Survey of India](https://ansi.gov.in/)
- [ICAR–Indian Institute of Natural Resins and Gums, Ranchi](https://iinrg.icar.gov.in/)
- [Archaeological Survey of India](https://asi.nic.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._