In the low, forested country west of Rairangpur, in what was then the princely state of Mayurbhanj, lies the small Santal settlement of Dandbose — a hamlet also remembered locally as Dahardih. On 5 May 1905 a boy was born there to Nandlal Murmu, the village headman and record-keeper, and his wife Salma. The child was first called Chunu; at his naming ceremony he was given the name Raghunath. Dandbose was then an ordinary cluster of mud-walled houses in a corner of Odisha that few outsiders visited. Today it is a place of pilgrimage for Santali speakers across Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Bangladesh and Nepal, because the boy born there gave one of India's oldest living languages an alphabet of its own.

Schooling in Somebody Else's Alphabet

Raghunath began his education at about seven, at the village-level school at Gambharia, where lessons were conducted in Odia. He moved on to the primary school at Bahalda around 1914 and later to the high school at Baripada, the capital of the Mayurbhanj state. He passed his matriculation in 1928. From there he took a distinctly practical turn, apprenticing at the Baripada power house and picking up industrial and technical training in Bengal — an unusual path for a young Santal man of his generation, and one that gave him a lifelong interest in machines, printing and craft.

The experience of being schooled entirely through borrowed alphabets shaped everything he did afterwards. Santali is a Munda language, with a sound system that sits awkwardly inside the Odia, Bengali, Devanagari and Roman scripts that missionaries, administrators and scholars had all tried to force it into. Its distinctive checked consonants and its vowel shadings were flattened or lost. Worse, the choice of script varied from province to province, so that Santali written in Odisha looked nothing like Santali written in Bengal, and a single people found itself fragmented on the page. Murmu concluded that a language carried in four alien scripts was a language quietly being dissolved.

An Alphabet Drawn from Santal Life

His answer took shape from around 1925, worked out in his own time and, by tradition, partly in the quiet of the Kapi-Buru forest. He called it Ol Chiki — a name that can be read as writing and sign, the drawing of a shape that carries a sound. The system he arrived at has thirty letters: six vowels and twenty-four consonants, written left to right, with additional marks for nasalisation and for the glottal features Santali needs.

Its genius lies in the shapes. Rather than adapt existing letterforms, Murmu built each character to echo an object or gesture from everyday Santal life — a hill, a plough, a bird, a hand, a leaf, the act of drinking. A learner unfamiliar with any writing at all could be taught the alphabet through the world already in front of them. This was not decoration but pedagogy: Murmu was designing for adults who had never held a pen, in villages with no schools. Around 1935 he set up a small press so that primers, storybooks and song collections could actually reach those villages, understanding that a script without printed matter is only a proposal.

Playwright, Publisher and Organiser

Murmu was never only a designer of letters. He earned his living for years as a teacher, working at the Baripada technical institute and at schools in Badamtalia, Gambharia, Bahalda and Rairangpur, and he wrote prolifically — by common estimate more than a hundred and fifty plays, stories, poems, novels and instructional works. His first published book, a collection of Santali songs, appeared in 1936. His first play, staged in 1942, told of divine figures bringing the Ol Chiki letters into the world, a piece of deliberate myth-making designed to give the new script the emotional weight of something ancestral rather than something invented last decade.

He toured constantly, teaching the alphabet in courtyards and at fairs, and he built institutions to outlast him. He founded a body to defend and formalise the ancestral Sarna faith of the Santals, and in 1953 an Adivasi cultural association that later became the Adivasi Socio-Educational and Cultural Association, or ASECA. It was ASECA, spread across state boundaries, that carried Ol Chiki forward for decades after his death, running night classes, printing textbooks and lobbying governments.

Guru Gomke

Recognition arrived slowly and mostly from his own people. In 1956, at an all-India Sarna gathering at Karandih near Jamshedpur, the Adivasi leader Jaipal Singh Munda conferred on him the title Guru Gomke, the great teacher, and the name stuck so firmly that many Santals know him by no other. Ranchi University awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1979 the government of West Bengal honoured him with a medal. He received acknowledgement from Odisha's literary academy. He died on 1 February 1982, aged seventy-six, having spent nearly six decades on a single unglamorous project.

What Dandbose Gave India

The vindication came twenty-one years after his death. In 2003 Santali was written into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, with Ol Chiki as its script — a decision that opened the way for Santali-medium schooling, official examinations, literary prizes and state patronage. Ol Chiki has since been given its own place in international character-encoding standards, so the alphabet a village teacher sketched in the 1920s can now be typed on a phone. Odisha has made his birthday an optional public holiday, and colleges, a medical college and countless schools carry his name.

Murmu's achievement is easy to state and hard to overstate. Very few individuals anywhere have successfully created a writing system that a living community actually adopted; fewer still have seen it become constitutionally recognised. He did it without wealth, without institutional backing, and largely without the notice of the country he was enriching — starting from a hamlet in Mayurbhanj that most maps did not bother to name.