Journey
Jharkhand — the Chotanagpur plateau
A plateau of sal forest, iron and coal that carried a nine-hundred-year dynasty, two of the largest Adivasi risings in Indian history, the most important Jain tirtha in the country, a village with seventy-two terracotta temples, and two painting traditions still practised. Almost none of it appears in a standard account of Indian regional history.
Stops (14)
- Navratangarh · Nagvanshi capital, c. 1610–1717
The Nagvanshi seat at Doisa in Gumla: a five-storey palace, a fort, temples and tanks on a low hill, abandoned in 1717 when the capital moved to Palkot. The dynasty ruled Chotanagpur for some nine hundred years and this is its best surviving work — the only multi-storey pre-colonial secular building in the state, unprotected and overgrown until the 2000s.
- Sammed Shikharjī / Parasnath · the Jain summit
Sammed Shikharji on Parasnath hill, where twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras are held to have attained liberation — more than at any other site, which makes the highest hill in Jharkhand the most important Jain tirtha in India. Pilgrims walk a circuit of some twenty-seven kilometres over the summits, barefoot, in a night.
- Deoghar Baidyanāth · the jyotirlinga
Deoghar's Baidyanath, one of the twelve jyotirlingas and also counted among the Shakta pithas, which makes it a rare overlap of the two great enumerations at one temple. The Shravani Mela brings pilgrims a hundred kilometres on foot from Sultanganj carrying Ganges water, in one of the largest walking pilgrimages in the country.
- Chhinnamasta, Rajrappa · Chhinnamasta
A temple to the goddess who holds her own severed head, at the confluence where the Bhairavi falls into the Damodar. Chhinnamasta is one of the ten Mahavidyas and almost never receives a temple of this size, because the iconography is about self-offering rather than protection. Santhal and Kurmi worshippers attend alongside Brahmanical ones, and animal sacrifice continues.
- Itkhori · three traditions, one enclosure
Itkhori in Chatra district holds a Bhadrakali temple, a Buddhist stupa faced with a thousand and four small carved Buddhas, and Jain sculpture including a Parshvanatha, all within a few metres. Local tradition attaches the name both to Mahavira's mother and to the Buddha's aunt, which is the usual sign of a site several traditions have each explained in their own terms.
- Maluti · seventy-two temples
Maluti in the Santhal Parganas, where seventy-two brick temples of an original hundred and eight survive, faced with terracotta panels of the Ramayana, the Krishna cycle and hunting scenes. Competing branches of the Baj Basanta family built against each other, which is why one village has a hundred and eight temples. Most were derelict until conservation began after 2010.
- Telkupi · drowned 1959
Telkupi's twenty temples of the ninth to twelfth centuries stood on the Damodar and were drowned by the Panchet reservoir. Photographs and plans made under salvage conditions just before the water rose are now most of the record of a whole regional style, and a few spires reappear when the reservoir is low.
- Bhognadih · the Hul, 1855
Bhognadih in the Santhal Parganas, where Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu declared the Hul in June 1855 against debt at compound interest, the police and the revenue officers. Ten thousand assembled and marched on Bhagalpur; martial law followed. The result was the first legislation in India making Adivasi land unsellable to outsiders.
- Lugu Buru · the Santhal origin hill
Lugu Buru in Bokaro, where Santhal tradition places Marang Buru's giving of the social and religious order — in effect the origin place of Santhal religion. The January assembly draws tens of thousands from four states and passes resolutions on language, script and land, so the hill functions as a religious site and a cultural parliament at once.
- Ulihatu / Khunti · the Ulgulan, 1899–1900
The Chotanagpur landscape around Ulihatu and Khunti that carries Birsa Munda's memory. The khuntkatti system — land held by the descendants of the families who cleared the forest, not by individuals — is what the rising was fought over, and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 wrote it into law eight years after he died in Ranchi jail.
- Jadopaṭiā scroll painting · the scroll and the dead
The Jadopatia painters of the Santhal Parganas unroll painted scrolls frame by frame and sing them to Santhal households — above all the Chaksudan pat, shown to a bereaved family and said to restore sight to the dead, for which the painter is paid. The painters are not Santhal but a small artisan community holding a necessary place inside another community's funeral rites.
- Sohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh · Khovar and Sohrai
Khovar, the marriage painting scraped through white slip to the dark earth beneath, and Sohrai, the harvest painting in coloured earths, made on house walls in the Hazaribagh valleys by the women of the household. The motifs match those in the rock shelters a few kilometres away, which is an unbroken visual line rather than an archaeological one.
- Isko & Hazaribagh rock art · the shelters above
The painted rock shelters at Isko and around the Hazaribagh valleys, whose animal and geometric motifs recur in the Khovar and Sohrai paintings in the villages directly below them. It is the only place in India where prehistoric rock art and a living wall-painting practice can be compared in the same valley, and Bulu Imam's surveys recorded both together.
- Chhau, Seraikela and Mayurbhanj · Chhau
The masked martial dance of Seraikela, Mayurbhanj and Purulia, performed at the Chaitra Parva on the spring new year — one tradition across the Jharkhand, Odisha and Bengal borders, with masks at two of the three centres and none at the third. Its vocabulary is a martial-training one rather than a temple one, which is why it stands outside the classical dance lists.