Santhal Pargana: The Hills Remember Everything
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Book Overview
In the forested hills of eastern India, where the Damodar and Subarnarekha rivers flow through ancient sal forests, lives a history that official records have long tried to erase. Santhal Pargana: The Hills Remember Everything is a sweeping narrative history of one of India's most extraordinary regions - the homeland of the Santhal people, the Paharia, and the other Adivasi communities of the Chota Nagpur plateau.
From the Jurassic bedrock that shaped its landscape to the coal mines that scarred it, from the great Santhal Hul uprising of 1855 - when fifty thousand people rose against colonial rule - to the long, contested road to Jharkhand statehood in 2000, PK Gupta traces four hundred years of resistance, survival, and memory.
This is not only a political history. It is the story of women like Phulo and Jhano, whose courage the textbooks overlooked. Of rivers that carry the memory of what the maps erased. Of a literary tradition forged in a script invented to preserve a language the empire tried to silence. Of villages that governed themselves by custom long before modern institutions arrived to replace them.
Drawing on archival research, fieldwork across the Santhal Parganas, and oral histories shared by village elders and community historians, Gupta restores to the record what colonial and post-colonial power repeatedly sought to remove - the names, the voices, and the lived experience of a people who have never stopped fighting for their land, their forest, and their identity.
The Hills Remember Everything is history told with rigour and deep empathy: a book for anyone who wants to understand how a region, a people, and a landscape remember what the world has tried to forget.
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