In his book Chota Nagpore, A Little-known Province of the Empire (1903), British administrator-writer F.B. Bradley-Birt narrates an endearing story about meeting a native of Hazaribagh upon reaching the plateau. During the course of their conversation, the native claims, much to Bradley-Birt’s amusement, that the motto, inspired by Kashmir, which the emperors in Delhi had engraved on their giant archways could very well hold true for Hazaribagh: If there is a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here. I am selfishly inclined to believe that the native whom Bradley-Birt met was me in my previous birth. Not only me, but also my townsmen—each one of them—for nothing binds this plateau town together more than the belief we put in its beauty. For Bradley-Birt, it was a kind of “pardonable pride”.
It was with this “pardonable pride” that in the autumn of 2010, I started travelling across Hazaribagh. I was familiar with the town: its streets that once, under the lost design of Officer Boddom, “intersected at ninety degrees”, and its buildings that are always a work in progress, their bricks exposed, desisting the final coat of cement. There was not much for me in the town to explore—in the sense of a Travel XP show—at least in 2010, so instead of travelling into the town, I travelled outwards into the larger district: a centrifugal movement.
Return journeys
Because I was born and grew up in Hazaribagh, I could never really go there. I could only—and always— return . This change in verb, in the context of Hazaribagh town , took away from me something crucial: the sense of discovery, which I usually feel when visiting other places. In the town, there was nothing to dramatically unearth when I was a second year student at Delhi University. And because I gravitated more towards the landscape, the apparent “naturalness” of places, it was to see this “nature” that I moved to the district, the countryside of Hazaribagh.
We live in the age of “pics or didn’t happen”. The late John Berger reminds us of the importance of sight, “seeing comes before words”. So, while in metropolitan literary circles I uncomfortably carry the tag of a poet, in Hazaribagh I turn into a photographer. No, to be fair, Hazaribagh turns me into a photographer. In 2010, if you googled Hazaribagh, the first few photos, which should have been accurate, were of either Ranchi’s Jonha Falls or of an altogether different Himalayan town. Both are beautiful places, but both are not Hazaribagh.
The travel industry on the web, concerned with content creation, is unequipped to distinguish photographic facts from photographic hearsay, especially when it comes to small-town India. One googles, one finds, one writes. Without going to the place, one compiles a travelogue. Easy.
To counter this inaccuracy was born Tales of Hazaribagh, which I describe as “a photographic archive of Hazaribagh’s most stunning places”. The adjective “stunning” constitutes three distinct ways of looking at the region: natural, cultural, and historical. In 2010, with a 3.2 megapixel camera-phone and my mother’s Alto, I began touring the district and posted the first entry on a blogspot blog: Salparni. Other places followed during successive vacations: Ichak, Chundru, Padma, and so on. As the camera in my phone graduated from 3.2 MP to 5 MP to 8 MP to 13 MP to a DSLR over the course of these seven years, several of the earlier photographs were lost and several more were taken. Propelled into travelling by nostalgia, I gradually became interested in the history of Hazaribagh itself: how the region came to be what it is now. I read colonial records, the gazetteers, travel accounts, anything that I could find. My two mentors from Hazaribagh, the inimitable environmentalist and historian Bulu Imam and the adroit megalithic researcher Subhashis Das became my primary sources. The verb “return” expanded its scope and became a methodology. The places were continuously revisited. The blog became a website. The hobby of documentation turned into a heritage archiving project.
Crippled by neglect
The first major recognition for Tales of Hazaribagh came from Britain. For in 2013, during the final year of my M.A., a senior studying for his Ph.D. in the U.K. told the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham about the website and asked me to write to them. I did, and over a chain of emails, explained what I was doing and why exactly.
The internet proved again that, unlike print, it was a medium that provided a world-wide audience and ensured longevity without much financial investment (you only need to renew the domain if you know your tricks). Long story short, the association between University of Durham and Tales of Hazaribagh took off, and since 2014, I have held an annual lecture every year where I talk about Hazaribagh, its heritage, and the challenges it faces.
The challenges are many. Hazaribagh, after Dhanbad, accounts for the second largest coal reserves in India, and mining activities have posed, and continue to pose, a serious threat not only to the plateau’s forest cover but to the very existence of its archaeological sites: rock art panels, megalithic complexes, and the cultural heritage of Sohrai and Khovar art forms through the displacement of villages. Policy-makers talk about sustainable development, but the measure of sustainability is amorphous, which has effectively reduced the phrase to a keyword.
In view of these concerns, it was not surprising that Greenpeace India in its publication How Coal Mining is Trashing Tigerland did a case study on North Karanpura Valley, a geographical region that includes the south-western portion of Hazaribagh’s plateau. Administrative apathy remains another challenge, as does the menace of littering and shoddy maintenance of public places that cripples several small towns in India.
In October 2014, I visited what is colloquially known as Lal Kothi at DVC Chowk. I had learned that it was really named Rattray House after Captain Thomas Rattray, whose battalion of 150 soldiers was instrumental in quashing the 1857 revolt in the region. Lal Kothi got its second name because it is completely red, its entrances marked by curious facades in the shape of pagodas. I had crossed this building so many times during childhood while cycling to school, but I had never registered its historical relevance.
Its history stood diffident under the building’s current existence as DVC’s Accounts Office. At Lal Kothi, I returned from the countryside to the town. Reading up on Hazaribagh made the town interesting, worth exploring, worth “discovering”. Lal Kothi became the first site, in the Hazaribagh urban space, that I photographed for the website.
Colonial records
Six months later, I had the chance to go to the U.K. on a three-month writing fellowship. I was to stay mostly in Scotland, but in the third month, I went to London looking for Hazaribagh’s colonial records and a book at the British Library. In one of the texts, the phrase Rattray House popped out. With Google and the entire library at hand, one fortunate search led to another, and after a couple of hours or so, I found that the great grandson of Captain Thomas Rattray lived in Scotland!
What happened next is an extraordinary story of friendship that I won’t narrate here, but I mention the incident because for the first time in these years of running Tales of Hazaribagh , I had managed to place myself at the centre of events and experience a history of 160 years spin around me.
The book I had gone to find was Garden at Hazaribagh by Samuel Solomon. Solomon was in Hazaribagh in 1946 in the capacity of an administrative officer. At the borrowing counter, I waited anxiously for it to arrive, but when I finally saw it, I was delightfully disappointed by the size. For it was what one would term a “cute little book” containing one long poem. In 25 pages. In a way, Garden at Hazaribagh halted my feverish search for history by being itself: a reflective piece of verse.
Writing a year before India’s independence, Solomon ponders on the jacaranda trees, the water lilies, the “black booty’ed lambs”, but besides the pastoral, it is his sadness, transparent at the thought of the family’s imminent departure, which strikes a chord. Articulated in the principal refrain of “Will this beauty stay after we are gone?”
Solomon speaks through time for everyone in Hazaribagh who is nostalgic about its “beauty”, whatever it may mean and however it may appear. And it is in this tradition of nostalgia that Tales of Hazaribagh exists. Besides stunning places, besides the challenges, besides the adventures, it is essentially a documentation of my own “pardonable pride” in this small plateau town.
The Hufflepuff wizard is the author of Painting That Red Circle White, his first poetry collection for muggles. He lives near a lake with lotuses and noisy cormorants.
