Ranchi

01Dharti Aba

Birsa Munda, born at Ulihatu in 1875, led the Munda ulgulan, the great tumult, against the landlords, moneylenders and the Company’s forest laws that had taken the Mundas’ khuntkatti lands. His followers called him Dharti Aba, father of the earth. He taught a return to the old ways of worship, an end to drink, and refusal of the rents imposed on them. After the fighting at Dombari hill in January 1900 he was captured in the Jamkopai forest in February and lodged in Ranchi jail. He died there on 9 June 1900, at about twenty-five; the British said it was cholera. The old jail where he was held was turned into the Bhagwan Birsa Munda Memorial Park and freedom fighters’ museum, opened on 15 November 2021, his birth anniversary, which the country now keeps as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas.

02Temples on the hills

The Nagvanshi chiefs of Chhotanagpur ruled this plateau for centuries. In 1691 Thakur Ani Nath Shahdeo of Barkagarh built a Jagannath temple on a hill south of the town, modelled on Puri, and its Rath Yatra still draws the whole region each Ashadh. On Ranchi hill in the town stands the Pahari Mandir, a Shiva temple where the tricolour is flown, and local memory holds that freedom fighters were hanged on that hill under British rule. Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar on 15 November 2000, Birsa’s birth anniversary, with Ranchi as its capital.

The life of this place