Chota Nagpur Plateau · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Places worth visiting in Chota Nagpur Plateau — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (16)