While looking for a pair of spectacles at Paul Optical, the name of the locality ? Tharpakhna ? aroused my curiosity. The owner, who has been running the shop for decades, had no clue about what the name of his locality meant. ?Consult a tribal language expert for a research on Ranchi colonies,? said the congenial shop owner.
Not just visitors with scant knowledge of tribal dialects, the name ?Tharpakhna? bewilders many a native of Ranchi as well. On the eastern side of Firayalal crossing in the state capital, Tharapakhna, like the name given to most colonies in Ranchi, is Greek to those with scant knowledge of Mundari and Nagpuria dialects. Like other outsiders, I too couldn?t understand it until Waswi, a journalist-cum-activist who lives near Paul Optical, and some other tribal friends enlightened me.
?Tharpakhna? comes from Mundari ? ?Thara? means standing while ?Pakhna? is stone. This colony dotted with medicine and specs shops, restaurants and high-rises means ?standing stone?. According to the experts, not very long ago, this area was used by the Mundas ? the original settlers of this land ? as a graveyard. Keeping with their tradition, they installed stones bearing the profile of the dead clan member at his burial site.
Tharpakhna has few Mundas today and there is not one such stone to be found. Tribal activists, however, assert that Mundas dominated this area until as recently as the 1950s. How can all signs of Munda habitation vanish in barely 50 years since ?civilisation? happened, paving way for modern shops, restaurants and high-rises? ?We found many etched stones while we were digging to build our house,? Waswi said, ?With a bit of excavation, you will surely hit upon some relics.?
A resourceful mix of the Mundari ?Baria? (two) and ?Hatu? (village) gave us Bariatu. Needless to say, this was a land of two villages dominated by the Munda and Oraon folk sometime ago. Now, a sprawling mini-city with more than three dozen colonies, it plays home to the dikus (outsiders), the budding medicos of Rims and the inmates of the army garrison. Neither the Mundas nor the Oraon have left a trace here.
Doranda ? with landmarks like the High Court, Nepal House, Hotel Ashoka, Yuvaraj Palace ? too, is a mix of Mundari words. ?Durang? means song while ?Da? stands for river ? Doranda is the song of the river. The original settlers, the experts believe, named this area after the river, which now stands reduced to the little drain ? we see in the area today. Only a few decades ago, there was possibly the music of the flowing river wafting through the air. Today, that has been replaced by the stench emanating from the city?s waste.
Karam Toli is a direct derivative of the karma tree held sacred by the tribals. The karma tree there today, a stark sign of the times, is no longer a centre of activity it once was. Kanke, the area famed for its restaurants, apparently, means forest, the root of the tribals. Kanke must have been a dense woodland before the magnificent Holiday Home, Chashm-e-Shahi and the three famous asylums came up.
Beyond the myths, legends and fascinating histories, however, all these places denote the cultural degeneration Jharkhand is going through. ?Civilisation? does not always bring identity crisis along with it. When other state capitals like Bhubaneswar, Lucknow, Hyderabad and, to an extent, even Patna can preserve that tinge of their history and culture, why are we, the ones responsible for Ranchi, not making an earnest effort towards it? Industrialisation and urbanisation are, obviously, welcome in Ranchi like they should be, but if they were planned and structured, the cost of civilisation would not have been as high.
