Person · Ol Chiki script inventor
Pandit Raghunath Murmu
Also known as Guru Gomke
Pandit Raghunath Murmu (5 May 1905-1 February 1982) was a Santal schoolteacher from Dandbose village in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha who in 1925, at the age of twenty, created the Ol Chiki alphabet for the Santali language — a thirty-letter phonemic script of pictographic origin that broke Santali's dependence on Devanagari, Bangla and Odia renderings and became the standard script for the only Austroasiatic language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution (added 2003). He founded the Adi Dharam movement to reorganise Santal religion around the Marang Buru creator, wrote more than 150 plays, novels and primers in Ol Chiki, and campaigned for script recognition across Jharkhand, Odisha, Bengal and Assam until his death.
- Date
- 1905–1982
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- Adi Dharam / Mayurbhanj
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Connections (2)
- Life routeDumka
Pandit Raghunath Murmu, the inventor of the Ol Chiki script for Santali in 1925, campaigned through the 1950s and 1960s from Dumka — the headquarters of the Santal Parganas district and the political centre of the Santal homeland — for official recognition of Ol Chiki by the Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal governments. He taught at Rairangpur in Mayurbhanj across the Odisha border but used Dumka as the organising base for his Adi Dharam movement and for the script-adoption campaign that would eventually see Santali added to the Eighth Schedule in 2003.
- CreatedOl Chiki script
Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki alphabet for the Santali language in 1925 at the age of twenty, drawing the thirty letters from the shapes of objects in the Santal natural world — nahar for an axe, laha for a crescent, dapa for a jaw. He wrote more than 150 plays, novels, grammars and primers in the new script, which was adopted as the Santali script by the Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal governments between the 1970s and the 1990s and was recognised in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution for Santali on 22 December 2003 — twenty-one years after Murmu's death.
Sources
Standard biography.
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