Place · district headquarters town · India
Dumka
Dumka in the Santal Parganas was constituted as the headquarters of the Santal Parganas district by the Company in 1855 after the Hul rebellion, as a direct-administered Non-Regulation district under the Santal Parganas Tenancy Act — the first Indian legal instrument to protect Adivasi land from alienation. From the formation of Jharkhand on 15 November 2000 it has been the state's sub-capital and the seat of its upa-rajdhani government offices for the fortnight each year the state cabinet moves to Dumka. Raghunath Murmu, the inventor of the Ol Chiki script for Santali in 1925, was born and taught at Rairangpur across the Odisha border but campaigned for script-recognition from Dumka through the 1950s.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.268, 87.250
Connections (2)
- Site withinMassanjore Dam
Massanjore Dam on the Mayurakshi river sits in Dumka district forty kilometres north of Dumka town, the headquarters of the Santal Parganas and the sub-capital of Jharkhand. The dam, inaugurated in 1955 as the first Colombo Plan irrigation project in India, submerged 144 Santal and Paharia villages in Dumka and Deoghar districts and remains an unsettled displacement grievance of the regional Santal political parties. The reservoir is managed from Dumka under the Mayurakshi Canal Division; the fisheries co-operative is a Dumka-based Santal self-help federation.
- Life routePandit Raghunath Murmu
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.
Sources
Standard reference.
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